Newser: Brilliant but toxic

Posted in: Business Models, Design, New Ideas, Newspapers, Revenue, Trends, by: John Duncan

Dec 23, 2008
02:15 AM

I like Newser. I have liked Newser since a very brief post on Poynter in the middle of last year alerted me to it as the sort of thing that newspapers should be doing. I can’t find the original post or I would credit the author with being 100% right. It is truly brilliant. The most shocking thing is that the success of Newser comes from two reader insights that are as old as a Guttenberg press and one small information design innovation that allows them to cut their cost base by 99.9%.

Oh, and their existence is potentially fatal to online newspaper revenue.

Reader Insight 1 - Readers like to consume stories in short format.
Reader Insight 2 - Readers like pretty pictures to engage them in a story.
Information design insight 1 - Put in an intermediate level of consumption between the user and the full content and most users will be satisfied with the intermediate level consumption.
(Note from Newser: “Thank you old media for spending all that money on content and then failing to think about how users want to read it so we can use if for free unchallenged. Nice!”)

Like I said, Newser have taken three things that every newspaper person has known for years and made a great business out of them while content providers sat on their hands.

If you don't believe me take a look at an average newspaper home page. The majority are actually rather poor. They ask the user to start on a crowded home page full of words with maybe a single big image - in the style of a newspaper. They look like hard work. They assume their users all want to consume news the same way. And it's broadly the same way they have told users to consume news since the first day the newspaper went online: Big headline, picture, menu up top, menu to the left, lots of words in lists ordered according to newspaper sections.

We make it difficult for our readers to choose. We make life complicated for them. We make our users work to get stuff. We make them share the same styles and templates as everyone else. We care about visual consistency more than usability. We think of our audience as one. So our storytelling becomes stale, our infrastructure becomes unwieldy and we get eaten alive by ants (the myriad sites who do what we do for narrow niches but do it better and with more personality).

Mark Potts’s post about Gatehouse Media suing to prevent aggregation of their content, hints at where this argument is heading and how little sympathy there is likely to be for old media companies trying to grab the genie and subpoena it back into the bottle, there is some merit to the argument that aggregation sites are parasitic thieves.

Let me say again, lest I be cast as a visitor from the mesozoic era, I think that aggregation sites are a brilliant innovation that takes advantage of market data every journalist has known for decades about human behavior. But so are Ponzi schemes and ... and the brilliance of their design doesn't make them any less toxic for the people who lose out on them.

Here is the argument. Most readers never get past the first paragraph of a story even if the headline has tickled their interest. So a site that supplies only the best headlines and the “best” 120 words gets a substantial proportion of the audience for the story with almost none of the cost of generating it. The link they supply to the originator website is unlikely to generate more than about 15% of the impressions that the page with the summary on it has.

An advertiser doesn't care - the audience is now fungible - they pay the same for the ad impression at the aggregation site as they do at the originator site. So the aggregator gets 85% of the impressions without having spent much at all on generating the content that creates that impression.

Fair use is a figleaf that makes the whole thing legal. But is this what fair use was intended to cover? It really is supposed to allow people to refer to each other's work incidentally without having to obtain copyright. Like in a book review, for example. Or a story reported elsewhere and picked up in your own title. It wasn’t designed to allow people to do nothing other than use other people’s work to make money. The fact that you are only using the most saleable part of my work to make money doesn't make it right.

Parasite is a strong word but it's a useful metaphor for scientific reasons rather than just to be pejoratively mean. There is no doubt that they are living off newspaper content. But are they parasites or symbiotes? A parasite feeds itself and hurts the host. A symbiote creates a relationship that benefits both. Aggregator sites claim to be symbiotic because they generate traffic for their “hosts”. But if they drain more revenue than they provide then they are parasites and the missing revenue they drain will kill their hosts, which makes them parasites.

So it comes down to whether you believe that aggregators generate traffic sufficient to keep their hosts alive in the long term. I don't think they do. In the short term a nice link grows traffic but this ignores the impact on long term news consumption habits. If I decide that Newser can supply all my news then I will only visit Newser and rely on Newser alerts. So my general browsing traffic at my local newspaper site is reduced to zero and I only visit when Newser says there is something interesting there. This results in quite a substantial aggregate loss (no pun intended).

The problem with aggregator sites is that they seem likely to carry on exploiting the foolishness of content owners until they are dead or fatally weakened and therefore they kill themselves too, If they redirect revenue to themselves then there is no way to continue funding the content they require to continue in business.

Of course they will still have countless bloggers and specialists to link to, many of whom will have a cost base that allows them to thrive on the link traffic that aggregators generate for them. But content is a highly interdependent ecosystem and it is hard to accurately predict what will happen if a major sub-species of news outlets become extinct. I don't know what will happen, but I don't believe you can state with any certainty that it won't matter or that the ecosystem will easily adjust.

Okay, so what to do about it. There are two things news organizations should be thinking about when they look at Newser or any of the successful aggregation sites.

Firstly, heal thyself. Why are you letting these sites steal audience from you? Why aren't you doing this for yourself? The skills involved in putting together an aggregator site are found in boundless quantities in most news organizations. If you don't think you are up to the task of making judgments about what is interesting and presenting it in an engaging and interesting way then you should go right to the top of your print plant and wait for the mother ship to take you back to the planet Loser. If fair use is going to allow theft of content then start stealing along with everyone else and use your scale and execution skills to win out.

Secondly, if you don't want to join ‘em, you have to beat ‘em. There is a good case for going after fair use law and clarifiying it to make it clear that commercial exploitation of small significant pieces of copyrighted content is not fair use. It will be complicated, unpopular and controversial, but there's an argument in there and it should be had somewhere…