With the new effort by newspaper folks who are unable to come up with a business model to blame news aggregators with big time executives from media companies insisting that aggregators "steal" from them by sending them traffic, it's time to brush away that myth. Take, for example, the excellent tech/social media blog ReadWriteWeb, who recently had an article about Eric Schmidt's predictions for what the web will look like in five years. Soon afterwards, the Huffington Post "aggregated" that story and posted the opening on its own site with a link to the full article. For over a year now, we've been hearing mainstream publications complain about this sort of thing by the HuffPo, with the NYTimes digital boss Martin Nisenholtz complaining about this activity just last week.
But, of course, all this sort of activity does is bring in tons of traffic. The Huffington Post gets an awful lot of traffic and a link from the site drives traffic. Marshall Kirkpatrick, from RWW, noted that the single HuffPo link drove 10,000 page views in just four hours, and basically begged HuffPo to "steal" more content like that. Indeed, it's still really difficult to understand why mainstream publications are so up in arms over other sites helping to promote their articles and send them traffic -- even to the point of looking to pass laws to stop such activity.
The topic of this post is sponsored by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author and not of IBM.
Drivers in the United States are faced with a constant barrage of traffic signs, lights and signals all meant to navigate them safely through the sea of cars, pedestrians and bicycles without incident. Furthermore, US drivers are faced with an increasing array of laws that prohibit a multitude of things like speaking on the cell phone while driving, even though studies have shown that roads are not necessarily safer. Red light cameras have been installed under the guise of making intersections "safer," even though, like the cell phone bans, study after study has shown that these cameras do little more than provide a revenue stream for the cities that employ them. The problem with using signs and fines to enforce driving behavior is that they usually attack the symptoms of bad driving, rather than the bad driving itself. After all, playing video games while driving has always been a bad idea, even before it was explicitly forbidden by law. Similarly, by teaching drivers to constantly monitor their speed and look out for red lights, they are preoccupied with the wrong things -- they should be watching the road and traffic around them instead.
Instead of trying to micromanage every aspect of safe driving with signs, signals and laws, a better approach would be to utilize what should be the smartest part of the car -- the driver. Just like a poorly designed door needs a sign to tell you whether or not to "push" or "pull" it, a poorly designed intersection needs to tell you when to stop or go. So, a better way to design an intersection seems counterintuitive: reduce the number of signs and signals. Back in 2003, in the Dutch town of Drachten, traffic engineer Hans Monderman replaced red light intersections with traffic roundabouts with reduced signage. Moving through the intersection, there are almost no signals or signs to direct the traffic at all. As a result, drivers, pedestrians and cyclists pay more heed to the actual traffic patterns within the circle. So, rather than blindly following traffic signals, they proceed much more carefully and make eye contact with each other as they make their way through the intersection. Traffic flows better now; gridlock is a rarity. Most importantly, six years after the improvements, Drachten is safer -- prior to the roundabout, there were over eight accidents per year, after the roundabout was installed and traffic signs and signals removed, less than two. By making traffic seem more chaotic, it is actually made safer.
Of course, any new approach has its doubters -- after all, intersections in Asia are infamously chaotic:
However, upon closer inspection, this seemingly chaotic traffic pattern actually works surprisingly well. Pedestrians, cyclists, cars and buses all coexist in relative chaotic harmony. With the addition on one simple rule, like a roundabout, it could possibly work even better -- but, to try and control everything with traffic signals would definitely disrupt the flow. As our cities and towns get more and more congested, embracing this concept of "shared space" will become increasingly important. After all, traffic improvements aren't just good for cars -- they make cities more livable for pedestrians and cyclists too. Elsewhere, according to Wired, when the town of West Palm Beach converted "several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings."
