People Are Promiscuous In Their News Sources
from the good-for-them dept
One of the defenses that people often put up for newspapers' dislike towards Google News is that newspapers don't want "drop in" visitors. Instead, they want people who specifically read The Local Paper Times, or whatever, rather than randomdude23 who shows up from across the internet to read one story. So they want people who are going to go straight to their site, stick around and read many different pages. After all, this is exactly how newspapers used to work. Most people would subscribe to one, possibly two, local newspapers and then read a good portion of it (potentially, cover to cover). Unfortunately, however, that's not quite how people consume news these days. A new study shows that people are rather promiscuous in their news consumption. They constantly divide their attention among many different news brands. This shouldn't be surprising, considering how many news options people have these days, though it should also ease the worries of those that believe people get all their news from one source and therefore need to be "protected" from bias at that source. This "news promiscuity" is also a reason why news providers should go out of their way to cater to the needs of their readers, as it likely means that they're constantly reshuffling their "news portfolio." Therefore, doing things like making your content tougher to access -- as the NY Times just did with the Freakonomics RSS feed -- is only an invitation to lose readers to a more friendly source that knows it needs to keep its readers' attention.
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Filed Under: newspapers, sources
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yep
How these people even get paid for ads is beyond me, since almost nobody in their right mind even looks at ads as well even assuming that they aren't blocked....which makes me question why people even put up such ads.
Reminds me of an article someone did a while ago where they showed a snapshot of a news site with and without ads (I think it was cnn.com)...and it looked GREAT without ads, and with them it was just a horrible jumble of navigation.
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Re: yep
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Ironic!
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Critical thinking
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Re: Critical thinking
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Protection from Bias
Okay, but how many of those sources are owned by Rupert Murdoch?
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Re: Protection from Bias
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Gotta monetize the content, baby! =|
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brought to you by firefox, adblock+, and flashblock
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