The Traffic Roundabout: News Publishers Assess Whether More is More
Important Details: Traffic. Drivers hate to be stuck in it. Publishers have long craved it. Online, more has seemed like more. Now, a series of announcements and initiatives tell us that more-is-more philosophy is being seriously revisited. Outsell believes these moves tell us that the fundamentals of measuring, understanding and monetizing web customers is in transformation, a topic we’ll cover more in 2010.
First, consider the various moves on the news front recently announced by Google, a target of increasingly vociferous criticism from news industry leaders and under scrutiny by the anti-trust officials at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
In the stretch of 10 days, Google has announced three programs:
- A five clicks free program: As announced, Google — which provides 25-35% of most news sites’ traffic — will allow paid subscription sites to both get exposure to non-subscribers and limit those subscribers to five pages per day. In theory, the change will prevent users who have exploited the go-back-and-forth-to-Google-and-paid-sites “hole” to avoid paying for access. The program has limited, current impact, given that most sites are open for free access. For paid sites, though, and those putting up “registration walls” to capture repeat customer data, it offers another tool.
- A separate news search crawler: Google has previously used the same crawler for its web and news searches. In creating a separate news crawler, Google has both simplified its own internal technology, according to the company, and provided publishers more news search options, essentially allowing publishers to automate a process of including/excluding snippets, images and other content assets. The new crawler has been launched in part to mollify European publishers (especially those advocating the adoption of the ACAP protocol).
- A “Living Stories” prototype: Developed by Google in association with the New York Times and Washington Post, the new Google Labs product is intended to let publishers more easily associate related content — archives and current, contextual pieces — with news stories.
All three programs are pitched as tools to let publishers better manage their own traffic, as traffic itself gets to be a major issue. Approaching 2010, news publishers have begun to come to grips with the infiniteness of the internet. The scarcity that drove newspapers, magazines and broadcast TV doesn’t apply. So, many news sites have found that half or more of its ad “inventory” is unsellable; there’s limitless space to be bought for next-to-nothing, or, literally nothing. That unsold inventory has led to questioning the value of traffic itself — especially search-driven traffic that may produce page views in bulk, but few repeat visits or that elusive goal, engagement.
Many publishers are echoing the recent words of Dallas Morning News chief Jim Moroney: “A lot of it is just `fly-by’ traffic. It not the kind of online relationship I am looking for. I want people who are going to come to our site multiple times a month.” Moroney’s solution, in part: Verticalizing his newsroom in pursuit of passionate sports and entertainment readers, seeking a certain kind of repeat traffic (see Insights, Dallas Morning News Models a New Path, Nov. 16, 2009).
Then, there’s the big announcements about e-readers, as publishers hope to find new paying traffic through as these devices come onto the market in 2010. Powerhouses Time Inc. News Corp, Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith announced a digital consortium this week, aimed at creating open e-reader standards and formats, ad-friendly approaches and common storefront. The notion: to get beyond miscellaneous and hard-to-monetize desktop and laptop web browser traffic, getting to “new” customers on new devices. More than a quarter million people previewed the new SI tablet, attesting to the game-changing potential of the product that is “coming soon.”
Finally, add in Nielsen’s introduction of sessions-per-unique-visitor-per-month metrics. Overall, we can see much nuance being brought to the first-generation art and science of traffic counting.
Implications: Google’s moves indicate an olive branch offering to a news industry increasingly concerned about the distributor/publisher balance of value. That war, Outsell believes, will continue well into 2010. It’s worth noting, though, that Google’s new news crawler and five clicks free program may offer greater flexibility to publishers testing paid content models — especially metering and niching — next year.
The traffic conundrum is one that will persist as well.
Publishers haven’t used the word, but what many are now seeing essentially Junk Traffic.
Junk circulation, of course, is all that out-state, event-oriented print circulation they’ve been paring back for the last several years — circulation that they essentially couldn’t monetize well. Now, in taking a new look and categorizing differing kinds of web traffic, they are sorting the higher-value treasures from the junk. Yes, all traffic offers the potential of conversion to longer-term engagement, but, in reality, some traffic is much more likely to be converted than others.
In developing new audiences, audiences that merchants will want to reach, Outsell believes that publishers are smartly moving up a ladder of value. They may be just learning the rungs, but the turn of the decade’s a good time to give themselves a boost.