Recently, to celebrate 50 years of automobile safety improvements, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a 2009 Chevy Malibu with a 1959 Chevy Bel Air. The results were impressive; the theoretical occupants of the 2009 vehicle would be able to walk away relatively unscathed compared to their unfortunate cohorts in the Bel Air. However, although modern autos do a great job of protecting vehicle occupants in case of an accident, a smart city with well-designed traffic systems could help to avoid such accidents in the first place.
With so much effort put towards new laws banning mobile phone use while driving, and installing speed cameras and redlight cameras, you would think that places that were quite aggressive in doing so would see a decrease in the number of auto injuries. After all, isn't that the point of all of this? The UK has been particularly aggressive in such efforts, but as Jeff Nolan alerts us, a new report out in the UK suggests that (despite the gov't's earlier claims) injury accidents have actually increased over time. The government has now been forced to admit that the stats it had been pumping out (which showed a decrease) were faulty, and that the real number of accidents may be as much as three times as high as what it had been reporting. This only came about after the British Medical Journal looked at hospital admission records of those injured in car crashes, and saw the numbers went up as these new efforts were put in place in the UK. We're all for safer driving, but the claims that these measures lead to safer driving aren't supported by the data.
from the that's-not-going-to-work-too-well... dept
We've already discussed how delusional it is to believe that 10 to 15% of online newspaper readers will suddenly convert to paying for online news content, but the numbers may be even worse than that. Jeff Sonderman points us to Alan Mutter discussing a report that suggests newspapers are vastly overcounting their online audiences:
In "nearly every market" included in a study of 118 newspapers of every size in every part of the country, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive found that publishers on average report the number of unique visitors to their websites is 1.3 times larger than the population of their respective communities -- and fully 10 times greater than their print circulation.
Those numbers are not just moderately overstated. "They are magnificently incorrect," said Harmon
And that's a massive problem. If they're already expecting 10 to 15% of that population to pay, and it turns out that the real population is a lot smaller and a smaller percentage signs up to pay, the numbers that those in the industry are throwing around concerning paywalls are going to not just be bad, but they're going to be downright embarrassing.
On top of this, that same study noted that newspapers don't seem to realize how little of their actual traffic is from loyal visitors, which tend to only represent about 25% of the actual traffic. And, just because someone's a loyal visitor, it doesn't mean they'll pay. This leaves newspapers in a seriously bad spot when it comes to doing any sort of prediction on how a paywall will work:
You don't really know how many unique visitors you have.
You have to guess at the percentage of loyal visitors who will be amenable to paying for content.
You have to guess the price loyal visitors might pay.
You have to estimate not only how much web traffic you will lose but also how far your ad revenues will tumble in response to the almost certain decline in page views.
It's like watching a train wreck in motion. I'm hopeful that most newspaper execs actually have some inkling of this -- which is why we've heard mostly talk, and seen so little action, on paywalls.
A media consultant, Arnon Mishkin, has a post up at Paid Content supposedly about The Fallacy Of The Link Economy, where he suggests that those of us (he links to us at Techdirt, for example) who are insisting that aggregators aren't a problem and that news sites should be happy about getting linked to, are wrong. But he seems to have gotten the basic argument wrong. He seems to think we're saying that the all you have to do is get linked to, and you should be happy.
But that's not what we're saying.
The link is a vote of confidence, but it's just a start. From there, you then need to actually do something with that link. Mishkin dismisses the value of the link by noting that most people who visit those aggregator sites don't click through. That's not news. That's the way it's always been, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there. On this, I can speak from personal experience. Over the years, we never worked that hard at building our own traffic (we never built a business that depended on traffic), but our traffic kept growing. Any time we were linked to from larger sites, some people clicked through, but we always knew it was a small fraction of the overall traffic to that originator site. But, so what? It's still new traffic that wouldn't have found us otherwise. On top of that, we knew that most of that traffic would visit us just that one time and not think to come back -- but again, that's fine. Because what did happen is that we started to build up our reputation.
