Along with Frontline, Dan Rather Reports is the best news show in TV. You should watch it.
The most recent Dan Rather Reports that's been posted to YouTube is included. It covers further updates on India's "Untouchables," the Dalit Women. Also covered is forced marriage in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
NY Times Data Starting to Coalesce.
It's been almost a month since the NY Times paywall went live, and I think we finally can say a few substantive things about it.
First, since the paywall was so "leaky," there was no distinct drop-off after its installation. Compare this to the charts for Newsday:
Or this absolutely comical chart for the Times of London:
The NY Times' 24 month chart isn't nearly as dramatic;
but I suspect that's because their paywall is so loose. You can sidestep it by simply blocking Javascript, or downloading a little Javscript shortcut, or by coming in via Google or Yahoo, or via a link on Facebook or Twitter. Essentially, as long as you don't go to the Times via their home page, you never have to pay. Which seems to sorta' defeat the purpose of a paywall, but whatever.
Even though the leaky paywall is preventing a dramatic and newsworthy drop in readership, there are some data to be gleaned.
First off, while the Alexa Rank numbers are only mildly affected, the page views have been significantly moved.
Zooming in to the 6-month chart the effects are more apparent:
They have dropped, certainly, but they have also stopped fluctuating with the ebb and flow of internet traffic. This is troubling, since on a healthy website, growth comes from that very ebb and flow. Very tight numbers means that your audience is flatlining. While this means you have a stable audience, when you do lose audience members, it's very difficult to replace them.
If we again zoom in to the 6-month scale on the chart, we can also discern a little bit of possibly-relevant data.
Looking back on the 24-month chart, the Times was, slowly sometimes, trending upwards in readership and global rank. This trend possibly may have broken, with the Times' rank the lowest it's been since December of last year. This is troubling since the Times' most popular general audience competitor, cnn.com, has been flat for the past two years. But even on this scale, we can see that while the heavy flow of news appears to have given CNN a boost in their readers, the Times has received no such boost and has, in fact, reverted to even lower numbers. CNN might break 50 and stay there in the next few months.
If we compare the NY Times to their biggest philosophical competitor, the LA Times, we see that the LA Times are growing while the NY Times is not.
All websites exhibit a great amount of fluctuation, so this past month is not enough to extrapolate long-term trends. The important fact to take away, though, is that while other websites went up, the NY Times went down. Both CNN and the LA Times are heading towards milestones on Alexa, with the former reaching for the 50th most popular website on Earth, and the latter heading toward 300.
I still think that it's too early to call the paywall a complete failure, but those page view numbers should be troubling for the Times executives. The nature of the paywall means that large chunks of the Times' audience could suddenly leave, resulting in shocking drops in readership. I think that this is a possibility because the paywall works via some Javascript that tracks article views. After twenty articles are viewed, the page is blocked asking for payment. With five daily views via Google, and unlimited numbers from Facebook and other social tools, it will take time for people to hit the wall a sufficient number of times to annoy them enough to simply stop going. Ironically, I think that this will make times of elevated news stories problematic for the Times, since people are more likely to hit the wall quickly and repeatedly, and since they won't care to pay when options like the BBC, CNN, LA Times, and Reuters are available much more quickly, they'll more likely to leave, find that they enjoy another website, and never return.
First, since the paywall was so "leaky," there was no distinct drop-off after its installation. Compare this to the charts for Newsday:
Or this absolutely comical chart for the Times of London:
The NY Times' 24 month chart isn't nearly as dramatic;
but I suspect that's because their paywall is so loose. You can sidestep it by simply blocking Javascript, or downloading a little Javscript shortcut, or by coming in via Google or Yahoo, or via a link on Facebook or Twitter. Essentially, as long as you don't go to the Times via their home page, you never have to pay. Which seems to sorta' defeat the purpose of a paywall, but whatever.
Even though the leaky paywall is preventing a dramatic and newsworthy drop in readership, there are some data to be gleaned.
First off, while the Alexa Rank numbers are only mildly affected, the page views have been significantly moved.
Zooming in to the 6-month chart the effects are more apparent:
They have dropped, certainly, but they have also stopped fluctuating with the ebb and flow of internet traffic. This is troubling, since on a healthy website, growth comes from that very ebb and flow. Very tight numbers means that your audience is flatlining. While this means you have a stable audience, when you do lose audience members, it's very difficult to replace them.
