Old News Can Be Good News For Media Sites
from the if-they-recognized-it dept
One strategy we've seen some media sites use over the years for their web properties is to lock up the "archives" and charge for access to it, on the assumption that if people want to see old stories, there must be some reason, for which they'd be willing to spend. Separately, many media properties assume that the only thing that really matters for generating traffic is the "breaking news." There's so much emphasis on "the scoop" and "being first," and very little emphasis on the follow through. It turns out, that may be a pretty big mistake. Chas Edwards highlights how some newspapers are discovering, to their own surprise, that old news can get an awful lot of traffic from social media sharing:Apparently London’s Independent, as it rolled out the Open Graph, learned that several quirky stories from the late 1990s are the most shared stories of the early 2010s. (More data here.) If news publishers are sitting a goldmine of buried archival content, imagine the opportunity for publishers outside the breaking-news category if they can figure out how to resurface those great stories from last month, last year, or a decade ago.This is actually something we've been really interested in lately. We see it happen quite frequently with our own archives. Suddenly, for no clear reason, a story from years ago will become wildly popular on Twitter or Facebook, and we'll get a ton of useful traffic. In fact, we made this point back in January, when we dug into "the numbers" from 2011 and discovered that our most popular post in 2011... was actually from 2010. It will be interesting to see if publishers can start to figure out ways to do more with "old news" rather than just assigning it to the "discarded" pile. I know it's an area that we're planning to explore more deeply in the coming months, so it's interesting to see others thinking along similar lines.
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Filed Under: archives, business models, journalism, paywalls, traffic
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The fact you're encouraging such a landscape kinda makes you anathema to both me and any future offspring.
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Yeah, because a silly comedy movie clearly defines the future.
The fact you're encouraging such a landscape kinda makes you anathema to both me and any future offspring.
I didn't even mention advertising in this article, because I wasn't even talking about advertising. How the hell is encouraging open access to information about "encouraging a landscape" that is akin to Idiocracy?
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My dreams have been shattered!
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Sadly we apes will eventually be replaced by roaches, mold, or robots someday.
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No brainer
They can sell ads for it like they always have. Maybe not the top tier of revenue they want, but a whole lot of something is better than not generating any revenue on old content and whining about no new revenue streams ( or cannibalizing old ones).
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Elections are always a good time to point out that politician X was just as much of a saint/criminal as he or she is now. Reference the recent Ron Paul article, with his supporters linking to articles from more than a decade ago in an effort to prove how consistent he is.
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Old news
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Re: Old news
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Old news
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Time for a paywall to get your old stories!
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Even worse, when the article goes into the archive, all you get when you click on a link is a "404 Page Not Found" No information on how to access the article in archives, or what the article is about, or that it even existed. I guess the 404 page has ads on it, so that's something.
Also, they charge access to the archive articles, but you can access it for free through the local library. I guess they're making a killing selling access to the library.
If anything it just seems like they put a system into place 10 years ago, and are unwilling to change. Of course, they've been firing people left and right as ad revenue has tanked.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot with something that seems like a no brainer.
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Putting our history behind a paywall has, to my mind, some negative implications.
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