Social

Stated simply: I am the new home page.

The small town press, online and off, looks to have a far different trajectory than the metros. Re-creating the Roxy, in news, may be as good a guideline as any to chart the future.

Most estimates place HuffPo 2009 revenues in the $12-15 million range — meaning that it is monetizing its unique visitors and page views at something like a tenth of the rate of The New York Times, the largest newspaper-owned property in the top 10.

So, through thick and thin, digital marketing, with better targeting being introduced around the clock, keeps pulling dollars away from traditional media — TV, newspapers, radio, and magazines.

I think we’ll see these companies go head-to-head for reader and subscriber dollars. As they do, I think they’ll face a new five-fingered exercise. Raise one hand; five is the probably the maximum number of iPad news sites for which readers will pay.

For all of us, as consumers and readers, we just need places to keep our stuff, organized well and the ability to connect up all parts of our work, family, financial and social lives. We don’t really want to be owned by anyone, but we’ve got to put that stuff somewhere, and that somewhere is increasingly in the cloud. Who owns the cloud(s)? That’s almost a metaphysical question, and one clearly unanswerable today.

Editors — gatekeepers — had long picked out stories for their readers. Now we’re picking out stories for each other, flinging them about the digital universe, into our e-mail inboxes, Twitter accounts and Facebook walls. The Google Buzz news just reinforces this wider phenomenon and tries to harness it.

The average news reader spends little time on newspaper-owned sites, from a 20 minutes a month or so on the New York Times site to eight to 12 minutes on most local newspaper sites. That’s minutes per month. Those numbers, as tracked by Nielsen and reported monthly by Editor and Publisher, are steady at best, showing, in fact, some recent decline. They are, literally, stuck in time.

Then, take the number of minutes Internet users spend on social sites. Nielsen’s January tally showed seven hours of usage a month on Facebook alone, in the U.S., blowing away all competition. That’s some 40 times more time spent on social sites than on any single news site.

Social media optimization will meet propensity modeling — the Financial Times‘ secret sauce, now being tasted gingerly by the New York Times — all in an effort to find out how, where, when and why you can engage sustainable customers.

The rules of marketing and PR — with their attendent impact on the news trades — may be bigger. No one captures that change in process and substance than David Meerman Scott.