Online web money-making: dotcom bubble to freemium

[Clinton]

BBC article

I don't think it says anything new - the summary seems to be that "build it and they'll come" doesn't always work - but I thought some might like hearing it anyway.

[Kay]

Hmm, perhaps yesterday was a slow news day. I wish I could get paid by the BBC for writing short pieces of fluff like that.

[bwelford]

Fluff indeed. No wonder the most watched BBC video that same day was Ex-Amish rodeo cowgirl and mother of six.

[Kay]

Now there's a thought. I wonder how easy or difficult it would be to create a 'newsworthy' human-interest type of story, then wait and watch for a slow news day and submit it to the Beeb to help them out. I guess you'd need to set up the right contact(s) first so you could move fast when the time was right.

Anyone done anything like this before?

Would it be worth the effort? I've had links from the major UK broadsheets before but they've never sent much traffic. And anyway, if the traffic isn't the converting type, then what's the point?

I've also had the BBC send tens of thousands of visitors to one of my sites, but they were information seekers (looking for news about a disaster). It was incredible to see the traffic, and of course we did our best to help people, but it created a lot of running about for us and took us away from our core business.

[David S]

I have to say that the BBC piece posted by bwelford was much more interesting that the one Clinton posted, but neither is news.

[grynge]

Not sure about the rest of the world but the "News" here is more about hollywood and sports than real news. The TV news is 30 minutes - 8 minutes of ads which leaves 22 minutes, but the sport, weather and business takes about 12 minutes so we get 3 or 4 peices of toddle, 1 world news story, 1 local feel good peice and thats about it. Unless of course the olympics are on then its 29 minutes of ads and 1 minute of sport.

[Kay]

Good points, grynge. The news industry has changed big-time over the last few years. With so much more available free online, some of the more serious newspaper sites have moved much of their content behind paywalls. Plus there's this huge rise in citizen-journalism to cut costs whilst creating masses of free content. While some amateurs can and do write very well, it squeezes the professionals out of the market and inevitably quality drops.

In the UK, the Telegraph used to be one of the high quality papers. Now we call it the Kissandtellegraph. As you say, there's so much about 'celebs', it swamps the real news. The BBC has also dumbed down considerably over the last few years. I dunno whether they're responding to the demand of a dumbed down audience, simply cutting costs, or what.

Grynge, would you say news in Australia has also dumbed down significantly or has Hollywood and sports always been par for the course?

[grynge]

All but 1 channel here is dumbed down, it may look like I was fluffing the truth but that is actually about correct with any of the major tv networks. The written media is just about the same, to show you exactly how incompetitive it is, the three main tv channels here in Adelaide do a news sharing system, so they take it in turn to hit local news stories, channel 7 sends out its truck 1 week, channel 9 the next week and channel 10 the week after, they all use similar footage just taken at separate intervals, same camera man though. So if the news editor of that week doesn't think its a story it won't be shown on any of the commercial channels.

[grynge]

You would have to think though it is the population not wanting the real news, not that the media doesn't want to show it? If the local commercial channels lost viewers to the non commercial channel showing real news wouldn't they start showing real news again?

[Dave McM]

To be fair, I think this discussion has taken the sound clip Clinton linked to a little out of context. It's billed as part of a series of "essays", so it's by way of "op-ed" analysis rather than news. And it was originally broadcast as a commentary piece on The World At One - the hour-long news and comment programme on BBC Radio 4, their "serious" news and information channel (as opposed to Radio 1 for yoof, Radio 2 for general entertainment, and Radio 3 for highbrow entertainment). So it's aimed at a mainstream audience rather than a technophile one.

Having said that, news content does seem to be heading steadily downhill. The Guardian (left-wing quality newspaper) used to have the world's most visited newspaper website until fairly recently. Then earlier this year it was overtaken by the Daily Mail (right-wing middle-class tabloid - "a newspaper for Stepford wives", is how I describe it). And why? The Mail's own screenshots trumpeting their achievement don't show this, but the right-hand side columns of the website are chock full of trashy celeb news, the sort of stuff which fills up their FeMail section.

The moral of the story is: there's a much bigger audience for "news" that entertains, rather than "news" that matters. It was probably ever thus, but now that there's so much more information readily available, the important news is being drowned out even more by the entertaining stuff.

Grynge's question about it being a matter of what the population want to read is true, up to a point. But the news channels are happy for it to be that way too. It's so much easier to gather celeb news, given that the celebs themselves have an interest in keeping themselves talked about and are pumping out material all the time. It's certainly a much easier option than having to provide sensible analysis about stuff that's actually going to make a difference to people's lives and that has to be researched, especially since no-one's quite sure what that difference is going to be and the news channels don't want to make themselves look stupid by associating themselves with a wrong prediction.