The abandonment of traditional media in favour of the Internet has continued to gather momentum with the revelation that online is now the third highest news source in America, knocking newspapers down to fourth.
The latest industry figures show that 61 per cent of Americans now rely on the Internet as a primary source of their daily news fix. This places it third in the US market, behind local news television stations (78%) and national TV outlets (71%). This reflects the growing worldwide trend for having news on demand, in near real-time and completely free.
The Internet has become a major new battleground for many industries – new and old. News being one of the most significant of these. As access has widened, speeds have improved and costs have (proportionally) lowered, traditional offline businesses have struggled to cope with the shifting demands and monetising opportunities online. Within the media, this has led to a significant lowering in the consumption of printed content.
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Online hubs have risen to prominence recently. Offering single pages of information, albeit largely advertorial (no matter how convert), they allow for a free exchange of ideas and advice. But they also allow you to stream numerous sources into one convenient place, providing a plethora of opportunities for information gatherers and producers.
If you look at most current hub pages, there’s a fair chance that they’ll be outwardly informative but also feature links to external sites – ordinarily as part of an extensive SEO link building strategy. However, hubs are more than just an opportunity to sell your wares; they provide the next leap in online communities.
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The movement towards paying for your online news appears to be gathering pace. Rupert Murdoch appears to have completely ignored how content online is distributed and decided that it’s time for his News Corporation sites to start charging.
The assertion that quality, unique content is something worth paying for is not wholly incorrect. If reporters have spent a good deal of time and resources unearthing a news story that nobody else is covering, then there will be demand and you should expect to pay a fee. However, these cases are rare.
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In discussion with Channel 4 news, Financial Times editor Lionel Barber suggested that online news sources ought to start charging for their services rather than simply doling them out for free.
The core of his argument appears to be well summarised in this single statement: “We thought that as news organisations we could put our material out on aggregators like Google, attract a big audience and sell advertising on the back of it. In fact what we should have said is: ‘No, information actually has a price – it’s valuable and therefore we should charge for it.”
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According to a new study conducted by Cornell University, highlighted by Search Engine Watch, traditional media sources are still first with the news; surprisingly beating blogs by an average of 2.5 hours. So whilst the immediacy of Twitter has caused serious groundswells in the halls of the major news outlets, it appears that speed isn’t being translated to blogs as yet.
Journalists may be restricted to reporting news that they can unequivocally confirm; however, due to the breadth of their research and reporting power they are still able to get to the stories first. Whilst the newswire may be slowly fading out, it clearly maintains a high level of importance in how soon and how accurate our news is.
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The MPs may not be having the best of times with the current expenses scandals, which appear to be shadowing them throughout the halls of Westminster; but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case for for everyone.
The big winner out of all of this appears to be the online media outlets who are reporting the news, most notably The Telegraph. Hitwise today announced that the Telegraph has received 1 in every 756 UK page views over the past week.
That is quite a staggering statistic, particularly when you consider the diversity of pages that people search for and the number of competitors they have for the limelight. With a 23.64% share of all the search terms associated with ‘MPs Expenses’ it isn’t exactly a monopoly (in fact it represents a drop a little over 7% from the previous week), but it certainly shows that someone at the Telegraph is doing their homework when it comes to SEO.
Although it should be noted that this isn’t the first time that The Telegraph have made the headlines rather than writing them in recent days. Last week it was reported that they pulled in 75,000 visitors a day from social media. This is primarily down to their strong presence on Twitter; however, with it accounting for 8% of their total visits, something is certainly working.
Once again though this ably highlights the need to have content that is relevant to the stories of the moment, have an expert writing team and generate a strong social media presence.
