Content Matters

As Google Abandons RSS, Will LinkedIn Fill the Void?

Yesterday was a big day for Twitter. First, it handled the huge traffic burst for the announcement of Pope Francis. But that was only the warmup. The big test came yesterday evening when word came out that Google (GOOG) will shutter Google Reader in July. My Twitter feed quickly lit up with pleadings to Google to keep it alive, and to developers to quickly build a replacement.

Of course, I follow a lot of journalists and bloggers, and RSS feeds have long been their lifeblood. Google Reader for them fills the role that newswires once played. But most people have no idea what RSS is or what it does.

Perhaps MG Siegler of the CrunchFund said it best:

Personally, I rely a lot less on RSS than I did four or five years ago. Then, tools like Google Reader and NetVibes were a critical part of my morning routine, right after checking my email. Today, they’ve largely been replaced in my workflow by Twitter and Flipboard. If there’s something important for me to know, chances are it will show up in my Twitter stream. And Flipboard is perfect for keeping up to date on things I don’t follow as closely, leveraging Twitter lists and a handful of RSS feeds.

For those concerned about replacing Reader, there are a bunch of options. Lifehacker was quick to publish a list of alternative RSS readers.

For non-blogger/journos, you might find Flipboard provides a more compelling interface for keeping up. It’s not a workflow tool in the way that Reader is, but for simply reading, it’s great.

The bigger challenge may come down the road if Google shutters its Feedburner service. Feedburner, founded by current Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and later sold to Google, is the tool most blogs and news services use to push out their RSS feeds for syndication. There have been rumblings for quite a while that Feedburner may soon be shut down. That would set off more of a scramble for a scalable solution to push RSS. But someone will fill the void.

A good candidate to fill both the Reader and syndication gaps could be LinkedIn (LNKD).  The company is rumored to be acquiring mobile news reader Pulse News for between $50 - $100 million. That’s just the latest step in LinkedIn’s move to become more of a content company. The recently launched Influencers Program, added to the LinkedIn Today feed has made its news page much more competitive. And while it could stand improvements, the LinkedIn Endorsements feature helps tag people to skills and interests. Combining the business-focused LinkedIn social graph with a flow of news content could enable a more true interest graph. As GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram notes “this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks.”.

Beyond the news reader side, LinkedIn could immediately gain traction with publishers by launching a Feedburner alternative. An aqui-hire of Feedblitz, Feedity or even IFTTT could position them to pick up the bulk of the RSS syndication market when Google exits.

Journalism and Personal Brands

Less than 24 hours after announcing his intent to part ways with the Daily Beast and launch his own paid blog, Andrew Sullivan announced that he'd already received more than $300,000 in paid subscriptions from nearly 12,000 subscribers:

I wish Andrew Sullivan and the Dish team well in their efforts. As publishers find it more and more difficult to generate strong ad revenues from niche sites, we'll need for models like this one to succeed. And Sullivan has been an early adopter of new models since the early days of blogs.

At the same time, this effort is, no doubt, causing stress for many publishers when they look at the strong brands that their writers are creating. 

From all that I've read, The Dish's separation from the Daily Beast is a friendly one. And, let's face it, Andrew Sullivan had built the Dish brand at the New Republic, Time, the Atlantic, and as an independent blogger, long before he was hired by the Daily Beast. So, there's no debate about who owns the brand. 

But many journalists will build a strong brand, leveraging the traffic and position that a major publisher can provide, and publishers will fear them taking that brand elsewhere.

Well, what else is new? Broadcasters have poached their competitors' top talent for years. The same happens in print. The only difference here is that a twitter account or Facebook followers may seem a more tangible asset than the vague concept of viewers and readers.

Publishers will be tempted to turn to their legal department in an effort to retain ownership of those social media accounts. I'd recommend they don't. The best way to keep your audience will be to continually hire great talent and keep them challenged. The audience doesn't want to follow a publisher. They will choose to follow voices they find compelling.

The challenge for Sullivan and the Dish will be to ensure they remain part of the social conversation around topics, even with the metered ('not a paywall") approach. The real value Andrew has always provided is in creating an environment for intelligent debate. Now he must make sure that debate doesn't only happen behind closed doors.

 

 

Related articles

Andrew Sullivan Declares Independence, Leaves The Beast

Andrew Sullivan raises over $100,000 for ad-free blog in first six hours

Andrew Sullivan Leaving Daily Beast to Start Subscription Web Site

GigaOm Acquires PaidContent Creating Premier Digital Media Brand

Tech blog GigaOm has acquired Content Next Media, parent of PaidContent and related blogs.