If we again zoom in to the 6-month scale on the chart, we can also discern a little bit of possibly-relevant data.
Looking back on the 24-month chart, the Times was, slowly sometimes, trending upwards in readership and global rank. This trend possibly may have broken, with the Times' rank the lowest it's been since December of last year. This is troubling since the Times' most popular general audience competitor, cnn.com, has been flat for the past two years. But even on this scale, we can see that while the heavy flow of news appears to have given CNN a boost in their readers, the Times has received no such boost and has, in fact, reverted to even lower numbers. CNN might break 50 and stay there in the next few months.
If we compare the NY Times to their biggest philosophical competitor, the LA Times, we see that the LA Times are growing while the NY Times is not.
All websites exhibit a great amount of fluctuation, so this past month is not enough to extrapolate long-term trends. The important fact to take away, though, is that while other websites went up, the NY Times went down. Both CNN and the LA Times are heading towards milestones on Alexa, with the former reaching for the 50th most popular website on Earth, and the latter heading toward 300.
I still think that it's too early to call the paywall a complete failure, but those page view numbers should be troubling for the Times executives. The nature of the paywall means that large chunks of the Times' audience could suddenly leave, resulting in shocking drops in readership. I think that this is a possibility because the paywall works via some Javascript that tracks article views. After twenty articles are viewed, the page is blocked asking for payment. With five daily views via Google, and unlimited numbers from Facebook and other social tools, it will take time for people to hit the wall a sufficient number of times to annoy them enough to simply stop going. Ironically, I think that this will make times of elevated news stories problematic for the Times, since people are more likely to hit the wall quickly and repeatedly, and since they won't care to pay when options like the BBC, CNN, LA Times, and Reuters are available much more quickly, they'll more likely to leave, find that they enjoy another website, and never return.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The NY Times Unleashes Paywall; Confirms That it Has No Clue
The New York Times has finally released all of the details of their impending paywall. It is, somehow, both stupider and smarter than I was expecting. The details:
Let's go through this step by step and find out why the NY Times is out of its freaking mind.
If you're going to have a paywall that's full of holes, why bother with a paywall at all. User conversion rates are going to be minuscule; less than 1% if other data are representative. As such, you'll get people interested in using the service for free, only to cut them off once they become frequent users. Conversion rates will remain low, and the bad experience will reduce the likelihood of their coming back even for free articles.
The Times doesn't go into details about how your monthly limit will be tracked. If it's done via a cookie, it would be very easy to simply delete the cookie and browse free for ever, so I doubt they'll do that. Instead, they'll force everyone who even just stumbles into the Times to create an account, which will send reader numbers even lower.
The pricing tiers are outright bizarre. You can get the phone and web, or tablet and web, but not phone and tablet, or just web. It also holds a twisted view of news as something that is defined by its container, and not by the content. It's all just data, so charging more for each variant of the same data is strange.
The archive limit is something that I find silly, if not stupid. The Times should be pushing their archive as hard as they can since it's the one thing that their competitors can't match. It's something that simply comes with age. It can bring eyes to the Times pages from people who were searching for something entirely unrelated to current events.
I'll reiterate, this behavior is being caused by a company that thinks its money came from somewhere it didn't, it's also confused as to what its product actually is. Newspapers always ran off of advertising revenue. Consumers classically paid as little as possible. It got to the point where magazine subscriptions cost $10 for an entire year. I wasn't even paying for the printing at that cost!
The product that magazines and newspapers once sold was, at the time, partially the publications. People did pay, so people were dispensing value units, money, in exchange for the paper. But their real product, the thing that they were actually selling to pay the bills, was access to those eyes that their publication had attracted. They were selling their readers to advertisers. The publications were merely an expensive way to attract a group of people every day.
The problem that newspapers are encountering is a drop in the value of each reader. Anyone could have predicted this, and many did. Newspaper value was high because it was one of the few games in town that attracted large audiences around a single medium: the newspaper. If the number of avenues (publications) increases, the value of each avenue will decrease. The internet suddenly made every newspaper a direct competitor. As such, the value of each person dropped precipitously. But that's not the whole story.
