After reading an outstanding, well-crafted think piece on what makes great content, I asked, “What wise old sage wrote this thesis?” Although it was posted to an SEO blog, it should be required reading for any creator looking to get their head around content in the digital age.

His name is Ed Fry. He’s 17. You could learn a lot from him.

The tip of the spear, sort of speak, for News Corp., will be UK's The Times and the Sunday Times publications. The company is moving ahead with a paywall strategy that rewards print subscribers with free online access. The rest will fork over about $3 a week for access come June. Will be interesting to see if they have better luck than Newsday.

The Times and the Sunday Times will form the vanguard of parent company News Corp.'s subscription plans for general news, as the U.K. newspapers move behind a paywall for the first time in June.

News International Ltd., News Corp.'s European division, said Friday the newspapers will launch separate Web sites in early May to replace the existing Times Online site. The two new sites will be available for a free trial period to registered customers, but from June will charge £1 ($1.48) for a day's access or £2 for a week. Payment will give customers access to both sites ...

News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, who said in a letter to employees last month that the company is "instituting fair pricing for digital journalism," has argued that news publishers should charge for content online that for years they have been giving away for free. The issue took on greater significance during the economic slump as advertising revenue dried up.

WSJ.com

Nice recap on b2bmemes.com that Google is finally looking into the keyword-stuffed garbage content that continually outranks decent original content on SERPs. Now what you consider a content farm is open for debate, but the examples pointed out in my June, 20, 2009 post -- Google ... Put a Stop to Keyword News shows examples of search results we can all do without.

Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS

Ray Kinsella never built a Web site.  And if he did, it wouldn’t rank in Google.

“Build it and they will come” may work for metaphysically-powered baseball fields in the heart of Iowa, but it comes up short when growing a web audience.

 
The nice hockey-stick growth chart was not driven by content, but by one man's mission
to take it directly to the people, who would care most about it.

Recently, I had two conversations with people looking to grow their niche web audiences. And both discussions centered on the fact that … building a better web site alone isn’t good enough anymore. We add original, aggregated or UG content, develop web tools, stream live and archived video and then some. We do so in hopes this will make us the envy of other media properties and the destination of choice for users.

The problem is, “the era of destination sites is over,” according to Dina Kaplan, co-founder of blip.tv. “The future of content … is that it needs to be distributed and distributed everywhere.”

What she’s saying is you need to target the audience that cares about your content, and then stick it right under their nose in all the places they congregate. Adding it to your site reaches the people who already know about you. Your future though, is dependent on the people who would love your content, but haven’t heard about it yet.

Reaching them, will likely require some combination of SEO, RSS, embeds, widgets, social networking or subscription newsletters. For more on this, see my Speed Dating Series: 7 Users You Should Meet.

Part 1 -- Ms. Cut-to-the-Chase, The Informer

Part II -- Mr. I. Need-Validation, Wally Joiner

Part III -- Mrs. Old School, Lady Go Go, Client No. 7

But for one man, it was something even simpler than that.

Meet Alan Jacobsen, founder of TweenTribune.com, a site that provides teachers with compelling tween-appropriate content  that can be used for interactive reading and writing assignments. Jacobsen’s idea seems like a pretty good one, but for the first six months it went nowhere. He tried to convince print and broadcast media partners to help promote and distribute his content. The polite response was, it didn’t exactly fit their target market.

So what did he do? He took it straight to the consumer and started e-mailing teachers one at a time.

That’s when he started to gain traction. Teachers who registered liked the site, and more importantly, so did their students.  “My kids are really excited about it,” wrote one science teacher, “their vacation started today and I've already received 10 e-mails from kids who signed up … on a day off.”

They recommended it to other teachers, who gave testimonials, which Jacobsen used to convince more teachers to try it. And now he’s had his first taste of success with week-over-week traffic growth for 12 consecutive weeks (see chart above).

The lesson Jacobsen learned -- one we can all benefit from -- is that we can’t expect users to find our great content just by adding it to our site. We can’t expect other properties to promote and distribute our content without a documented traffic- or revenue-based incentive.

But we can make it easier to find our content offsite, in the gathering places where our most likely users come together. And when we find them, suggest and encourage them to recommend it to their friends and colleagues.

Because nowadays, the “most trusted source in news” isn't CNN, Fox News or even Yahoo.  It’s your neighbor, your friend, your sister, your co-worker. These are the people whose invites stop you in your tracks to say, “Hey, what did [insert name] send me?”

Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

"Content is the one area on the Web that hasn't seen the full potential. Hopefully, we will spark a revolution of people doing content at a different scale," says [AOL's] Mr. [Tim] Armstrong, a former advertising executive at Google.

AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors.

wsj.com

As more of AOL's content play is revealed, it appears that Tim Armstrong's strategy is focused on leveraging actionable data from search and ad sales to create pre-sponsored content channels via low-cost freelancers and an editing staff directed at least in part by algorithms. Yes, it sounds a little '1984,' but the one discussion we should not have is, "Should this or shouldn't this be?"  The fact of the matter is ... it is.

And even if we don't agree with the entire approach, there are elements of this plan that could allow traditional media companies to add more value to their web content that, as of yet, has not been able to replace the declining revenue of its offline properties. 

Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

What do marketing guys know about digital content?

They didn't go to J-school. They didn't work on their college newspaper. They probably don't even own an AP Style Guide.

Then why did I leave today's ICSC (Internet Content Syndication Council) Summit thinking, "Sheesh, these marketing guys from IBM and DuPont have a pretty good content strategy."

