As I write this column, I wonder: Am I slipping into schizophrenia? My right brain is frying, overloaded by a never ending whirlwind of new digital tools, from hardware to internet applications. My left brain, which powers both my current daily job and this Monday Note, is cooler, skeptical. Both sides look on as the digital wave devastates professional journalism, shredding all value previously associated to it.
Take RSS feeds.
From a right brain perspective, RSS is an extraordinary invention. It provides all the ingredients of modern news consumption: unlimited choices, free access (including to otherwise paid-for sources), easy setup, inherently up-to-date, etc.
The first RSS iterations were rather crude. “Readers” (RSS client software) were spartan but extremely efficient. Now, we’re entering a new phase: RSS “arrangers” or “organizers” transform raw feeds into a rich reading experience, much closer to a newspaper or a magazine. The introductions of Flipboard and, last week, of Zite make Google Reader look like a Finnish psychiatric ward being replaced by a Norman Foster design.
Zite has generated a great deal of reviews (see Fast Company’s ). It’s a marked improvement over Flipboard. The latter is better designed, but offers not hierarchy to help arrange RSS feeds and other sources (such as Twitter, Flickr of Facebook feeds). Zite creates a magazine-like table of contents and, using a recommendation engine, appears to learn from your reading patterns. Further dissection is left to learned tech bloggers debating the pros and cons of the latest iterations of these multi-sources readers.
No matter how perfectible these personal readers are, they undoubtedly gestate the news publishing industry’s future. They successfully address two key factors in today’s media consumption:
- time allocation — I’ll tend to pick the service that helps me to be more productive
- the interface dimension, i.e. the increasing appetence for sleek and fluid designs.(Something Google still doesn’t get: instead of sticking to their Blue Cross Blue Shield-like, data-centric color code, they ought to go get their own Jonathan Ive).
Now, the left brain speaks up and asks two questions:
- what business model for the apps developers?
- how does this way of reading the news impact (positively or negatively) the business models of existing medias?
Advertising is the most likely answer to the first query. In theory, huge readership should yield nice revenue streams. At some point, B2B licensing could become feasible; large firms could fill bespoke versions of Flipboard with internal information, catalogs, manuals, etc.
The second issue is more tricky. Here are some examples.
Below is the Business home page in Zite. No ads, no nothing. In the red rectangle, a headline from Business Week:
Next is the Business Week article as it appears in Zite:
Look, Ma: No ads! No money!
Now, the original story as it appears on the BusinessWeek site:
As you can see, there are ads. Expensive ones, actually. According their official rate cards, Bloomberg Business Week expects to charge a CPM (Cost Per Thousand) of respectively $115 for the banner and $144 for the square in the right column. OK. These are before-negotiation rates. But even after a 50% rebate, this is still huge: in Europe, rates for business sites are more likely to net a CPM in the $20-$30 range. Bloomberg Business week supports this price with its 12.9m unique visitors audience and its enviable demographics. BBW brags it reaches 638,000 millionaires, which is half the Wall Street Journal’s purported score of 1.38m millionaires.
The wall Street Journal, precisely. As it appears in the Zite business page:
….Then, in a Zite full story page:
… and the original story, as you can see full loaded with ads (but, for some reason, not behind the paywall):
You get my point: by reinserting a story from an external source in its interface, Zite strips it of any value to the original publisher. Here, I refer to the ads sold in this particular editorial environment. And Zite isn’t even substituting its own value — thank God…
This could be fine for a Twitter feed, Facebook babbling, or any kind of user generated gruel. But it is not fine at all for professional publishers such as The Wall Street Journal Gigaom or Business Insider (I performed the test above for all three.) To a varying extent, these organizations line up writers and editors in order to produce their content. For them, this is the perfect lose-lose situation since their news material leaks into Zite, resulting into content they won’t be able to monetize. In return, they get nothing: no fee, no revenue share, zip.