Newspapers were rarely read by just one person. Thus, the cost per impression was actually lower than the subscriber counts indicated. The Times charged a set amount per column inch in advertising, and if you divide the total number of paid column inches by print numbers, you were able to derive the earnings per print. If we assume that only one person sees a paper, then the earnings per print equals the earnings per impression, but that's not the case. Many papers are read by many people. For example, a newspaper in a doctor's office is read by dozens of people. This drops the value of the cost per impression since we have to divide the total revenue by a greater number of people. What this does is drop the value of individual people closer to the level of the cheap cost-per-impression that exists on the internet.
I think that the drop in impression value isn't as large as the shaky financial situation of the various newspapers would indicate. I think their situations are the result of bloat and bad management, which was allowable in the days when advertising revenue per column inch was very high. It all went wrong because the drop in per-impression advertising value was not met by an equal increase in impressions. And if we assume that there were far more impressions that prints, you can see how reader numbers must become very large to warrant the same income as before.
Again, that's why AOL is pushing SEO onto every post. They need to get those reader numbers very high to earn the kind of money that the Times used to earn. BUT IT CAN BE DONE! Not only can it be done, but the earnings of old will be eclipsed by the earnings of a well-networked content company today. For example, Gawker media has begun abandoning old-style advertising in favor of integrated advertising. This isn't an "ad" per se, but a brand that is integrated with the brand of the content creator.
Try going to one of Gawker's sites, be it Gizmodo or io9, you'll find at least one of them with some brand plastered right up there with the website's logo. It's part of the website. Adblocker does nothing, and importantly, it doesn't need to. Adblocker is helpful because banner ads are usually garish, screen-filling, CPU-hogging monsters. They've changed the nature of the advertisements. Not entirely, but one that's only really feasible in a digital environment.
The Times needs to increase readership, not decimate it. They need to come up with new ideas for advertisements, not simply shovel out the same ones. The paywall does neither of these things. The paywall will be a failure, guaranteed.
- You can access articles for free via search engines and social media links, similar to The Wall Street Journal. Google provides five free articles per day.
- Newspaper subscribers get access. This includes both weekdays and Sunday-only.
- There are three levels of price: web & phone $15/month; web & tablet $20/month; web, tablet, & phone $35/month.
- Those prices include 100 "archive" articles per month.
- Users can view 20 articles per month for free.
Let's go through this step by step and find out why the NY Times is out of its freaking mind.
If you're going to have a paywall that's full of holes, why bother with a paywall at all. User conversion rates are going to be minuscule; less than 1% if other data are representative. As such, you'll get people interested in using the service for free, only to cut them off once they become frequent users. Conversion rates will remain low, and the bad experience will reduce the likelihood of their coming back even for free articles.
The Times doesn't go into details about how your monthly limit will be tracked. If it's done via a cookie, it would be very easy to simply delete the cookie and browse free for ever, so I doubt they'll do that. Instead, they'll force everyone who even just stumbles into the Times to create an account, which will send reader numbers even lower.
The pricing tiers are outright bizarre. You can get the phone and web, or tablet and web, but not phone and tablet, or just web. It also holds a twisted view of news as something that is defined by its container, and not by the content. It's all just data, so charging more for each variant of the same data is strange.
The archive limit is something that I find silly, if not stupid. The Times should be pushing their archive as hard as they can since it's the one thing that their competitors can't match. It's something that simply comes with age. It can bring eyes to the Times pages from people who were searching for something entirely unrelated to current events.
I'll reiterate, this behavior is being caused by a company that thinks its money came from somewhere it didn't, it's also confused as to what its product actually is. Newspapers always ran off of advertising revenue. Consumers classically paid as little as possible. It got to the point where magazine subscriptions cost $10 for an entire year. I wasn't even paying for the printing at that cost!
The product that magazines and newspapers once sold was, at the time, partially the publications. People did pay, so people were dispensing value units, money, in exchange for the paper. But their real product, the thing that they were actually selling to pay the bills, was access to those eyes that their publication had attracted. They were selling their readers to advertisers. The publications were merely an expensive way to attract a group of people every day.
The problem that newspapers are encountering is a drop in the value of each reader. Anyone could have predicted this, and many did. Newspaper value was high because it was one of the few games in town that attracted large audiences around a single medium: the newspaper. If the number of avenues (publications) increases, the value of each avenue will decrease. The internet suddenly made every newspaper a direct competitor. As such, the value of each person dropped precipitously. But that's not the whole story.
