06 Jul 09 There’s always another way
I recently read two great pieces of journalism online. One was Matt Taibbi’s scathing account of Goldman Sachs’ role in various financial bubbles, published in Rolling Stone. The other was Michael Lewis’ piece on AIG and how one group there in particular figured large in the insurance giant’s fall. That one appeared in Vanity Fair.
Thing is, I didn’t read either of those articles on their respective content magazine’s website. I read Taibbi’s article on DocStoc (here) and I read Lewis’ report on Scribd (here).
Even as newspapers are in great number considering the return of the Pay Wall, there will always be a solution to find free content. There will always be a free and easy way to access these articles, even if Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair decide not to allow readers to see the entire articles on their websites– which in this case they did. (You’ll see, for example, the URL for the Michael Lewis piece gives a few hundred words of text and then some bullet points summarizing the rest of the article).
It seems that most content providers don’t seem to understand that cease-and-desist letters are not going to cut it. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about print/words, movies/television or music. I can point you to an endless numbers of sites to stream, download and share all sorts of media and content. It is not limited to any one medium or any one company.
Point is: unless there is some brilliant way to implement Web-wide micropayments (and even then, who knows), dropping a Pay Wall or blocking off content simply is not a smart idea.
Brief Update/Addendum: I just saw this on Mark Cuban’s blog (via @rfurlan) and I 100% agree. It doesn’t go against what I’m saying in terms of consumers, but it certainly rounds out the picture from a profit sustainability standpoint. I should also add that one final lens through which to view all this is with Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, and Malcolm Gladwell’s critical review which you can read, free of charge, here.
Tags: docstoc, download, journalism, Media, micropayments, news, newspapers, pay wall, rolling stone, scribd, sharing, streaming, vanity fair
20 May 09 Huffington Post and Popularity Ranking
Today’s Wall Street Journal published a story about the proliferation of “online news providers rank[ing] the top 10 most-read, -emailed or -commented articles on their home page.”
Sure, we’ve all seen them. The New York Times breaks it down by “most emailed,” “most blogged,” “most searched,” and– randomly appended at the end– “most popular movie.”
The BBC’s shows regional results and even tells you some basic information about the flow of web traffic to the BBC News site.
The WSJ article points out that the Web, on the whole, likes to be “instantly quantifiable.” But the author, Carl Bialik, shows how these popularity rankings are public, and can easily create a “positive-feedback loop.”
Which brings me to the Huffington Post. Oh sweet, sweet Huffington Post: you collection of politics, celebrity guest columnists and enormous red links on your homepage.
Matthew Salganik, a Princeton professor, who co-authored a study on popularity in the music world, is quoted in the WSJ as saying:
Deducing merit from popularity “can lead to self-reinforcing snowballs of popularity, which can become decoupled from the underlying reality.” These snowballs can grow much larger than their competitors, leading to winner-take-all markets.
And maybe it doesn’t matter so much if the most-deserving entrant wins, whether it’s Britney Spears ruling pop, or a gossip item leading a list of most-read news articles. “If we view the role of cultural products as giving us something to talk about, then the most important thing might be that everyone sees the same thing and not what that thing is.”
I am not sure whom to blame more: the Salganikian positive-feedback loop or Huffington Post’s readership. But, alas, the top stories on the Huffington Post speak for themself:
Hard-hitting news selected by, well, us
I’ve embedded the live “Most Popular on HuffPost” below. I hope that by the time you’re reading this, you will already have decided who is hotter when soaking wet.
Tags: aggregators, bbc, bialik, embed, huffington post, huffpo, new york times, news, nytimes, popularity, princeton, rankings, reporting, salganik, top stories, traffic, wall street journal, web traffic, wsj
