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Demand Media and the New Economy of the Journalist
Demand Media has been a constant topic of conversation among online journalists of late. It all began with this article in Wired entitled “The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model“.
Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
Demand Media is what we’d generally call a content mill. Instead of the old days of the newspaper where the editorial and advertising teams eyed each other distrustfully, in this case, the entire editorial side is essentially outsourced, and it’s done at rates that would make any professional writer cringe. From their Wikipedia page:
Contributors choose among available titles that were previously identified by the company’s algorithm. They are paid once their work has been automatically checked for plagiarism[7] and is approved by editors. Typical compensation is $20 for a video clip, $15 for an article of a few hundred words, $2.50 for copy-editing an article and $1 for fact-checking an article.[6]
To put that into context, I used to write similar content online for a rate of $500.00 per article. Ouch!
For the record, there’s a huge gulf between what you buy for a $20 article and a $500 article. In the $20 version, I’d suggest that some of the little things go out the window, such as revision, or perhaps even contacting sources. Wired puts it well:
Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal.
The question I have in mind is this: at what point does Google start to put some weighting behind their search results that will,instead of just promoting stories that are well optimized for SEO, help good content rise to the top?
In This Week in Google’s latest podcast, Matt Cutts, spam guru at Google made the statement that 2010 would be a bad year for low value content, when Leo Laporte pressed him on the issue (note: this is not a direct quote, I’m going by memory here, but the gist is fairly clear…).
How do I think they could add value to search results? A few suggestions:
- Leverage the actual search experience of real users with vote up, vote down, hide capability.
- Identify and utilize subject matter experts to fine tune results.
- Allow us to add weight to the search experience of our friends (note: that doesn’t simply mean using everyone in our contacts list!).
In the long run, fixing this hole may make things a lot harder for those of us who do SEO optimization as part of our services. However, I’ve got to think that things only improve for those who use the only time proven SEO tactic I know: providing good pertinent content in a tight, well ordered presentation.
The thing that truly worries me is what this portends for journalists. We’ve seen steady erosion in jobs for journalists over the past couple years, as newspapers and magazines cut back. Now it would seem that even online their services are devalued. Is there room in this new online economy for good content at a fair price?
I certainly hope so…
Death of Newspapers – RIP Editor and Publisher
When I worked in the Atex marketing department, we lived and died by what we could get published in Editor and Publisher. The once vaunted trade journal was the place you wanted to get mentioned, the measure of your having “made it” in the print world. Those days are now gone – from E&P themselves:
Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.
An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.
The expressions of surprise and outpouring of strong support for E&P that has followed across the Web — Editor & Publisher has even hit No. 4 as a Twitter trending topic — raises the notion that the publication might yet continue in some form.
Its sad to see an industry that was once so much a part of my life now unable to even sustain a trade journal. In my youth, it was impossible to imagine a world without newspapers. Increasingly, it is becoming hard to visualize a future with them…
I could ruminate for hours on the subject, but I think the point is already made. Even the journal of the print publication industry can’t make print work and is looking for a way “continue in some form.”
Wordpress 2.8.6 Released and a 2.9 Preview
I got the notice last night that Wordpress 2.8.6 was released to fix a pair of security holes. So I hopped right into the admin console from my Iphone and in 2 minutes, it was updated. If you have a Wordpress installation, I urge you to update right away as well.
This will almost certainly be the last release prior to the much anticipated release of 2.9 which is our next major (feature related) release. Aaron Brazell had a great preview on his site yesterday, and since I’m not currently running the beta, I’ll leave the full on feature review to him. Here are the major bits to expect:
- Enhanced image handling – scaling, cropping, and thumbnail sizing on a per picture basis.
- Trash Can – this really goes back to the old notion we saw in newspaper editorial systems, delete doesn’t really delete, it just hides. This will come in handy.
- The_post_image – if you’ve ever tried to add an image to an excerpt of a post you will know why this is important.
- oEmbed – video support, which I’ve had for years using Vipers Video Tag Plugin.
- Custom Post Type – this is one of those CMS type functions. It’ll make my life easier, although honestly in the past I’ve been able to make categories do my bidding with little trouble in Wordpress CMS settings.
- Comment Meta – I have no idea what to think about this one.
