Google exec Eric Schmidt spoke to the NAA today, then took questions like these: Question: Google has been at the
forefront of conditioning our audiences that a headline and extract is
enough. So they've gotten to the point now where we do a Google search,
come up with a list of topics or from Google News we look at the
headline and extract and that becomes "enough news" in the Twitter
world. So that what happens is that Google becomes the point in the
middle between that audience, that consumer supporting the creation of
that professional content. So the real question becomes how can the
media industry in general partner with Google to help support that
professional content when the headline and the extract is good enough.
Leave it to Jeff Jarvis, in this case, to write the speech Schmidt should have made. And there's one point in Jeff piece that Schmidt certainly did make in his Q&A:
News companies that don't want to be indexed by those evil Internet aggregators can end this exploitation RIGHT NOW! This instant. All it takes is one tiny line of code and Google's search bots will leave them alone forever.
Why don't they? Because as Jarvis says, they'd wind up losing at least half their traffic just that quickly.
When I moved into my weird online job at The Post and Courier in November 2005, the company required "heavy" registration before allowing users to view content on its website. The company hid anything that had been around two weeks or more behind a clunky archives paywall. Nothing was searchable. And every bit of this insanity served the company president's stated goal of charging users to see our content online.
Every single element of that policy was a magnificent flop. Every person involved at the implementation-level knew it. But because management had set this paid-content goal, no one was communicating effectively up the chain the reality of failure. So Job No. 1 for me was to just keep reporting (as delicately as possible) this fundamental truth: Management was batshit-crazy when it came to charging for online content, and nothing would improve until we dealt with that fact.
Eventually the web director, on his own volition, simply removed the hated registration system. This earned him an instant ass-chewing from corporate, but within a matter of days Google was indexing the site again and traffic increases demonstrated that open access was a better deal for the company.
When I convinced them to drop their paywall archives, we put The Long Tail principle to work for them on the vast bulk of their content. Even in its best year, their paywall system had earned them annual revenues in the mid-four-figures. The moment we tore down that wall, site traffic -- with older stories served up with standard ads on them -- exploded. Our audited stats improved by more than 50 percent within six months. Adding smarter URLs and permalinks provided another boost.
How many times will newspaper companies have to learn this? The cost of "controlling" your content is invisibility. Color me cynical, but invisibility strikes me as an awkward marketing plan for a an industry based on renting people's attention to advertisers.
June 3, 2009 note: I just noticed that in the original post I consistently called the NAA the NNA. Consider it a nasty form of dyslexia acronym.... err... acronym dyslexia... anyway, I fixed it..dc
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