As traditional media companies experiment toward a Web business model that would support the traditional high-end journalism they produce, it’s interesting to eyeball two timely examples of companies that think content is a good bet for making money on the Web. One is AOL. The other is Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst. Common threads? Both AOL and Kutcher want to deliver people the sort of content they want, right to where they are – search and social networks. They also both blur the line between traditional content and advertising. Both have obvious journalistic difficulties in terms of being lessons for news companies, but it’s worth looking at them for clues. Kutcher is interviewed in Fast Company this month. Kutcher’s company, Katalyst, makes, among other video content, funny, silly short videos for the Web series Katalyst HQ and injects product placements into them. (Hot Pockets, anyone?) He described his company to the magazine as, “a merger of three industries. A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.” AOL, according to the Wall Street Journal, is wagering on mass production of metrics-driven content by an army of freelancers who get paid based on content popularity to revive it after Time Warner spins it off. “Content is the one area on the Web that hasn’t seen the full potential,” Chief Executive Time Armstrong told the Journal. What content AOL creates will be based on search metrics and other data that tell AOL a.) what are people looking for and b.) what sponsors are looking to buy. Some of the pieces that get done will be advertorials. While it won’t be the first mass content play of its type, some folks think AOL’s access to massive amounts of data about its users will give it an edge when it comes to choosing what content to produce.
So what’s to learn for old media? Newsrooms likely shouldn’t use their Web analytics to pick search friendly story topics and then work with advertisers to generate advertorial content to fill news sections. Nor are they likely to send photo journalists into the street with Flip cams to record pranks that involve bodily fluids. But newspaper companies, maybe outside of the paper’s main brand, could be using their metrics and search analysis, using the paper’s marketing engine, and working with advertisers to create high-utility advertorial content (print special advertising sections have done this for a long time). And this sort of revenue stream could support the newsrooms, the way non-news programming supported network television news. The core nugget is using the search analytics and other tools that give insight into the behavior and Web habitat of potential audiences to drive content development for these sections in way some traditional media companies have yet to do.
UPDATE: Here’s a savage critique of the AOL plan from the folks at Slate. Though the critique isn’t founded on the metrics-based content development concept, rather, “…it’s what the company will likely do with search data—publish quick, vapid posts that do little to advance any hot story and instead feed readers a collection of factoids gathered from other places.”
Tags: advertising, marketing, metrics, newspapers, seo, social media
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