- Metadata API – Another feature I’m sure I’ll use, but currently I can’t think of anything I’d use it for. I guess this is like custom fields for everything, not just limited to posts.
- Theme System Modification – this will allow developers to work on one theme, while real users look at another. This has been needed for some time.
- Rel=Canonical Optimization – seems like a little thing, but it will help a lot with SEO.
Check out the preview at Technosailor.com for the full scoop.
Tags: Automattic, Wordpress
A Few Coherent Thoughts on Murdoch Blocking Google
Yesterday Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp, said that he was going to have Google blocked from all New Corp. websites. That means something
From EditorandPublisher.com:
The Chairman of News Corp. said in an interview with Sky News Australia (reported here in MediaWeek U.K.) that once the newspapers get their paywalls, News Corp. plans to pull its content from the likes of Google and others.
Murdoch said: “We’d rather have fewer people come to the Web site and pay. Consumers shouldn’t have had free news all the time — I think we’ve been asleep. It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content. No news Web sites anywhere in the world are making large amounts of money.”
Immediately the web went all a flutter, myself included, predicting that that Murdoch would rue the day. Joe Mandese at Mediapost.com noted:
According to an analysis of Google-generated traffic released late Monday by Experian’s Hitwise service, Google and Google News currently account for more than 25% of the daily traffic to the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com site.
That’s an awful lot of traffic to put at risk. Now the other side of the coin is that Murdoch knows that showing tons of traffic low cost network ads begging them to Punch the Monkey or telling them they just won a lottery is the absolute path of least resistence. You go there when you have nothing else to possibly do… (more…)
10 Nov 09 | Broadcast Media, Online Media, Print Media, Publishing Technology, Search | Comments (0)Money for Nothing and Your Chicks for Free…
(Disclosures: I work for Namemedia, who is technically a competitor of Internet Brands, owners of vBulletin. I also run several sites that use vBulletin and spend a significant part of my work week working in vBulletin code…)
Over the past month, there’s been a slowly erupting feud in the vBulletin community over the new pricing structure that was announced for vBulletin 4.0 by Internet Brands.
You see, back in the day, the original vBulletin license cost $185 (originally $160 I think) and could be renewed for a yearly fee of $60. With the new version of the software (which has not been released yet) they are moving to a license per major level release, rather than what might be best described as a yearly fee structure. New licenses will cost $195.
I’m going to say right here, right now, that I don’t get why people are so up in arms about this. We want Internet Brands to be able to develop excellent software, right? We want to use the best, right?
Well that won’t happen if they don’t get paid for their software. Ford does not upgrade your car for free. Microsoft did not upgrade your Vista operating system to Windows 7 for free, so why the expectation that Internet Brands will offer perpetual free upgrades?
I know part of the complaint is that it’s going to get expensive if you have a bunch of vBulletin sites. My answer is this: if your sites don’t earn enough to pay for the license upgrade, then perhaps you shouldn’t be running so many sites! If it isn’t earning then by all means you ought to be running open source software.
The plain truth is this: many of us would pay MORE for vBulletin if we could get an enterprise level support agreement. Those of us who have mission critical vBulletin installations would love to be able to get preferred support from them. So perhaps some level of tiering in pricing might work.
The bottom line is this: I have no problem paying good money for good product. I don’t expect free, and neither should you. There are plenty of free open source bulletin board solutions out there, if you can’t pay, I suggest you try using one of them.
Sad to say, but the world of vBulletin has far too much drama about it. Perhaps we will be better off without the complainers…
A few Wordpress sites you might not have seen…
I’ve had a few launches recently and a few of them are worth mentioning.
The Afternic Domainer’s Advantage – this is a knowledge center for use by Domainers, which is fully integrated with the AfternicDLS.com site. For those who aren’t aware, Afternic is the world’s largest premium domain marketplace with over three million domains available for sale. The Domainer’s Advantage site is a fairly standard Wordpress installation that makes use of several fairly standard plugins. Special features:
- Integrated news feed of domain news
- Slide Share integration
- Homepage featured content block
- Single sign on integration with Afternic
- Full design integration with the parent site
- Design by Mark Hentschel – a real design rock star.