The agent responsible of this economic absurdity is the RSS system. Medias are profusely generous with their RSS feeds. The New York Time offers no less than 167 streams of various natures. You can reconstruct an entire digital newspaper with those. In doing so, you remove all the value that was sold with this content by the NY Times ad sales people. And if you add feeds provided by great newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist (50 feeds!), The New York Review of Books and some good pure players and professional blogs like Slate, Poltico or TechCrunch…. You’ll end up making the best digital daily you can think of, because, you will end up to be the ultimate editor.
I cant’ help but consider the RSS generosity shown by all medias (main street traditional as well as digital natives) as another iteration of Lenin’s rope: “Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”…
At the risk of repeating myself, from a user’s perspective, I find this abundance of great content just fantastic. And as a journalism freak, I carry no nostalgia for the good old days. My concern is simply for the news business, for its ecosystem’s sustainability — i.e. the ability to collect and produce original information. That’ll be the subject for a next column.
—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
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29 Comments
RSS has never seemed to catch on with the non-tech crowd (at least the crowd I know). So, RSS has never really been that big a threat to the content producers. Now that we have these new layout engines, more suited to the mainstream, I fear they may just kill RSS. That would be a sad day but I guess I couldn’t really blame them. Too many scavengers (aggregators) eating for free.
It’s not another iteration of Lenin. It’s a pure Muhammad Ali “rope a dope” play. And it isn’t the user who’s the self-abuser, it’s the publisher.
That’s one of the legacy time bombs of publishing companies. Their “top guy” is a “publisher.” Their top guy should be called, and have the role of, “developer.”
I just read your post, like very week, in my favourite app on my iPad via your RSS feed.
But joking a side: one could sell “rss-feed subscriptions” (Baekdall.com does this). You could sell one “main feed” for $10/month. Or a feed for every section (example: sports, culture, column A, etc…) for $7/month/section. This having the added value that the articles are separated as opposed to the one general feed that includes all articles but). Or not?
Just to clarify, this is your ‘left-brain’ argument: “by reinserting a story from an external source in its interface, Zite strips it of any value to the original publisher.”
You’re effectively saying that “any value” of a piece of content to a publisher is the ability to display a sold ad next to the content. That’s just not true.
Producing and distributing content doesn’t have just one value; there have always been many ways for publishers to generate value around content — just ask any reporter who’s gone on an adjacent platform (radio interview) and talked at length about a piece they’ve written or the marketing departments who stage promotional events to get the word out about cover stories.
Full Text RSS is a great way to extend a media company’s brand to a regular audience of early adopters who will, in many cases of the share functions of applications, even put that content in front of new audience members in a word of mouth way. This is especially helpful in a crowded local-national media market where everyone is competing for eyeballs. It also allows smart publishers to increase the engagement of fans of a particular author who would otherwise be deterred by, let’s face it, sub-par design that makes it tough to find individual work on many media websites.
For example: you skip over the fact that these new readers have social capabilities that allow for a single RSS reader to push a direct link to his or her social network that would send friends/family/readers to that web page and generate impressions — your own indicator of value — for the publisher.
In the end, full RSS feeds provide multiple values, not a lose-lose situation for publishers as you categorize it.
I actually expect an opposite outcome: A model where consumers will want to pay the publisher for the feed subscription.
Sites that will kill feeds in trying to protect their precious ad revenue will shoot themselves in the foot: Their readership will go elsewhere. Content is abundant on the Internet.
Ariel Bloch
Agreed w PXLated that the exposure is minimal for now. If that changes, the current feed situation will be short-lived: deals will be cut, ads and backlinks will be inserted in feeds, and co-branded Zites and Flipboards will make appearences.
It’s early in in the process. Apps vs sites vs feeds vs aggregators is all TBD w/r/t traction, models, monetization.
Taylor Carik above has got a point. THE point, IMHO. As a matter of fact, my aggregator tool -Opera- shows me the whole content in a very organized way, using folders, read/unread, tagged, etc. feeds. However I often find myself clicking the link to the original source and thus enabling those “expensive” CPM ads to be shown and -maybe- clicked.
