Finance Matters

Archive for April 8th, 2010

Courtesy of Foster Kamer at the Village Voice, we get to read Nick Denton’s monthly letter to his Gawker Media editorial corps.

In it, Nick explains how to win in the brutally competive online news and content business.  (Gawker Media is big, profitable, and growing rapidly–the latter being a trait shared by almost no mainstream media organizations.)

Don’t like what Nick’s saying?  Think it’s too lowbrow? Then you should probably go work for Bloomberg or Reuters (two of the only news organizations on earth that have a sustainable business model, another being FOX News).

Don’t care what Nick’s saying?  Then you’re like 99.9% of other people.  One of the biggest mistakes media people make, after all, is to assume that everyone else finds their industry as endlessly fascinating as they do.  Not surprisingly, that’s one lesson Nick highlights.

(As a primer for those who aren’t familiar with Gawker, most of those weird names are names of Gawker Media blogs.)

Enjoy!

Here, belatedly, is an editorial review for March. Most sites are on the up. And a particularly good month for Gawker, Kotaku, Jalopnik and Deadspin. But let’s focus on the individual stories.

The stories that hit the Big Board in the office are usually pretty
well packaged; but there are still so many that could make it and
don’t because the headline is too bloggy, too insidery, too clever,
too complicated or too opaque.

It’s tragic: a few minutes of thought about the headline and a bit of
maturity could save that story you just sweated over.

Here are the Top 100 ranked by new visitors followed by some observations.

1. Scandal sells. Deadspin’s outrageous Tiger texts and Gawker’s
Peaches pics both hit the top ten. And Kotaku’s knife attack story was
pretty dramatic. The staples of old yellow journalism are the staples
of the new yellow journalism: sex; crime; and, even better, sex crime.
Remember how Pulitzer got his start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

2. The pseudo-exclusive. We can take ownership of a story even if it
isn’t a strict exclusive. In case of both Tiger and Peaches, other
sites (the porn star’s site and Reddit, respectively) carried the
original material. But we added context and packaged the stories up.
(See Choire Sicha’s piece on The Gawker Exclusive: How the Internet
Works, but I can’t find it on the web.)

3. Drama. Another in the obvious department: readers respond to drama.
New guy Sam Smith’s story about the rally-winning $500 Craigslist car
is a perfect example. Triumph over adversity. No wonder Hollywood’s
trying to buy the story.

4. Visuals. I know most of you are writers. But images can’t be an
afterthought. Of the top ten stories, five were photo-driven and
another two were based on video clips. If you can get an image or a
document to support a story — or even make the story support the
image — the package has way more chance.

5. Explainers. When remotely possible turn news into explanation.
Straight how-to and why stories — such as Kotaku’s excellent
Farmville guide — obviously resonate. But you can turn a news story
into an explainer, as Lux did with the sexting scandals. And sometimes
you can turn a mediocre news story into something that passes for
instant reference simply by removing a verb. e.g. Mark Zuckerberg,
Teen Hacker instead Mark Zuckerberg Accused of Hacking Accounts.
Imagine you’re writing a headline for a magazine (one with tight
deadlines) rather than a newspaper.

6. Don’t rubbish the story in the headline. Did that Prius really run
away? Does Facebook really promote syphilis? When examining a claim,
even a dubious claim, don’t dismiss with a skeptical headline before
getting to your main argument. Because nobody will get to your main
argument. You might as well not bother. Questions-as-headlines are a
no-no in newspapers. On the web they work rather well. You set up the
mystery — and explain it after the link. Some analysis shows a good
question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation mark at
the end of much the same headline. (More here: http://is.gd/aYKhn)

7. Parody. What’s missing from the upper reaches of this list? Any
headlines laden with irony or parody. You might think it’s funny to
mock the tentative style of the New York Times. XXX XXX Makes Us Sad,
Angry. For regular readers it’s a worn-out cliche; the in-joke is
impenetrable to new readers; and, as Remy jokes, these are the
headlines that make me “angry, comma, angry.” If you want to indulge
yourself with Onion-style headlines, work for the Onion.

8. Inside baseball. This note is for the geek sites in particular. We
write for consumers, not people in “the industry.” So don’t refer to
Zynga when you can talk about the makers of Farmville, for instance.
But, actually, this rule applies also to other sites such as Jezebel.
Great story today about how Good Housekeeping photoshopped Michelle
Obama’s face. But leave out the magazine’s name from the headline.
Michelle Obama Gets a Photoshop Facelift would have been better.
People actually know and care about Michelle Obama. Only media
insiders care that much which magazine it was.

——————————————————————————

Now some of you are probably bridling. You think the best-performing
headlines on this chart are flat and boring., you can inject a bit of
attitude into even the most web-friendly of headlines. Ray Wert has a
few tips on that. But, yes, this exercise does take a lot of the fun
out of the headlines. I can only console you with this: the more
people that come through the headline, the more people will appreciate
your wit in the piece itself.

Anyone else with observations, pitch right in!

Nick

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See Also:

• More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About The Economics Of The Online News Business — A TWEETIFESTO
• The Truth About Investigative Journalism (A Tweetifesto)
• CNN Implodes

The March U.S. search share numbers are out.  Here are the key points:

• Google dropped nearly half a point to 65% (unusual)
• Yahoo (freakishly) gained a tenth of a point (irrelevant)
• Bing continues to scratch and claw higher, gaining 2 tenths to 11.7%.  Bing is buying a lot of this share through toolbar and other traffic deals, so don’t go nuts extrapolating.