Blog.Photo.Net – photo.net is a site for serious photographers to connect with other photographers, explore photo galleries, discuss photography, share and critique photos, and learn about photography. The blog is maintained by Josh Root, the community director for the site, and is used to provide a taste of the vast content available around the site as well as to post industry news, events, etc.
- Full design integration with the photo.net site
- Standard Wordpress installation
- Twitter feed
What is the next Wave?
Google Wave - a chance for us to rethink Social Media?
For some time, I’ve been looking for the next compelling thing in social media sites. For that next development that transforms the way we interact, that re-envisions forums, chat, photo galleries, articles, etc; in fact a redefinition of the way in which we communicate online altogether.
For the past couple years, I’ve watch as vBulletin, my favorite forum software, basically did minor incremental releases, remaining essentially the way it was in 2001. Wordpress has done better, yet still, the fundamental blog/cmslite experience remains pretty much as it was 4 years ago. Photo gallery software, chat, etc. all remain pretty much as they were when they burst on the scene.
The user experience on most sites now is very segmented. Comments are in one spot, while forum posts over here. Most sites don’t integrate chat, as it tends to remove us from the page view model on which our revenue streams are so often based.
We’ve patched together separate systems, and in virtually all cases, the seams are showing. Clear lines of demarcation block logical points of information transfer. Most of what happens isn’t real time, or anything close to it. It’s a post then wait and click refresh experience for most of what we do.
That’s the point of entry for Google Wave, the new open source project that launched in private beta today. It has real time communications, chat has both private/public components, that can take on the threaded view of a forum with real time updates, that can be presented as a forum, or a blog, or whatever you imagine.
You see the important thing here for a developer is that they’ve built the basic tools, but we can add whatever we want via their api. To demonstrate this, they added Google maps integration. Yet that bit could be a video, or even better a live video stream or a recorded application view (think Webex presentation), live photo gallery, or all of them. All of which can be manipulated and edited real time by multiple users.
So what is this Google Wave, really? It’s opportunity for us to FINALLY break out of the box, to really do something new and different, to for once rethink the way we do our sites.
I can’t wait…
Check out the abridged version of the video from the I/O conference to get a taste of what I’m talking about.
30 Sep 09 | Blogging, Community Building, Publishing Technology, Social Media, Technology, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)Has the Public Library Killed Book Publishers?
As I was in the local public library picking up a little something to read on Saturday, I realized there was an interesting parallel between that and Internet file sharing.
What does the library do after all; it loans books for free to people. The same books which both publishers and authors base their entire commercial livelihood. Thus if the picture the music industry draws of the dire future for music if file sharing is allowed continue were really a concern, every book publisher and author in the country would have gone bankrupt long ago.
Instead, the public library is a place where publishers want their books to be. They realize that by having them there, people will read them, then talk about them, thus causing other people to want to read them. And some of those folks will actually buy the book…or even people who read the book at the library may decide they want to own a copy (yes, I have done this…). Why would the recording industry or movie industry expect anything different for them?
In fact, many libraries also carry dvds of the same albums and movie which the recording industry is trying to protect, and loan them, for free…
Let’s here what you have to say on the issue…comment away!
Newspaper Tipping Point: Current Events
My 11 yo daughter called me while I was driving home last night, to ask me to pick up a newspaper so she could start her weekly current events assignment for school. Without thinking, I told her “you don’t want a newspaper for that, you need to get the information of the web where it’s up to date.”
Now I’ve worked with newspapers on and off since my days atthe University of Vermont, and I worked for Atex where we engineered newspaper publishing software for close to a decade. My grandfather was a linotype operator. For me to tell her that the print edition of newspapers weren’t the place to go for current events was a huge step.
The revelation: the print edition is all old news, yesterday’s news, in fact.
However, it was also particially incorrect. She’s certainly be getting newspaper content for her current events brief. It just won’t be from the print edition.
Strangely enough, I realized as I drove to the office today that the best way for her to put together her little weekly assignment would be to do the whole thing electronically. That way she could link back to the original content, using only a summary so as not to violate copyright and run afoul of the AP and their army of revenue enhancement lawyers. Now that would truly be a skill that all kids should be learning in school today.
So there it is, the point at which I realize I have no use save bird cage liner for the print edition…it is now as useful as would be one of those old linotype machines that were once state of the art in type setting.