Plus, just as @arielbloch says: “Sites that will kill feeds in trying to protect their precious ad revenue will shoot themselves in the foot”. Yes, “Content is abundant on the Internet”.
It doesn’t really matter what your left brain says
Left brains are usually creative and have good instinct, but they also fear too much too often. You will ultimately see how things end up finding their right place on earth, and on the web. And as far as I can tell, RSS Feeds seem to be healthier than ever.
Thanks for a great post and a good debate opportunity.
Whether content providers can figure out how to monetize their RSS feeds is one thing. Another is how Zite, Flipboard, Pulse and other tablet apps can monetize the traffic they draw by publishing others’ RSS feeds.
Right now, I’m not seeing a business model: http://www.loganmolen.com/spew/2011/3/11/zite-raises-bar-on-tablet-news-reading-but-wheres-the-revenu.html
@Alejandro thanks!
Even if RSS feed went pay/defunct at major news organisations, there is an army of person-bots who re-quote (in credited and uncredited form) from a few sources like NYT, Guardian, BBC, WashPost for secondary news organisations. I’m familiar with Treehugger.com and Care2.com where I’ve seen literal stealing on a weekly basis.
Since the ‘writers’ are bloggers, not journalists, they have no ethical standards nor a professional code of conduct which says you can’t copy your copy. So they get away with rewritting the NYT on major stories of interest to their demographic and selling Google ads to what they claim “millions” of members’ eyeballs.
I’m sure this happens on thousands of other ‘news’ sites focusing on particular subject areas that I am not aware.
Could _Moday Note_ afford a double CR/NL character for a para break or would it cost too much virtual space? How about Markdown while you’re at it!
Yes Alastair, there are plenty of plagiarists with feeds – But, if the content creators got serious, I would imagine they could drive them out with a few costly lawsuits. Personally, I’m not going to chase these rogue rss feeds from one shut-down site to the next. There’s plenty of quantity on the net, I need quality.
It’s early. The solution to the concerns you point out are trivial.
RSS should remain and be offered as it currently is. These are intended for readers… real people. Not for startup companies to form a business around without terms in place. Yes, companies are attempting to innovate on and leverage this free data that is in RSS/Atom format (or other XML flavors). But both sides know that the time will come when a contractual partnership and terms will be required.
This could simply boil down to mandating that the ads displayed on the publishers source “page” be carried over to other apps that output the cont ent of an article. The ads could be wrapped in semantics as to specify which ads are to remain in tact with the article no matter where it gets republished. The ads need to maintain the same tracking links etc etc.
That’s all. Easy to solve. Question is…. When and with what standards.
Michael – Is it really that easyily solved? – Right now, the apeal of these apps is the layout/display sans ads. Add in ads, you have the website again. I not sure users of these apps won’t rebel/move on to the next shiny object. If ads are left out, then the only option seems to be a subscription fee.
Granted, The ad removal aspect of these services is a driving force of their popularity but lets face it…. Ads will prevail. Its inevitable. If these content republishing apps are lucky, they will be able to at least choose where and how to display the ads (i.e. interstitials/preroll, footer of article). The key is to keep providing a top notch experience as best they can while adhering to the terms of the content sources. These services can also attempt to sell the White Label angle and in a sense revert back into a backend solution provider as opposed to a single destination app for consumers. Same stuff going on with Internet TV and why Google TV is barely able to launch with agreeable partners.
Not sure if ads will prevail – They’re currently layout inhibitors. The standard ad unit sizes were set way back in the mid 90s, back when website viewports were 640×480, 800×600 and haven’t changed. It’s one reason why damn near every site running ads looks the same, and have the same column widths.
The advertising needs to change, be flexible, in order to fit in or I’m not sure users will adapt to it.
The ads themselves may not prevail (statistically) but the tethering to articles/content will prevail, at least in foreseeable future and until more innovative and effective solutions are found and put into play.
