A significant move happened in the online publishing world this week and it is a sign of things to come for any online publishing company that is burning money managing their own hosting operations.
Newsweek.com announced this week that the site is outsourcing its Web site hosting duties to Amazon, joining a small but growing number of companies experimenting with cloud computing.
“Until now, Newsweek.com had been hosted by its parent company, The Washington Post Co. The media company has been trying to cut losses at its magazine division, which recorded $29.3 million in operating losses in 2009. By joining the cloud, Newsweek expects to save close to $500,000 annually.
“It saves Newsweek money,” said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital.
“Lots of people out there built their own infrastructure and are going to be tortured by this idea of sunk costs.”
Kontexto started using Amazon Web Services in early 2008 and now our whole real time content analytics platform is built on the Amazon cloud. We have always been lobbing the idea around of launching a cloud based news infrastructure that takes care of everything post publishing including storage, search, delivery and analytics. Give the CMS and editing freedom to the content creators, but hand off everything else.
After newsweek.com, it is hard to say who will be the next to transition hosting to the cloud. Some other certainly have without announcing it. But it is good to see a brand name publication make an organizational shift to the cloud.
Short post, but this is an article worth reading if you are interested in how a legacy print magazine is trying to fit into Bloomberg, a real time data organization.
Bloomberg is in the business of selling data terminals and everything else supports that cause. They are damn successful doing this and pride themselves on being the most influential news organization in the world. True or not is up to you, but they do produce news that moves markets.
I have picked out some points from the article and will share my brief thoughts on them, as they capture some broader themes we are seeing emerge across the online publishing world namely:
Profit - News needs to have a profit motive
AND
Measurement - Everything can be measured in the news creation process
Some other points from the article:
1. News should help people make money. Whether the creator of the news or the consumer of the news, there is a profit motive. If news makes money, then everyone is happy.
This flies right in the face of everything taught in Journalism school and the Businessweek staff that did not buy into this philosophy were shown the door or remain at Bloomberg and are adapting.
2. Bloomberg operates a “speed desk”, with the sole purpose of quantifying how much news they get out first and if that news makes people money.
I think this philosophy can be taken all the way down the chain from global news providers like Bloomberg to hyperlocal news providers. If you get more content out before your competitors (speed), you will build a loyal audience for that.
3. Every Bloomberg writer has a “dashboard” where the metrics determining his compensation — any scoops, hits an article attracts — are tracked.
This is precisely the type of feedback and support that content creators need and can use to their advantage. There is a real resistance to measurement in the newsroom, but it is going mainstream and it should be embraced as a positive not a negative. Staying employed, building an audience and improving the success of your content choices seems to be a reasonable plan, real time metrics can help you do this.
4. This is an angle I had not considered… the psychological impact over time on individuals of creating content that does not make money. As put by a former Businessweek employee about his colleagues… “They really feel like writing for Businessweek is a waste of time — it’s not making money, they get nothing out it,”
People are generally happier when they are making money and if metrics and data can help you to make your content more profitable then you should embrace it.
The exclamation point is their touch, not mine. But, the all out battle has begun between the news paywallers and the legions of hacks that seek to get around those paywalls with their wallets no lighter than when they arrived.
BreakthePaywall! is the first news paywall hack I have come across that is looking to promote itself and gain adoption amongst people looking to circumvent news paywalls.
Looks like it is a browser add on that simplifies the process of deleting cookies, which news sites plant to track how many free articles are read before they cut you off. For existing account based paywalls that charge for everything, they are hardly a threat. But, I think this serves as a reminder of the reticence to pay for general online news content.
They are currently seeking donations to fund the development of the service and I suspect grow the slush fund for their legal team when the times comes.
I have a bunch of searches set up to track the evolution of online news job postings. In particular I am looking for job postings that mention the words “real time”, “monitor site traffic”, “story placement”, “story trends” and other word combinations that capture the convergence of editor, web producer and stats geek.
Similar to the portadista job role I posted and reviewed last year, this one for a site manager at the TheStreet.com just popped up. I have highlighted the interesting chunk.
It is good to see big media sites starting to realize the value of using data and real time metrics to provide content decision support. We are big believers of this growing trend, which is why we are building a business around delivering real time analysis and insight to online news publishers via our service publishflow™.
It is one of the first semi-mainstream articles I have come across that deconstructs an article into a collection of assembled words. And in the authors opinion, all too often articles have way too many words that do not add any value to the story at hand.
The value of a word, a collection of words, an article and even a publication is in the eye of the beholder, so I am not going to rehash this authors take on things. You can read the article and see some interesting examples he uses of wasted words.
What I would like to highlight is the last passage of the article, which in my opinion addresses the actual business case of deconstructing stories using the “cost of words” (measurable) versus the “value of words” (subjective).
“On the first day of my first real job in journalism—on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Michigan—the chief copy editor said, “Remember, every word you cut saves the publisher money.” At the time, saving the publisher money didn’t strike me as the world’s noblest ideal. These days, for anyone in journalism, it’s more compelling.”