Newspapers were rarely read by just one person. Thus, the cost per impression was actually lower than the subscriber counts indicated. The Times charged a set amount per column inch in advertising, and if you divide the total number of paid column inches by print numbers, you were able to derive the earnings per print. If we assume that only one person sees a paper, then the earnings per print equals the earnings per impression, but that's not the case. Many papers are read by many people. For example, a newspaper in a doctor's office is read by dozens of people. This drops the value of the cost per impression since we have to divide the total revenue by a greater number of people. What this does is drop the value of individual people closer to the level of the cheap cost-per-impression that exists on the internet.
I think that the drop in impression value isn't as large as the shaky financial situation of the various newspapers would indicate. I think their situations are the result of bloat and bad management, which was allowable in the days when advertising revenue per column inch was very high. It all went wrong because the drop in per-impression advertising value was not met by an equal increase in impressions. And if we assume that there were far more impressions that prints, you can see how reader numbers must become very large to warrant the same income as before.
Again, that's why AOL is pushing SEO onto every post. They need to get those reader numbers very high to earn the kind of money that the Times used to earn. BUT IT CAN BE DONE! Not only can it be done, but the earnings of old will be eclipsed by the earnings of a well-networked content company today. For example, Gawker media has begun abandoning old-style advertising in favor of integrated advertising. This isn't an "ad" per se, but a brand that is integrated with the brand of the content creator.
Try going to one of Gawker's sites, be it Gizmodo or io9, you'll find at least one of them with some brand plastered right up there with the website's logo. It's part of the website. Adblocker does nothing, and importantly, it doesn't need to. Adblocker is helpful because banner ads are usually garish, screen-filling, CPU-hogging monsters. They've changed the nature of the advertisements. Not entirely, but one that's only really feasible in a digital environment.
The Times needs to increase readership, not decimate it. They need to come up with new ideas for advertisements, not simply shovel out the same ones. The paywall does neither of these things. The paywall will be a failure, guaranteed.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
AOL, The New York Times, And The Future of News
As is being passed about the interwebs, for the first time, the internet has surpassed newspapers as a source of news for those surveyed. Everyone is aware, even the New York Times, that print is on the way out, at least as far as news goes. This news comes as even more significant because of recent events involving the old guard of the news world and some big bets being made in regards to the emerging players.
First, we have The New York Times, probably the single most visible newspaper in the world, erecting a paywall. We've already seen the effects that paywalls have on readership. Newsday implemented one and received, after three months, thirty-five subscribers. Thirty. Five. They then took down the paywall for about a month, which caused a small spike in their Alexa numbers, which immediately went back to its pathetic standing after the paywall was reinstated.
News Corp. instituted a paywall for the Times of London, reducing its online readership by 95%. Two websites that have paywalls but remain successful are both financial, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. What that means, I'm unsure, but I doubt that it's a coincidence. Furthermore, the "paywall" of the Wall Street Journal can be largely bypassed if you always enter through Google search. I also know that the Economist's paywall isn't absolute, since I've read many articles on their site.
Paywalls are a disaster waiting to happen for whichever publication is stupid enough to try. But on the other side of the coin, they are a massive opportunity to any enterprising competitors, which is exactly what's happening with the recent AOL purchase of The Huffington Post. First off, I think it was idiotic that Yahoo! didn't buy the Post first, but that's another story. Second... off?... we have the New York Times complaining about The Huffington Post, calling them thieves, following a similar charge levied by The New Republic (which, shocker, is also behind a paywall). It is not at all coincidental that these comments are coming after AOL's buyout.
Further evidence of the coming shakeup is the supposed "AOL Way" that is being pushed out to all of AOL's online properties, including mega-blogs like Engadget. This strategy, and truly the strategy of Huffington Post from the beginning, has only one goal: to dominate the online newscape. The number of stories being produced is going to be staggering, and even the copy of those stories will be SEO'ed. Any competitor who's stupid enough to go behind a paywall will immediately be decimated by open competitors who are optimizing their entire site to draw in as much traffic as possible.