There is simple solution: insert ads into RSS xml.
@Alistair – if Zite and Flipboard had to include non-original sources for complete stories, they’d immediately loose their “magazine-like” editorial product construction. As Frederic and others note, this is what makes these products appealing beyond the early adopters.
As for bloggers “vs” journalists, the more attention we pay to that non-event, the less we’re focused on building new business models for growing media, publishing and journalism toward their next phases of existence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/mar/13/sxsw-2011-jay-rosen-bloggers-journalists
I agree with what Taylor Carik writes above. Well said.
Also, one reason you don’t see ads in RSS feeds is because the audience is not there. If there were significant subscribers, you would see (better) RSS ad products developed.
Did I just wake up in 2004? (shakes head).
Few mainstream media publishers offer full RSS 2.0 feeds, which is why the public has never reaped the full benefits of unbundled media. Until the ecosystem is developed that allows creators to be compensated somehow for content that is distributed in this fashion, it will continue to be the right brain dream alone. My thinking has always been that RSS ad feeds are a solid model, but not as they are currently produced. Ads are content in the new world, and there’s a market for unbundled ads, just as there is a market for unbundled news items.
Your logic is faulty. Readers that receive content via RSS feeds are not going to seek out the same content on the publisher’s site. Thus, reading content on a feed reader does not constitute lost revenue, just lost audience.
Step 2: When somebody reads content on an RSS feed and they want to share it on Twitter or Facebook, they will link to the publisher’s site, not the RSS feed. In fact, that’s how I found THIS VERY ARTICLE! Jeff Jarvis tweeted about how stupid it was and linked here.
God I am so tired of hearing people say that Google needs design sense. If you don’t like it, remix it. They’re notoriously free with their APIs and they even have an internal group dedicated to helping you leave their ecosystem if you desire.
…but what I find even more interesting is that in the oft maligned Google reader I still see ads which stand a chance of monetization. These are Google ads, to be sure, but there’s still a chance to make money. Most of the journalists who are so often lamented don’t even bother to cite sources any more (if ever they did), which reduces the utility of their product even further. If I just wanted sensationalism without any data to back it up, I’d spend more time with Fox News. Now THERE’S an outfit that I could happily see go the way of the Buffalo.
Nathan – It’s more than design sense, it’s a total right brain that they need
All the gnashing of teeth and hand-wringing by original content providers about the aggregation of their intellectual property is moot, unless they’re willing to do something about it, ie: set lawful guidelines for third-party reuse and bring down the legal hammer on those who ignore them. The copyright laws are very clear, especially vis-a-vis “fair use” for news & other purposes. Sorry nay-saying, the-web-needs-to-be-free, (head in the) cloud(s) people, but Zite a’int in compliance. Not even close.
It’s one thing to collect and display links back to the originals, add your own comments and content, and package these as your own, It’s quite another to completely rip-off stuff AND delete the ads that paid for the originals to be produced in the first place. The weak type redesign of the Zite GUI and even weaker logo nod to the original provider, does not abrogate their lawful responsibility to avoid stealing sh@t.
Here’s a simple fix that would be fair and reasonable, and easy to follow (even for overblown sense-of-entitlement morons). Include the ads as they appear on the original, on your rip-off Zite page. The Ad folks would get a double-bang for their buck, and the Zite-ites could at least point to a revenue ENHANCING strategy for other copy-cat publishers to embrace as well. It’s still plagiarism, but at least monetized back to the source.
As it stands, Zite’s business model is total unethical, illegal, suable, weak-minded, bullsh@t!
But surely if the RSS system debases the value of content provided by the big media houses they will eventually just reduce the content offered through the feeds to snippets and not the full article?
I must be missing something. Are the majority of RSS feeds (especially from news sites) not just snippets/intros of the full articles?
Therefore, these third-party apps simply increase the chances of users then clicking through to the full article on the originator’s own site.
What news publishers are providing full text RSS feeds? (And why?)
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