News Has Always Been Free…
Image couresy of WSJ.com
I read an interesting post this morning by Michael Hickins on The Faster Times that posit that “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are“. His basic premise: that the tech industry, and the web in particular with with the dotbomb era and sky high salaries and insane stock packages, inflated journalist salaries well beyond their regular levels.
Why? Because salaries had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups. How could Walgreen’s compete against Drugstore.com without compensating for the stock options that could make someone an instant millionaire? They couldn’t. The dot-com bubble burst threw some people out of work for a short period of time, but did nothing to bring salaries back into line.
So all of a sudden, in 2001, I went from making $45,000 for the print publication to $60,000 per year for the online version while working for the same publisher, Conde Nast. Not that I complained. At my last full-time position, I made $90,000 per year working as an editor at Ziff Davis Enterprise – and had reporters working for me who earned well above that. It’s public knowledge that Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal earns over $1 million per year.
I posted the link via Twitter and was quickly reminded by Stephen Hadley that “…Most of my reporter friends who are losing their jobs aren’t overpaid. It’s just that the papers they work for no longer are able to sell advertising to support their staffs. Ad dollars are moving.”
That, to my mind is the crux of the matter. You will definitely spot other problems throughout the newspaper industry, but the real problem right now is ad revenue going away. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a myriad of other compounding issues here, such as circulation declines, outdated technology, Jurassic management, etc., and certainly those are all factors. But the real problem comes down simply to a matter of dollars not coming in the doors.
Brian Carr pointed me towards the AnnArbor.com launch – a Michigan newspaper opened a new site, using 54 staff members. (according to their site masthead) Ponder this: 54 newspaper folk took a couple months to launch a site using what appears to be a bog standard MoveableType installation. Frankly, given part of a weekend and a 12 pack of Mountain Dew, I could have outdone them. Seriously…
The big problem for journalists is this: even though Hickins may tell us that the web got us big salaries back in the day, the sad truth is this: the prevailing thought on the Internet today is that content is free. As content originators, that means our work isn’t under valued, if FLAT OUT ISN’T VALUED.
Back in the day, I got $500 for a blog post. Granted, those were some excellent blog posts, but right now I do basically the same thing for free.
Look at the fiasco a few weeks back when Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, and EIC of Wired Magazine lifted huge sections of wikipedia articles for his new book “Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price” (and yes, he’s talking about free content…). If a Wired Magazine editor can’t even manage to properly cite Wikipedia, what does that say for his view of the value of content? Oh, right, I guess we should re-read the title of that book…
The real problem inherent in all of this is that after we’re done killing off all the reliable primary news sources, such as newspapers, television news, or even magazines, is that we’ll find we’re left with a gaping void. The thought is that blogs will take over. unfortunately, while blogs are generally interesting sources of commentary and opinion, I see very few that provide anything like news, and when and where they do it, they generally do not do it reliably. You can’t count on today’s source to have good info, or any info, tomorrow, and you definitely should not expect extensive enough general coverage that will allow you to get a good picture of the world, or any small part of it for that particular piece of time.
Okay, I’m sure one of you is thinking now about the Iranian Election a few weeks ago, and how it broke on Twitter. In fact, it would have broken on major news outlets as well, but it got bumped for the MJ Media Circus. Even so, Twitter may be many things, but it’s not a reliable primary news source. Yes, it may provide a lead here or there, but any good journalist knows, that’s just where the story starts…not where it ends.
Getting back to the original theme here, I think now that we can see that news generation was a loss leader for newspapers. It took a lot of effort to do it right, but it was something they could monetize through ad revenue. Today, we need to forget about how content gets delivered, and remember that content generation is still a valuable and necessary product. When we rediscover a proper way to monetize it, the world for journalist and everyone will be a better place.
Because none of us wants to work for free…
28 Jul 09 | Broadcast Media, Content Management, Online Media, Print Media, Publishing Technology, Social Media, media | Comments (0)About Us
I'm Mark Cahill - Online community developer and content management wonk since 1995. I'm interested in new media, communities and social networking, and love saltwater fly fishing. For a longer version, you can read my full about us page.
I am mncahill on Twitter
Email me at allthingscahill at gmail
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