AOL is positioning itself as the replacement to any news organization that shoots itself or otherwise fails to adapt. The AOL Way is the core of this mission. Yes, we'll have lots of boilerplate garbage, and lots of aggregation meant to do nothing more than draw search clicks; but the more of that AOL can manage, the more quality production it can afford, eventually leading to a massive, dominating news presence. What these news stories indicate is that AOL seems to understand something that the old guard is completely incapable of grasping.
AOL understands that the biggest issue is not now, nor has it ever been, people being unwilling to pay for news. Obviously, they are willing; when that access is the only game in town. That's what made newspapers valuable. For a long time, in any given area, they were the only games in town. That meant a very limited and focused pathway from advertiser to consumer. The internet has changed that. It's not piracy or entitled consumers. It's the very CORE of economics. When there are more competitors, the value of whatever is being produced goes down.
Thus, the issue is a huge drop in per-person advertising value. Theoretically, that should be more than compensated for by the large increase in the size of the audience. Each person is worth less, but there are tons of them. Instead of embracing this, old-world companies are desperately clinging to their old models. Well I'm sorry. You can no longer expect to get multiple dollars of daily revenue for each reader. Per person revenue is now measured in cents. It's Econ101. Get used to it, otherwise, AOL is going to eat your fucking lunch.
First, we have The New York Times, probably the single most visible newspaper in the world, erecting a paywall. We've already seen the effects that paywalls have on readership. Newsday implemented one and received, after three months, thirty-five subscribers. Thirty. Five. They then took down the paywall for about a month, which caused a small spike in their Alexa numbers, which immediately went back to its pathetic standing after the paywall was reinstated.
News Corp. instituted a paywall for the Times of London, reducing its online readership by 95%. Two websites that have paywalls but remain successful are both financial, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. What that means, I'm unsure, but I doubt that it's a coincidence. Furthermore, the "paywall" of the Wall Street Journal can be largely bypassed if you always enter through Google search. I also know that the Economist's paywall isn't absolute, since I've read many articles on their site.
Paywalls are a disaster waiting to happen for whichever publication is stupid enough to try. But on the other side of the coin, they are a massive opportunity to any enterprising competitors, which is exactly what's happening with the recent AOL purchase of The Huffington Post. First off, I think it was idiotic that Yahoo! didn't buy the Post first, but that's another story. Second... off?... we have the New York Times complaining about The Huffington Post, calling them thieves, following a similar charge levied by The New Republic (which, shocker, is also behind a paywall). It is not at all coincidental that these comments are coming after AOL's buyout.
Further evidence of the coming shakeup is the supposed "AOL Way" that is being pushed out to all of AOL's online properties, including mega-blogs like Engadget. This strategy, and truly the strategy of Huffington Post from the beginning, has only one goal: to dominate the online newscape. The number of stories being produced is going to be staggering, and even the copy of those stories will be SEO'ed. Any competitor who's stupid enough to go behind a paywall will immediately be decimated by open competitors who are optimizing their entire site to draw in as much traffic as possible.
AOL is positioning itself as the replacement to any news organization that shoots itself or otherwise fails to adapt. The AOL Way is the core of this mission. Yes, we'll have lots of boilerplate garbage, and lots of aggregation meant to do nothing more than draw search clicks; but the more of that AOL can manage, the more quality production it can afford, eventually leading to a massive, dominating news presence. What these news stories indicate is that AOL seems to understand something that the old guard is completely incapable of grasping.
AOL understands that the biggest issue is not now, nor has it ever been, people being unwilling to pay for news. Obviously, they are willing; when that access is the only game in town. That's what made newspapers valuable. For a long time, in any given area, they were the only games in town. That meant a very limited and focused pathway from advertiser to consumer. The internet has changed that. It's not piracy or entitled consumers. It's the very CORE of economics. When there are more competitors, the value of whatever is being produced goes down.
Thus, the issue is a huge drop in per-person advertising value. Theoretically, that should be more than compensated for by the large increase in the size of the audience. Each person is worth less, but there are tons of them. Instead of embracing this, old-world companies are desperately clinging to their old models. Well I'm sorry. You can no longer expect to get multiple dollars of daily revenue for each reader. Per person revenue is now measured in cents. It's Econ101. Get used to it, otherwise, AOL is going to eat your fucking lunch.
Monday, November 23, 2009
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