The junkies are rebelling against their dealer. The dope is the traffic, and the dealer is Google. For years, the search giant flooded the market with an ideology built on the early 2000′s, ill-fated, get all eyeballs you can, the rest (i.e. monetization) will take care of itself.
Publishers have invested tons of money, energy and brainpower in order to follow The Google Way: designing sites, structures, pages, even setting editorial rules to gain audience. Any kind of audience, by any means necessary. Legions of Search Engines Optimization (SEO) consultants were enrolled to help implementing the new click-to-Grail. At the same time, the so-called Search Engine Marketing (SEM) made a lot of expensive noise as media organizations were buying keywords to improve their ranking in search results, some of them spending as much as €100,000 a month in this digital heroin. At some point, for many sites, clicks coming from Google thanks to SEO compliance and aggressive SEM were contributing to 40% or 60% of their entire traffic.
Then, the tide reversed.
Publishers soon realized the Google windfall was not as high as expected. As the search giant kept thriving, their own revenue plummeted. Over the last 12 months, newspapers print and digital advertising revenues have melted: -16% in Western Europe, -19% in Central/ Eastern Europe and -21% in North America. At the same time, Google is still cruising at a 35% operating margin altitude. The economic crisis and the structural problem of web sites (endless inventories inducing low prices) caused CPM (revenue of an ad per thousand viewers) to drop. This convinced publishers the advertising-based free model wasn’t going to fly. They told themselves that sometime, somehow, readers will have to pay, and that Google, with its all-you-can-eat, free-for-all system, was in fact “doing evil” to they dying business.
That was the backdrop for last week’s 62nd Conference of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Congress and for the 16th World Editors Forum (WEF) I attended and spoke at, in Hyderabad, India.
As expected, this 2009 edition of the WAN/WEF was open season against Google. There, Dow Jones’ CEO Les Hinton went after “the false Gospel of the web” and urged the audience: “beware of geeks bearing gifts”. “It is true that Google is at the heart of the crisis confronting journalism today”, he said, although he acknowledged “that the industry is the principal architect of its greatest difficulty today”.
The conference ended with a debate, “What to do about Google?“, the title which, after all, honestly sums up the industry’s embarrassment. Gavin O’Reilly, the elected WAN’s president, delivered a passionate but unconvincing speech. A few years ago, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Mr. O’Reilly had called Google “kleptomaniacs”. This time, he chose to turn the heat on the copyright issue, denouncing “the countless thousands of bots and spiders that trawl through cyberspace should not presume that “our content is simply their content”.
In doing so, Mr. O’Reilly displayed a great deal of bad faith. He deliberately avoided the publisher’s addiction-to-traffic contradiction that actually is at he heart of the question. For most part, publishers have actually chosen to handle Google as much content as they can. They even paid to do it.
And they had the choice not to. (In the next issue of the Monday Note we’ll explain the ways and means to shield contents form indexing robots)
At the Hyderabad conference, a British media executive delivered the most damaging blow at the Google-guilty-of-everything theory. Matt Kelly, the associate editor in charge the internet operations of the Daily Mirror, has a lot to say about handling the Google dope. Mr. Kelly’s Hyderabad keynote speech is an absolute must-read for those who want to deal with the Google issue in the best possible way. His take:
- “In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimization.”
- …”Content wasn’t king. Traffic was.”
- …” The very CPM model we’d prostituted our brands for online, began to punish us”.
- About the word “users” employed to describe the online audience: “…Online, “users” is about right. They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts”.
Unlike Gavin O’Reilly who seeks refuge in legal quibbles about copyright, Matt Kelly and his Mirror crew decided the audience degradation process could actually be reversed. First of all, 18 months ago, they relaunched the Mirror.co.uk site focusing on the key attributes they considered crucial to the Mirror’s brand. It turned out to be a great success: their mostly UK-based audience grew 100% year-to-year.
Secondly, they spun-off two properties, Mirror Football and 3am, a showbiz gossip website, both designed without regard for Search Engine Optimization considerations. “And the hell with SEO”, says Matt Kelly. “We’re chasing passion, here, not page impressions”. And here is the interesting thing: after just 3 months of operations, Mirror Football enjoys a nice 2m UV/month and 3am about 800,000 UV/mo. Even more interesting: only 15% of the football site’s traffic comes for search engines; for the gossip site, the ratio is below 10%. (For such sites, figures for search dependency would usually hover around 40% to 50%).