Take Gary Spangler, e-marketing manager at DuPont.

He sees content as his opportunity to forge a direct relationship with his target audience. He says he's done renting that relationship via pre-roll and banner ad. He's focused on creating content that is compelling, useful and leverages the expertise that his company has to build an ongoing relationship with those users.

He talks in laboratory terms like "testing, measuring, catalysts," but he says his methodical scientific approach to content has paid dividends and it started with a small series of videos called "DuPont Science Stories."

"Advertising is about invitation, not interruption," says Spangler. "We have subject matter experts who can be new voices for DuPont."

And he's talking about spotlighting a dorky guy in a lab coat (of course he used RocketBoom's Amanda Congdon for his first effort). What about us media properties with underused experts like meteorologists, doctors, athletes, financial analysts, columnists, or even staff members who can share their expertise?

You want to stand out, take a page from the marketers. Develop the unique searchable content in your own backyard. It's not easily duplicated by AP or Reuters. And even if it is, it won't be delivered with the style and personality of your local talent. 

Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS

When I returned from SMX East '09 this week, I asked myself -- what's the one quote I heard that stuck with me?

There were several contenders including CNN.com SEO guru Topher Kohan's "don't ever ask Google to figure something out that you can specify yourself." (General paraphrase there, I wasn't taking notes at the time.)

There was Danny Sullivan's "you guys suck" reference to Google, Yahoo and Bing representatives regarding lack of official press releases. (Although fun, it doesn't provide me much actionable insight.)

But I think my favorite was this gem from Ben Huh, Cheezburger Network CEO:

"Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity, but reward simplicity."

-- Ben Huh, Cheezburger Network CEO

That got me thinking, as new technologies are developed for our sites, are we asking the simple questions like "Does the user get it? Need it? Use it?" I've worked on media sites for going on 10 years, and I've seen my share of bells and whistles, but often they’re deployed with little regard for the user.  

In fact, I was present for the mother of all poorly envisioned technologies, the Cue Cat, which served as a shining example of a technology that evoked the trifecta of "huh?" "why?" and "I'll pass."

Because weather is a prominent feature of most broadcast web sites on which I work, it was like a stick in the eye when I saw an entirely different angle on relevant weather coverage that left me asking, “Who doesn’t need that?”  It included the required technologies, but only as a means to an end, not as the centerpiece of the offering. It focused on one idea, a simple universal need that rivals toothpaste or toilet paper. The site, listed on Rand Fishkin's review of "single-purpose homepages", immediately struck a chord with me.

UmbrellaToday.com delivers the one piece of weather information I need every day, offers it to me in multiple ways (web, sms, e-mail) and allows me to decide when and how often I get it. Oh, it offers one more very important thing ... nothing else.

So when it comes to the choice between Ben Huh's “admiration of complexity” vs. the “reward of simplicity” ... this concept exemplifies a keen combination that favors the later. And it prompts the knee-slapping question, "Damn, why didn't I think of that?”

Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS

Anyone who knows me, knows I live and die with the Red Sox, which means I also live and die with Red Sox coverage. And therefore every time I'm jammed into an 11-page slideshow to read a playoff preview for my favorite team ... a little piece of me dies.

Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography / Flickr

And it sparks questions like:

+ Why is this story taking so long to load?
+ Why can't I scan this article and separate what I know from what I don't?
+ Why do I need to wait for a new photo and page to reload with each new paragraph?
+ Wait a minute ... why I am clicking through a slideshow in the first place?

The answer is: The publisher that created this piece was not thinking about me or any other reader for that matter. They were thinking like Homer Simpson does about a donut -- "Mmmm ... 11 pageviews. (drooling noise) 11x the ad impressions ... mmmm."

Well the post below is a bang-on take of how some sites have become gluttons for ad impressions and pageviews at the expense of the user and the advertiser. I agree a story that features a one-graph lead to another site's story stinks (see my previous post "Google, Put A Stop To Keyword News). On the other hand, I do think top-10 lists and photo galleries have value when they're created to inform or entertain the user. But when they're generated solely to pump up metrics and ad impressions ... not so much. Shelby Bonnie blames the CPM, but we need to take some responsibility as well.

At some point, publishers decide that if all clients care about is impressions, then OK, we’ll give them impressions. The output is an industry that overproduces shallow, superficial, commoditized impressions. Why do we have so many bad sites that republish the same junky content–content that’s often made by machines or $1-per-post contractors? Why do sites intentionally try to get us to turn lots of pages with tons of top 10 lists, photo galleries, or single-paragraph summaries of someone else’s story?

The ironic kicker to this systematic approach to pumping out low-grade pageviews and ad impressions is that it punishes the two groups of people that sites are desperate to please -- users and advertisers. When an advertiser pays for an impression, there's a reasonable assumption that the impression will 1) be seen when the page loads and 2) the user will likely spend more than 1 second on that page. And for those consuming this type of content, are they likely to return for a second helping of this? I doubt it.

To me, this approach treats users and advertisers as disposable commodities that need to be replaced once they discover the limited value in the content or ad presentation. But there is an alternative -- accept the tradeoff of lower metrics/impressions for a user that shows more loyalty and is more engaged by well-crafted content that ... wait for it, here it comes ... that displays an ad users are more inclined to click on.  After all, isn't that what users and advertisers really wanted in the first place? 

I think it's time we started measuring the actions and behaviors that our customers and clients value -- and build content that drives those metrics. But for right now, I gotta go -- I'm only two-thirds of the way clicking through my Red Sox playoff preview.