Content Next, first acquired by Guardian Media in 2008, has been on the shopping block in recent months, as GMG looks to focus its operations. 

Of all the rumored buyers (including AOL, Vox Media, WebMediaBrands, Dow Jones, SAY Media) this is likely the best possible result, both for readers and the Content Next team.

From the outside, it looks as though the two companies have very similar cultures. Both founded around the same time as independent blogs (by Om Malik and Rafat Ali), GigaOm has been able to remain solo, taking venture funding along the way.

The combined GigaOm - Content Next will be an impressive media company:

• Great editorial - from editors and writers like Staci Kramer, Ernie Sander, Mathew Ingram, Nicole Solis, Om Malik, Erica Ogg and others - will yield great coverage of the digital media and technology space.
• Both companies have great events - including Structure, Structure: Data, Mobilize, PaidContent, PaidContent Entertainment, and more.
• GigaOm has experimented with paid research, led by VP research Michael Wolf, which has the potential to grow further.

With a modest cost structure, the combined company should retain the flexibility and nimbleness to test and adapt in an ever-changing digital media environment. 

Congratulations to both companies. I look forward to seeing what comes next.

The Verge Offers a Compelling Vision for Online News

To much anticipation, consumer tech blog The Verge launched yesteday. The Verge is the newest site in the newly named Vox Media stable, joining SB Nation, and is led by Joshua Topolsky and much of his editorial team from Engadget along with publisher Marty Moe.

Engadget, of course, was the leading gadget blog on the web (and, at one time was the top overall blog in terms of traffic). Josh and much of the Engadget team left as AOL closely integrated the blog into the Huffington Post organization.

SB Nation had already made a name for itself through its dual focus on great editorial content and a heavy emphasis on its technology platform. In fact, their mantra, under CEO Jim Bankoff, was Always Be Coding, not the typical fare you’d expect at a media company. And they are bringing that technology focus, along with an emphasis on local, social, real-time news to the new site as well.

I think the Verge is well-positioned for success in this market. Others have commented on their fresh-looking UI. I agree, but design can be copied by others (and other sites, like Newser, have created similarly compelling visual designs). I see two critical factors that position The Verge for success:

Posts built on top of Structured data. Blogs are just blogs – a bunch of articles you can browse or search for. But The Verge starts out with a structured database of products and layers its articles on top of that. This provides a number of benefits:

• Great product pages. Take a look at the page for the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch. It’s got specs, reviews, photos, a video and an easy comparison engine.
• Better navigation – The Verge offers faceted filtering, so you can find stories on digital camers from Canon, Nikon and Panasonic, costing under $200 and with a review score of 6 or higher. The filtering is a bit quirky right now, but I expect they’ll resolve those bugs quickly.
• Easy new product development. It would be incredibly easy for The Verge to launch spin-off products - like sponsored mobile apps ranking the best products by category, or to offer up APIs to shopping sites. For every top 10 list you can imagine, they could easily pop out an app or microsite.
• Better SEO for the publisher – blog posts have a short shelf life, but detailed product pages can live for a long time.

The other key feature that The Verge has incorporated from SB Nation is the concept of Story Streams. Similar to the experimental Google Living Stories, Story Streams are designed to allow the reader to follow a story over time. A new reader can read the full story, while someone who’s been following the story can dip in for a quick update. Writers can update posts anywhere within a story, and those updates can be pushed out to readers. Unlike most editorial articles where additional data shows up at the end of the story, with Story Streams, you’ll typically see the newest information at the top, with links to prior updates.

Looking at the Story Stream for the Amazon Kindle Fire, there are 12 updates, beginning with rumors of the new Kindle in late September, and ending with a gallery of images from last week.

The consumer technology space is a crowded one, and The Verge will not have an easy time leapfrogging the existing players. But they've got all the ingredients to make it happen.

And for online media companies looking for ways to drive revenues and create new products, they could do a lot worse than looking at The Verge's use of editorial on top of structured data as a model.

 

Why AOL – HuffPo is a Smart Deal

The big media news this morning was the AOL (AOL) acquisition of the Huffington Post. HuffPo had long been considered the diamond of the alternative media world. The only online newspaper site with more traffic than HuffPo is NYTimes.com.

Many argue that it may be too little, too late for AOL, but I’m not so sure. Content may not be King (platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter have proven that), but traffic can still be monetized.  By adding HuffPo, along with Engadget and TechCrunch, AOL positions itself strongly in the upper and middle segments in terms of quality content, while it already covers the lower end with its Seed platform.

