When spiders from Google or Bing or whatever pay sites a visit, they don’t send back oohs and ahs about Nick [Denton]’s enterprise content. They don’t glow with envy over how well it’s sorted and displayed for users and report that back to Google. They care only about what’s new. “What can I report back about the stream and flow?”
So live by the CPM, die by the CPM. Live by the RFP, die by the RFP.
Media companies secretly know this, but there’s still so much money attached that they’re paralyzed. So Nick is taking his company back in this direction, rather than continuing to explore how to monetize his audience, not his content. I think that’s a mistake.
”Terry Heaton responds to my earlier post and makes some strong points like this one:
“Display advertising is not, nor will it ever be, the driver of Web advertising. It’s designed for a one-to-many display, and the Web is a constant, real time two-way connection.”
I don’t however agree with him on all fronts, like when he asks rheotrically, “Does Twitter give a crap about how anything looks?”
No, Twitter does not. But the people who use Twitter and share urls and information do. Design and user experience are still valuable. To dismiss them because their current incarnations are failing advertisers and contributing to “banner blindness” is to have the same limited view of what’s possible as the tone deaf advertisers you’re helping.
I agree that “media people” are in love with their content, perhaps even blinded by it, especially those who come from a print background. They have protected their content and pandered to pageviews at the expense of innovation. They have neither engaged the medium on the level that you propose, which places priority on the back-end, nor have they honestly engaged in the process of designing a website that places the user first, that elevates the reading experience using the medium, rather than in spite of it.
While I understand better now your argument against what Nick Denton has done and appreciate your position, I still think there are elements of the new design that provoke, that are different enough from the traditional media outlets you disparage, that make Gawker something wholly separate from them—and perhaps more like Twitter than you think.
Tired of Nick Denton? Sorry.
Say what you will about Gawker and Nick Denton—god knows they’ve gotten enough good and bad publicity over the last year to nauseate even the most casual media observer—but this post about the future of Gawker is the smartest dissection of a website’s traffic, information architecture, and purpose I have read by a publisher—perhaps ever.
What I respect most is that his argument for good business is an argument for improving reader experience and investing in reporting—the benchmarks of any good tabloid.
Only time will tell whether if right rail browse column will catch on. (It should. It’s smart. And if the last major redesign is any indication—in which Gawker adopted uniform sized thumbnails and tight teasers amongst other things—it will.) Nevertheless, it’s bold and boldness deserves respect—even if it’s given begrudgingly.
Let’s assume Denton is right and the Web needs to be more like TV. Would the ultimate conclusion of that assumption be less content on the page? I’m not convinced.
It’s interesting. I happen to agree in part with both sentiments: the Web needs to think of itself more like TV and media websites shouldn’t be constrained by a pageview model that forces them to cram 3-4 ads on each page and a flurry of links. But I don’t know if one follows from the other.
Let’s take the TV argument. The web should more like TV in that it should strive to be its own medium. In the same way that TV content evolved away from being stagings of radio plays or shortened movies, the web has to evolve away from being a souped up newspaper or an interactive magazine. Web content has to strive to be different, not to accommodate more pageviews, but to make it more compelling, to make the experience of experiencing content online qualitatively different from that of reading a newspaper or watching a TV show.
For Denton, this means eliminating clutter and making Gawker more “magazine-like,” as Choire would argue. While I agree that these design goals would improve the online reading experience, I don’t think this is how web content becomes more like TV. The only way to do this is to start thinking about the medium and how one creates a compelling reading experience that is impossible to replicate by other sites and unique to medium. While I’m sure Gawker will continue to be successful, I doubt we’re going to see that out of them anytime soon.
Evan Smith of Texas Tribune: 'Journalists Deserve a Living Wage'
Because the Tribune does not receive advertising, Smith said, it relies on “five buckets” of revenue: membership, major donors, foundations, corporate sponsorship, and earned income through events and premium products like newsletters. And, despite what he calls “the Nick Denton legacy” of online news, the Tribune will never pay its writers based on their page views.
“Nobody took a pay cut when they left their jobs to come and work for the Tribune,” Smith said. “One of the benefits of raising enough money to do a real operation was we could pay honest to goodness real journalists a real wage. Journalists deserve a living wage, not to be nickel and dimed on the basis of traffic.”
Inaccurate, and not completely fair to Nick, because Gawker writers got a bonus based on pageviews, their base pay was separate. This became too expensive for Nick and he abandoned it. Now they’re concerned more with unique visitors than pageviews. Obviously if you’re a traffic generating machine, you’re going to be more valuable to the bottom line but saying pay is directly tied to traffic as if they’re being paid per click is disingenuous.
Writers should not paint themselves into the same dilemma ad sellers have. Television may be a medium of scarcity when it comes to available ad time, but if the same number of people see my ad on my laptop monitor that see it on my television monitor, I shouldn’t be charging less for the one on my laptop. The dilution of the value of web traffic in relation to other mediums has a direct correlation to how much money online media outlets have to give to their writers.
For Smith, it’s also easy to knock incentivizing pageviews when your business plan is not tied to them. Ultimately it boils down to what will be more sustainable. You can’t run a profitable news site based on ad revenue without being obsessed with traffic. It’s a game of volume. While I agree with you that Smith is taking an unfair shot at Denton, ultimately what Smith is suggesting is that his business plan allows the Tribune to make decisions, personnel and otherwise, without putting an undue emphasis on traffic, which I believe is a healthier—and perhaps more sustainable—way to run an editorial site.