So, no, getting a single site to link to you isn't that meaningful, and won't drive that much traffic initially (or even repeat traffic), but as you build up your reputation, and get linked multiple times in multiple places, and then build up credibility based on your content and your community then people start to come back. So, getting linked from a certain site once is meaningless. But as we would get linked multiple times, we'd start to notice that then our traffic would increase. It was a case of that other site helping introduce others to us, not because of a single link, but the combination of being linked to multiple times, along with having good content and good discussions -- and then people would realize that it was worth visting us regularly (or adding us to their RSS reader or whatever).
It's an ongoing process, but the fact that most people don't click through on a single aggregator link is meaningless. Those people wouldn't have seen the story anyway, but it may help build up the brand of the original site. And, I can assure you, over time, if you keep providing quality, that pays off.
The problem here is that Mishkin and others seem to think the value is in the single atomic story. It's not and never has been. Being unable to view the larger picture and the overall process misses the point. It's not the link alone that has value or the story alone that has value, but the overall process of building a community.
Zachary Seward over at the Nieman Lab is revealing more of the AP's "top secret" plan to figure out this darn web thing. Following the plan to hold back some content from its members, the latest installment is focused on trying to attack Wikipedia's search dominance with its own SEO play: creating "landing pages" designed to be the definitive destinations on certain topics, with the idea of using inbound links from partners newspaper sites to goose the Google juice and shoot them to the top of the list.
Now, as a first pass, this is actually not a bad idea. Creating compelling topic pages that become the main source for people to go to is a good strategy. The problem is that it's just not that easy. A bunch of other sites have tried to do the same thing and have failed miserably. Many of these are startups, obviously, but even Google itself tried to do something similar with its Google Knol offering, and that's been a massive disappointment. And it has the inside scoop on how to get good PageRank.
Even worse, as Felix Salmon points out, the AP seems to think that these pages should be autogenerated! Yes, the AP seems to think the way to take on Wikipedia is with a computer spitting out spam SEO-trap pages. Wow. The biggest asset (and yes, it's a huge asset) that the AP has is the wealth of knowledge in the heads of all of its reporters. They could actually create some very useful definitive content pages... but instead they're going to hand it over to computers to autogenerate? Talk about missing the point...
There's an absolutely huge business out there of folks trying to get more traffic from Google, called Search Engine Optimization. It's a big deal. Traffic to your website is the lifeblood of most internet business models, and so any way to get more traffic is a good thing. Except if you're in the newspaper business for some reason. Lately we keep seeing odd stories of newspaper business folks complaining about the fact that Google sends them traffic. The latest? Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, who called Google a "digital vampire" claiming that it's "sucking the blood" out of the newspaper industry (found via Mathew Ingram). He then goes on to suggest that at least some of this is the newspapers' own fault for giving "Google's fangs a great place to bite."
So, uh, Mr. Hinton, here's a suggestion: there's a little thing called robots.txt. You can block Google from indexing your websites. Then everyone's happy, right? That stops the bloodflow right there.
Except, perhaps the real issues is that, as everyone in every other business seems to recognize, traffic is important, and it's up to the website receiving that traffic to capitalize on it. So, either Hinton doesn't know this, or he's simply lying. Neither one makes Dow Jones look particularly smart.
It seems that some folks are beginning to explore a rather important topic: the value of certain types of links. In the past, people generally assumed that all web traffic was effectively equal, and no matter how you got it, it didn't much matter. But it's clear that's not really true. For example, some people note that traffic from a site such as Digg is often not very "useful" traffic, because people come, see the one page, do nothing else, and never come back (this isn't entirely true in our experience, but it's mostly true). And, of course, there are newspapers who claim the same thing is true about Google News -- even to the point that some are suggesting that, even if it brings in less traffic, newspapers should block Google from scraping them so that visitors have to find those news sites via other means.