It is interesting (for me at least) to think of news publishers as speculators whose job is to invest in words. Sometimes you go long and sometimes you go short. The trick is to be long or short on the right things. Whether investor or publisher, that challenge remains.
Most of the newsrooms we work with are using traditional web analytics services like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics to quantify their traffic and page impression stats on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Nothing shocking here, pretty much par for the course.
But it is rare that we see newsrooms really studying their analytics data on an hourly or daily basis to uncover new insight about visitor behaviour, story preferences and overall engagement with authors. There is a ton of information trapped in traditional web analytics packages that can help newsrooms become more efficient and make more money.
It has long been our vision at Kontexto, that newsrooms will need to start using traditional ‘return on investment’ business metrics for every story they create. Like every other business that makes decisions based on future returns, newsrooms can be no different if they wish to survive.
Companies like Demand Media, Huff Post and others are onto this, but AOL is the first big media brand embracing this approach and you can get up to speed on it in a brief, but timely article from Businessweek ‘AOL Moves to Build Tech ‘Newsroom of the Future’… CEO Tim Armstrong deploys software that helps journalists collaborate on articles readers seem to want, then reports the traffic they generate.
They are using stats, stats and more stats to determine what topics, stories and authors are successful over time. But more importantly, it uncovers what is not working over time so adjustments can be made.
“ROI”, “efficient allocation of resources” and “market driven story creation” may seem cold and dry, but I want as many newsrooms as possible to be around 3, 5, 20 years from now and using stats to help make sure this happens is something we (and AOL and a growing list) believe in.
Watch out for a big transition to data driven reporting in the coming years. Can’t wait.
Some positive market stats on the international news front released this week by comScore.
Some highlight on Indian online news growth…
-Online news is a fast-growing market segment among the increasingly technology-oriented Indian population.
-The number of online news and information consumers in India surged 37 percent in the past year, more than double the rate of growth of the total online audience in India.
-A look at the most visited news destinations in India revealed that local brands make up a significant portion of the top news sites.
-Multi-national brands Yahoo! and New York Times ranked as the most visited destinations in the news category
-In October, an average visitor to the news/information category spent 22 minutes on news sites and consumed 38 pages of content.
Slowly, the winds of change are blowing into newsrooms around the globe.
20minutos.es, a popular Spanish language news website has just hired a full time home page editor “Portadista” that is responsible for the performance of the home page and tracking the most popular stories in each column, using their own software to show real time performance stats.
It may seem like a mundane role, but one that will become the most coveted job in newsrooms around the world in the next few years. The one person that is making decisions in real time about which content gets high visibility and using click data to verify those decisions.
In our discussions with newsrooms of all sizes over the past 12 months, it is clear there is a large market demand for real time data that can direct editorial choices, optimal link placement and measure real time story performance metrics.
The only thing that has been slowing adoption down is the lack of software to do this at scale (this is where our real time web analytics service buzzflow™ comes in) and hiring the proper staff to manage real time editorial management on websites. Both of these things are changing quickly.
I managed to find a fuzzy screen cap of what seems to be a one hour view of link performance on the home page of 20minutos.es. You can see the head and long tail of links and images that were clicked on and in what amount over the course of 60 minutes.
Real time data driven newsrooms are here to stay and this is going to be a very exciting space to play in for content and analytics freaks such as ourselves. Plus, who wouldn’t want the job title of “Portadista” on their business card, way cooler than mine.
publishflow™ is early into its second year as a real time news analytics service for the online news industry. After a year in the trenches meeting with with news brands from around the world and dealing with the global media slowdown, we have learned alot about how to keep things lean while the market for real time news analytics starts to unfold. It is our firm belief that news organizations of all types and sizes can benefit from monitoring and analyzing real time news flow in creative ways. We want to help them do it.
The one thing I have learned in the past 13 months is that “creative” can only be achieved through “flexible”. publishflow™ v1 was outstanding at answering certain questions about news flow on a regular basis, but was a bit handcuffed at times when we wanted to express questions of the public news flow on the fly and in real time. That has all changed now with the latest version of publishflow™.
The newest version of publishflow™ is a complete overhaul of our technology guts that has made everything real time. Our data collection, parsing, categorizing, indexing, storage, search, notification and analysis technology lets everything happen in real time. Whether one is interested in using publishflow™ to track website publishing performance, monitor competitor publishing metrics or trend topic coverage across the web, it’s all happening in real time now.
We are comfortable now that there is a no one size fits all model for real time news analytics and our customers now have the “flexibility” with our service to be as “creative” as they need to be in order to monitor, compare and trend news analytics data.
In line with the new publishflow™ release, the website has been updated at www.publishflow.com with some new information specifically for news executives, section editors and reporters+bloggers. You can take a tour of publishflow™ as well to get some good screencaps, videos and descriptions of what the service can do.
A sample publishflow™ real time news analytics dashboard view
I think I know a few developers who are going to be taking a few days off next week, well deserved. Thanks for all the hard work and time put in to let us take a massive jump forward as a company.