To sum up, what Matt Kelly and his crew did is “putting SEO in its rightful place as a tool to be used when appropriate, [and] focusing our main attention on what is unique and brilliant about what each of these properties represents”.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not an anti-Google zealot. I actually believe the search engine has, by far, brought more good than bad to the internet in general, and to the news-related contents carried by the worldwide web. Having said that, I also believe Google is a cold-blooded, engineering-driven company. Nothing personal, we’re just doing algorithm optimization, here. Problem is, Google is built on a market-share capture model that turned out to be inherently deflationary.
What I don’t like is the duplicity shown by legions of publishers: pouring huge sums in SEO/SEM to develop questionable audiences, on one hand, and, at the same time, whining about copyright violation and fair use abuses simply because this styrofoam audience is not monetized enough.
“What to do about Google”, demagogically asked WAN’s chief Gavin O’Reilly? With all due respect, Gavin, do what the Mirror.co.uk did: work on what your constituents’ publications can do best in terms of contents, uniqueness, relevance, competence and passion. And stop whining. It’s beside the point and, in the end, embarrassing.
— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
I’m not through with this. Next week, I’ll come back to the subject, parse Google’s pathetic defense and analyze the complicated technical issues surrounding flexible copyright.
No related posts.
20 Comments
The bit about Matt Kelly doesn’t make sense – on the one hand, he’s saying he wasn’t chasing traffic because it’s worthless, and this appears to be justified by… traffic? No mention of how much advertisers are paying for these ‘passionate’ readers. His understanding of SEO appears to be rather flawed – content is king in SEO, but it’s the one ‘trick’ that costs the most money, and so the last one that publishers appear to want to invest in.
I could go on and on and on about the various flaws in the various views presented in Hyderabad, but I’ll just pick out that one.
I have followed this argument for a year or more and only now is some clarity emerging. It seems quite simple and obvious to me (but then again, I don’t make my living peddling SEO solutions to newspapers).
What Matt Kelly is saying (as I read him) is that newspapers need to concentrate on building an engaged audience online. He argues that the primary job of any newspaper website should be to mark itself as distinct and if this means sacrificing some SEO practices in favour of, as he puts it, engaging passion, then this is worthwhile.
In response to Paul Bradshaw above, anyone who actually has to make a living from this business, and not just talk about it, knows that CPM values have been decreasing steadily in the past five years. This supports entirely Kelly’s premise about the underlying value of content being eroded. What’s flawed about that understanding?
I disagree with Kelly and the sentiment of the above article; that Google and other aggregators should not be the primary focus of the industry’s challenge. But I think his general sentiment, as expressed here, is a fine one. Do what we can for ourselves, and stop blaming others for our problems.
James, I know very well that CPM rates have been falling in the past 5 years – and it’s bloody obvious why. My point was simply that the claim of Kelly’s ‘success’ (by the article) does not rest on anything to do with CPM, but on traffic. If he’s reduced traffic but increased CPM to compensate for that, great. If he’s maintained traffic, and increased CPM, wonderful. But CPM isn’t mentioned at all in this article, only traffic, traffic, traffic, which is exactly what Kelly says he’s not interested in!
I should also point out that CPM as an online advertising model is not growing nearly as fast as CPC and CPA – another reason why CPM rates are declining and one which publishers need to react to. Why do we talk so much about content when the main source of income – and the main area where innovation is needed – is advertising?
Yes Paul, I understood you first time around, although your syntax was a tad confusing. What I failed to grasp was the reason you were attacking Kelly .. it seems what he is suggesting is perfectly aligned with your argument.
Kelly never said he was not interested in traffic … only traffic at any cost. Indeed, he was quick to point out the relative success of his websites in terms of traffic. His point is that the newspaper industry has to “reinject a sense of value” into what has become commodotised online. Isn’t this entirely true?
Of course, he is at the sharp end of the business – by which I mean, he actually has to produce results, rather than merely chat about them on blogsites and classrooms.
Better late than never, the newspaper industry is getting serious about digital. Who knows what is right and what is wrong. It would take an act of supreme arrogance to suggest you had the answers online (take note Mr Bradshaw) but it is encouraging that people of intelligence, dynamism and vision are taking up the baton. The presumption that print journalists are not capable of making sense of a digital landscape is just insulting. Especially when the answers provided so far appear to be leading precisely nowhere. One thing I agree with Frederic absolutely is that newspapers must stop whining about their predicament and take control of their own futures.