Along those lines, Fred Wilson has started exploring the value of links from different places, with a focus on "passed" or "earned" links -- basically links that someone "passed on" rather than were found via a search engine. The hypothesis was that such "passed links" were more valuable, and from a conceptual level it makes some amount of sense. If someone you know or trust sends you to a link, you're more likely to click and pay attention to that link. Fred does some investigating of this, with a limited amount of data, and isn't quite sure it's true (from what he's seen), though he admits that the data is limited.
I think this is definitely an important subject for websites to investigate -- but I find the initial suggestion (blocking one source because the "value" of those visitors is low) to be quite silly and backwards. That's deciding that because a certain type of user isn't worth that much, you should ignore them all together. I would think the smarter means would be to simply treat those visitors differently, and focus on recognizing where they come from, and then looking to provide value based on that fact. You won't capture everyone, but you can certainly do a better job of funneling people in a certain direction based on where they're coming from and what they're likely looking for based on that information. It's not something that we do here, but it's about to be added to the "things to do" queue.
A former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter, now writing for Paid Content, seems to take some glee in reporting that traffic to the Seattle P-I's website is off 20% since the decision to lay off most of the staff and go web only. But, actually, it seems like a pretty good result. Editorial staff was cut by 80% down to just 20 people. Support staff is basically gone entirely. And then all the printing and delivery expenses are gone as well. To basically cut all that expense and still retain 80% of the traffic? That seems phenomenal. If anything, it validates the decision.
Yesterday was the news that social networking and blogs had become more popular than email; today, word comes that Facebook has become the most significant source of traffic for a number of big web sites. It's overtaken Google for some sites, even with just a third of the unique visitors of the search behemoth. But, as paidContent points out, Facebook needs to figure out how to translate this traffic-generation power into revenues as a part of its bigger overall search for a monetization strategy. An issue persists for the likes of Google, too, though: as social networks start to become more powerful sources of traffic, will advertisers shift more of their dollars to them, and away from search-based keywords?
Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
There's a famous saying by John Gilmore, that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." However, that saying may apply equally to other "damage" beyond censorship -- and that includes spying, slow connections and many other things. In fact, with it being considered somewhat common knowledge that US intelligence agencies frequently tap into internet traffic coming through the US from elsewhere, more and more countries are working hard to make sure their internet traffic need not travel through the US at all. It's not just about the spying -- though, that is a part of it.
It's also about a basic competitive advantage. Since the internet has become such an important infrastructure concern, relying on a separate country to make sure that infrastructure remains solvent (especially when that country has actively promoted policies that seem to hinder investment in that infrastructure) doesn't make much sense. So, while the US gov't argues over side issues like net neutrality, other countries are making sure that whatever the US does with its internet policy doesn't impact their ability to make use of a global information network. One of these days, US politicians are going to wake up and realize that while they were arguing over net neutrality and policies concerning telcos and cable companies, other countries built out much stronger internet infrastructure that will allow their economies to profit, while we start playing catchup.
Over the years, we've had a number of posts about studies showing that red-light cameras tend to increase the number of accidents, even as cities that install them claim that they're doing so for safety reasons. The problem appears to be that red-light cameras cause more people to slam on the brakes at the last second, leading to more rear-ender collisions. Plenty of studies have shown that if you really want safer intersections, the solution is rather simple: increase the length of time for yellow lights and include a pause after a light turns red before the cross-traffic signal turns green. Some cities already do this, but many do not. A big part of the problem is that red-light cameras are big money makers for municipalities, who share the revenue with the makers of the cameras -- who have every incentive in the world to set the traffic lights to encourage more violations, rather than fewer. To give proof to the lie that municipalities are installing red-light cameras for safety reasons, the National Motorists Association is now offering $10,000 to cities (found via The Agitator) if it can't reduce by 50% the number of red-light violations using regular traffic engineering. They're only looking to do this at camera-enforced intersections that still have high numbers of violations. Of course, if the NMA can show such a reduction, the city would then be required to remove its red-light camera systems. What are the chances any city takes the NMA up on this challenge?
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The topic of this post is sponsored by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM 