Bottom line?  One month does not a trend make, but…

• Google’s share gains have stalled
• Bing continues to nibble away.
• Yahoo (generally) continues to slide
• Everyone else is irrelevant

Here’s JP Morgan’s Imran Khan with the details…

ComScore released March 2010 core search volume and market share data for the US. We note that this is only one data point and is not necessarily predictive of 1Q performance. Following are the data highlights.

• According to the data, total US core search volume increased 7.6% Y/Y in March, below the 10.4% growth in February. The total growth in 1Q decelerated to 10.1% Y/Y from 4Q’s 15.8% Y/Y growth.

• Google domestic core search market share was 65.1% in March, down from 65.5% in February. Google grew March core search volume by 10.1% Y/Y, slightly below 14.3% growth in February. Google domestic core search volume growth of 13.6% Y/Y in 1Q is below 4Q’s 19.9% Y/Y increase.

• Yahoo! domestic core search market share rose to 16.9% in March from 16.8% in February. Yahoo! March core search volume decreased by 11.4% Y/Y, a deceleration from down 9.8% growth in February. Yahoo!’s 1Q domestic core search volume decline of 10.0% Y/Y trails 4Q’s 0.5% Y/Y decline.

• Microsoft sites domestic core search market share increased to 11.7% in March from 11.5% in February. Microsoft sites grew March core search volume by 51.3% Y/Y, down from 55.4% Y/Y growth in February. Microsoft sites domestic core search volume was up 52.0% Y/Y in 1Q, ahead of 41.9% Y/Y growth in 4Q.

• Ask Network domestic core search market share increased slightly to 3.8% in March from 3.7% in February. Ask grew March core search volume by 8.5% Y/Y, up from 0.7% Y/Y growth in February. Ask Network domestic core search volume was up by 8.0% Y/Y in 1Q vs. 8.8% Y/Y growth in 4Q.

• AOL March domestic core search market share stayed flat at 2.5%. AOL March core search volume declined by 28.2% Y/Y vs. a 29.3% Y/Y decline in February. AOL domestic core search volume was down 28.4% Y/Y in 1Q vs. a 15.5% decline in 4Q.

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See Also:

• Bing, Revisited: Still Toast (But Slightly Less Burnt)
• CHART OF THE DAY: Bing’s Impossible Dream
• One Thing Bing Isn’t Doing: Killing Google

We’ve solved 17-year-old Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy‘s penis problem.

Or rather, a senior project manager from Missouri named John Spyers has.

He’s the guy who submitted the winning entry to our first annual Solve Chatroulette’s Penis Problem And Help It Make Billions And Billions Contest. 

(A quick recap: Chatroulette’s penis problem is that according to one study, of the approximately 3.9 million people who visited Chatroulette in February, about 507,000 of them were “perverts” — men using the site without the pants on, doing things to themselves.These pantsless perverts not only make Chatroulette a less than pleasant experience for the other 87% of users, they also reduce Chatroulette’s chances of becoming a profitable, brand-advertising supported site.)

John’s ingenious solution was for Chatroulette to “utilize a facial recognition scan or brief eye tracking scan before making connections.”

Per the contest’s rules, John put together a fantastic presentation demonstrating how his solution would work. (Go check it out >) In it, John explains:

“Not one of the people I’ve encountered displaying their wares on Chatroulette shows their face. So, utilize a facial recognition scan or brief eye tracking scan before making connections. If there’s no facial recognition, then pixelate teh image and prompt to accept cam feed.”

For winning the contest, John gets to have his resume posted here for all our hiring readers out there and have us send it to Andrey and pair of VCs we happen to know have interest in investing in Chatroulette.

So! Here’s John’s resume:

Click here to see John’s winning entry >

And see our next seven favorite entries:

• When a user is reported for obscene behavior, take their snap shot and post it to a “rogue’s gallery.”
• Repeal and replace Chatroulette’s current “report” feature.
• Create a sister site to Chatroulette, Rawchatroulette.
• Recruit site admins who are already dead inside.
• Allow users to tag and document offenders so administrators can deal with them..
• Add a “bang” button users can click to disqualify obscene users for 5 minutes.
• Bonus for style: Yet another facial recognition entry. (But this one is from Argentina)

Vote For Your Favorite

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In China, the heat is being turned up on local governments, which have been characterized as the SIVs of the country’s financial bubble.

Local governments are saddled with huge debts, and are desperate for the real estate bubble to continue feeding the beast.

As such, we’re not surprised to see stories like this, from ShanghaiDaily.com:

THE mayor of a southeast China city committed suicide yesterday by jumping from a government building.

Officials in Fujian Province confirmed Zhang Guosheng’s early-morning death.

Zhang, the mayor of Putian, jumped about 8:30am after he scrambled out of a toilet window on the fifth floor, according to a statement released by the information office of the city yesterday afternoon.

He died later in hospital.

Here’s what makes this story remarkable. ShanghaiDaily describes this as a trend:

More than 20 suicides have been reported among China’s officials since 2009.Their deaths have fueled speculation they were “sacrifices” to prevent investigations of other corrupt officials.

Zhen Lifu, 51, a senior political adviser in Jiangmen City, of south China’s Guangdong Province, was found dead after hanging himself near his home on March 20.

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APPLE SCREWS ADOBE AGAIN: New iPhone developer agreement bans the use of Adobe’s forthcoming Flash-to-iPhone app compiler. This as Apple increasingly convinces the media industry to move away from Flash video, which doesn’t work on the iPhone and iPad.

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