Yes, I do agree with Kelly broadly. If you’re going to compete on traffic alone you’re always going to lose to the bigger fish who can claim millions. The USP that publishers have is brands and engaged audiences (although a lot more could be done around engagement) so playing to those strengths makes absolute sense.
By the way, as for being at the sharp end of the business, I’ve been a group editor and online services editor; I’ve overseen magazine launches, magazine website launches, and events. And I currently run a startup. So I’m more than familiar with having to produce results at the sharp end. But ‘having to produce results’ does not make someone right.
@PSG wow, I’m feeling the love in this comments thread. Where exactly was I suggesting that I had the answers online? I’m just pointing out that the article suggests Kelly has been successful without any evidence, and that there is a lot of crap talked about Google/SEO specialists/ANOther being at fault for the news industry’s woes.
Bring on the paywalls, bring on the micropayments, bring on the anti-SEO editorial. Let’s have some experimentation, test the theories and stop talking about how it’s somebody else’s fault.
Worth seeing a recent post about this here – http://econsultancy.com/blog/4986-3am-site-goes-from-no-seo-to-keyword-stuffing-in-3-months
They changed their tune quickly it seems.
Thanks Andrew – that’s very useful. Also worth reading is Sly Bailey’s comments on a similar vein some months before – http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/17/sly-bailey-newspaper-websites-digital-britain
Seems Kelly is to some extent just repeating the party line.
The future is ad-free. Ads are a cancer in media. I don’t want ninvited encroachers into my consciousness. Left to persist it will be just a matter of time before we see a 50-50 split, or worse, between ads and content, just as is becoming the case with Sat TV. I want good content and am prepared to pay for it. I don’t want uninvited distractions from that content by vendor-whores trying to separate me from my money and getting in the way of my enjoyment of what I am paying to consume. If your future viability rests on ad revenues, you are finished imo. Paid-for content must be ad-free. If the content is good, it will succeed.
@Paul Bradshaw «Why do we talk so much about content when the main source of income – and the main area where innovation is needed – is advertising?» : because — in the ‘news’ business case — publishers’ expertise has always been to sell contents AND to sell an audience, at the same time. As far as today, news publishers have failed at both on the Net. Innovation is needed in both areas. Furthermore, how can you say that the MAIN source of income online is advertising ? Look at the facts : mass market in content business is over.
@Stan, yes, I agree, they’ve had to sell both and have failed at both, and perhaps I’m exaggerating because we spend 99% of our time talking about content when 70% of profits for most publishers comes from advertising (although that figure varies wildly, particularly for mass market tabloids which make more money from cover sales).
The other point is that the main threat to newspapers has not come from new ways of selling content, but rather new ways of selling advertising (e.g. CPC, CPA), and they’ve not responded to that threat.
Let it go gentlemen. The old exploitative, rather too self-indulgent fat cat publishing model will not run any longer. I feel an old cliché coming on but really, wake up and smell the coffee please. When the press (newspapers and magazines controlled the medium, consumers were screwed. We paid for the issues and we got the ads we did not want. The press no longer control the medium of today. If they want to continue in business, they must provide better content than their ‘net upstart competitors and forget about including ads for their paying customers. If someone wants the content but is not prepared to pay, then by all means inundate them with all the ads you can muster.
Whatever happens, even if Google is excluded from every news outlet, the news will out by one means or another….err probably Google and as little as 10 minutes after the moment of first publication. We’ve done this experimentally a few hundred times. It is easy and it works just fine. I mean, once a news item is out, it is in the public domain and can be re-purposed by anyone. The news event itself belongs to no one in most cases, so what’s all the bleating about ownership and plagiarism? The proprietary stuff is another matter – the carefully researched investigation and so on. But no one and no thing can stop this change happening … short of blowing up the whole of the Internet.
This is evolution. The time is ripe for a new paradigm. The reason there is so much protest from ‘old’ publishing houses is because they know in their hearts that they will never have it so good at the consumers’ expense any more. Now what is wrong with that? You are consumers too, every one of you.
Consider that Felix Dennis has recently published books on how to get rich and how easy it is … anyone can do it etc etc. Now, imo, that is a sure sign of bad times to come for publishing.
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