The acquisition strengthens their position in local news, augmenting their existing Patch platform. And, HuffPo gives AOL much greater potential reach for Wow, it’s daily deal/Groupon clone. And the large AOL  sales force should be able to generate much higher revenues from the Huffington Post.

Key to the deal is Arianna, who will bring a clear voice to their disparate content properties. As Felix Salmon writes:

It’s smart, and bold, to put Arianna in charge of all AOL’s editorial content, since she is one of the precious few people who has managed to create a mass-market general-interest online publication which isn’t bland and which has an instantly identifiable personality. That’s a rare skill and one which AOL desperately needs to apply to its broad yet inchoate suite of websites.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis notes:

Content alone isn’t enough for Aol. It has content. Lots. What HuffPo and Arianna bring is a new cultural understanding of media that is built around the value of curation, the power of peers, the link economy, passion as an asset, and celebrity as a currency.

Yet analysts remain cautious about AOL. Macquarie’s Ben Schachter advises clients to “wait on the sidelines”, while Clayton Moran at the Benchmark Company notes that the $315m price tag is “more than 40% of the $802 million in cash that AOL had on hand at the end of last year. The acquisition price is a bit of a stretch.”

There are really only two major online content companies left – AOL and Yahoo. With this acquisition, AOL takes a big step forward.  As Keith Rabois points out, with this acquisition, AOL becomes a more attractive acquirer for startups and entrepreneurs than Yahoo.

As newspapers experiment with moving content behind the paywall, it creates additional opportunity for free news sites. With a mix of topical, political and local content, AOL is positioning itself to fill any void. Of course, the proof will come in the months that follow. Will authors look to be paid? Will Patch integrate nicely with HuffPo? Lots of questions yet to be resolved, but this is a smart deal and it has a good chance for success.

 

Seeking Alpha to Pay Contributors, Share Usage Statistics

Seeking Alpha this weekend announced three new initiatives relating to its contributors.

The initiative that has gotten the most attention is that they will begin to share revenue with contributors, at a rate of $10 per thousand page views. The revenue share comes at a cost, however. Only posts that are exclusive to Seeking Alpha are eligible for the revenue share, and contributors must grant Seeking Alpha an exclusive license to use that content in perpetuity in any way that it wishes. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon addresses that issue in great detail on his blog, so I won't dig into it in great depth here, only to say that for most professional bloggers, who syndicate their content via Seeking Alpha, this will not be an attractive option.

Second, they've announced a revamp in their "leader boards", now providing more granular rankings, showing the most popular bloggers by category, rather than the old leader board which provided overall rankings by number of followers.

Third, and perhaps most significant for most contributors, is that they have begun to post actual page view counts for their contributors. For example, in the Internet category, the Alacra Pulse Check blog was the 4th most viewed source for the past 90 days, generating 33,100 page views.

While the revenue share will likely appeal only to a small subset of Seeking Alpha bloggers (primarily those who post only on SAI today), gaining some visibility into usage is important to all of us. Unlike some aggregators, who post only a snippet from a story (our own Alacra Pulse, for example), Seeking Alpha includes the full text of each post on its site. That's good for Seeking Alpha (and probably for the reader) but it leaves publishers in the dark as to how their content is being used.

Publishers and bloggers typically syndicate their content to Seeking Alpha to drive brand awareness, since there's little reason for users to click back to the native site. By providing usage stats, Seeking Alpha has begun to quantify for publishers the value of that brand awareness.

While providing exclusive content to Seeking Alpha doesn't make sense for Alacra today, gaining visibility into usage is a big improvement on the site and the most important of the new features in my opinion.

Morningstar Acquires Footnoted.org blog

Morningstar (NASD:MORN) has acquired Footnoted.org, the blog-based financial research service that reads through footnotes of SEC filings, spotlighting the items that companies prefer investors not see.

Footnoted also posts its "worst footnote of the year" each year - for 2009, the "winner" was Chesapeake Energy (NYSE:CHK) which spent more than $12 million to purchase its CEO's antique map collection.

Last year, Footnoted introduced Footnoted Pro, a service geared towards hedge funds and institutional investors.

Congratulations to Footnoted.org founder Michelle Leder, who has tirelessly read through more filings in the past seven years than most analysts do in a lifetime. Following the acquisition, Michelle will continue to run Footnoted under its new parent.

Update: Some insights from Michelle on the acquisition, posted at Footnoted.org.

