News Publishers Open New Windows on Community
Important Details: MediaNews, which has emerged as the fastest-growing large US newspaper publisher (now with 57 dailies), has chosen Topix to be its main community-building partner on the web. It has already launched Topix community functionality on several of its New England properties and plans to extend this to more than 30 additional sites by “early 2008.”
Topix, which began life as a news aggregator, reinvented itself in April 2007, focusing on user involvement and creation of news. Now, CEO Chris Tolles tells Outsell, fully 60% of its (Top 25 ranking) traffic comes from user-generated content, with only about about a third from legacy-media created news. More than 2,500 volunteer editors shepherd local community sitelets within Topix. Tolles makes the point that much of the content is original, not dependent on “hanging off of [traditional] news stories.” There is lots of unwritten news out there, he believes, and is positioning Topix to harness it across the U.S.
Partnerships such as that with MediaNews give Topix greater local promotional power, and access to a sales-force to monetize (through ad revenue sharing) the growing page views. Topix now powers 113 media sites, mostly those of two of its owners, with Tribune adding community to newspaper and city guide sites and Gannett adding it to its broadcast TV sites.
For its part, Pluck, with its well-regarded SiteLife set of community-building tools, and influential customer set (Gannett, Reuters, Discovery Communications, The Washington Post, The Economist, Freedom Interactive, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Rodale and Meredith Corporation) is connecting its customers to the booming social networks outside traditional media.
“We believe audiences moving back and forth between sites will prove to be a win-win for traditional media companies and social networks,” said Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck Corporation. Panos told Outsell that Pluck’s toolset, if integrated well at the article level, “should provide 10% more article page views.” Panos further explains that that the “low-hanging fruit is getting readers to post and share Hallowe’en photos of their kids.” But of great interest are more sophisticated applications like The Economist’s engagement with readers on the value of technology in improving education (which drew 390 user responses) and the Washington Post’s more than a dozen Discussion Groups, which leverage columnist personality. In Pluck’s experience, reader comments are still number one in volume, followed by original posts, often of photos, and then by engagement in discussions and forums. It’s a gradual process, says Pluck, a kind of maturation of involvement, as audiences get used to participating.
Meanwhile, Trinity Mirror‘s David Black says his company’s UK social publishing experiment in Teesside community, launching microsites in 20 postcodes earlier this year, has already yielded 50,000 additional monthly unique visitors and a new group of “reverse-published” print weeklies and monthlies, largely made up of reader contributions.
Implications: As 2008 dawns, the crucial user-gen question is what’s a fashionable experiment and what’s critical mass? “Critical mass. I don’t have a model yet,” freely admits Topix’s Tolles. Ad models that scale are the so-far elusive holy grail of local user-gen. There is lots of money in local sales, retail and listings, the latter traditionally the province of newspaper and Yellow Pages companies. Google’s AdWords program is trying to get increasingly local, as Yahoo! makes its case to newspaper companies that it can best harvest emerging online local ad dollars. But no one’s there yet, as “local” defies easy definition.
What these user-gen movements do though is help with the re-definition. Clearly, internet users are intrigued by the social power of the medium, in finding local service recommendations, in engaging in political debate, and yes, in posting Hallowe’en photos. Newspaper companies that partner with those software companies fully engaged in social publishing are smart to try to stay on the edge of the re-definition. For instance, Pluck’s quick embrace of Google’s Open Social platform and Facebook integration gives publishers greater access through interoperability to a booming world. After all, social publishing is a window, not a door.
Harnessing and harvesting user contributions is as much art as science, and the learning of what kind user-gen works, and what really works, should be a hallmark of 2008. With that knowledge, publishers and their partners should be better positioned to reap the advertising rewards of content they don’t even have to pay to produce.