Alacra Pulse named SIIA CODiE Finalist in 3 Categories

The Software & Information Industry Association has just posted the finalists for the content division CODiE Awards and Alacra Pulse has been named a finalist in three categories:

• Best Social Media Aggregation Service
• Best Online Business Information Service
• Best Online News Service

The CODiE award winners will be selected according to the votes of SIIA members and will be announced at a special Information Industry Summit dinner to be held January 26, 2010. Finalists were selected by a panel of judges who carefully reviewed each nominated product.

The past year has been an exciting one for Alacra, having launched the free version of Alacra Pulse in the spring, followed by the professional version released this fall. In addition to the customers who have integrated Alacra Pulse inside the enterprise, Fidelity has featured Street Pulse in its just-released Stock Research Center. We have also partnered with American Lawyer Media to bring Pulse to the legal market.

In addition to Street PUlse (analyst and key blogger comments about companies), the Pulse platform now includes Deal PUlse (intelligence on M&A deals and rumours), Weak Pulse (distressed company events) and the just-introduced Chief Pulse, which features comments by corporate CEO, CFO, President, Division heads and other leaders.

Our clients tell us that Alacra Pulse is helping them address two distinct needs:

1. Idea generation: give me a reason to call my client or prospect; and
2. Current awareness: keep me from looking dumb in front of a client by not knowing key information

According to our clients, the differentiators between Pulse and traditional news & information services are:

• Curation: identification of the key blogs and news sites for trusted information
• Events: rather than every mention of a company, highlighting those events with business impact (M&A, credit downgrades, restructuring) and links to commentary from key opinion leaders
• Tagging: improved precision over keyword-based searches
• Human oversight to ensure maximum quality

We're currently working on a series of enhancements which will be rolled out shortly after the New Year. In the meantime, to learn more about Alacra Pulse, please contact our sales team or drop me a note.

John Byrne on the Future of News Media

Via Peter Kafka's MediaMemo (All Things D), comes a concise view of the state of the news media market from John Byrne, whose last day as Executive Editor of BusinessWeek is today.

And while many have weighed in on that topic, Byrne's comments carry a lot of weight. Not only has he watched the value of BusinessWeek plummet, culminating in its sale to Bloomberg for less than $5 million, Byrne has been an innovator among his peers in exploring new media and models. Among non-tech publishers, he was an early adopter and avid user of Twitter (@JohnAByrne), while overseeing the BusinessWeek.com website. Between stints at BW, he served as editor-in-chief for Fast Company. There are few "old media" journalists with a better understanding of alternative media than he.

OK, now to his comments, captured on MediaMemo:

I have three fundamental beliefs that inform my thinking:

1) Print advertising will never come back. There are just too many options for advertisers today and too much pressure on rates. Sadly, success in print will be measured in single-digit declines, forever.

2) Online advertising will never offset those declines nor save print. There’s far too much competition online and far too much available inventory; and

3) Users will not pay for content, unless they’re convinced it has immediate and tangible value. Very little journalism meets that standard today. Do we really need 57 versions of a story on Bernie Madoff pleading guilty?

Not that different from what's been written here and elsewhere, but well-said and from someone worth listening to.

Alacra Pulse Adds Twitter, Social Media apps

We’ve just added two exciting new social media features to Alacra Pulse. These new services are designed to help users track and share information that is of interest to them.

 

1.  Tweet This is a customized Twitter integration. By clicking the Tweet This button, a draft “tweet” is automatically created, including a short snippet from the specific business event. The user may edit the tweet before posting to their Twitter account.

 

Tweet This has an added twist: integration with the popular StockTwits service. If you are a StockTwits participant, your tweets will automatically be assigned the “$ticker” for the company the Pulse event is describing, so your tweet will automatically flow through to StockTwits.

 

For those unfamiliar with StockTwits, it’s a Twitter-based community of more than 70,000 users, largely active traders. To join, you can simply follow @StockTwits. There’s more information on the StockTwits page.

 

2. Share This is a plugin that allows users to automatically post stories to social media applications like Facebook or LinkedIn, as well as social bookmarking applications including Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon and others. With a single click, users can post a story to any of more than fifty different social media applications

 

Alacra Pulse is gaining a strong following among users of business and financial information. The first application on the Pulse platform, Street Pulse, at http://pulse.alacra.com, is a completely free website that aggregates content from traditional and alternative media, identifying comments on companies by sell-side, industry and credit analysts, plus a carefully-selected group of reputable bloggers. Street Pulse answers the question “What do key opinion leaders have to say about Company X today?”

 

To stay on top of the latest business events, you may also follow Alacra Pulse on Twitter.