0
In my last post, I began examining an article from Fortune/CNN about the challenges companies face when venturing into the world of online media. Read on as I discuss the remaining points from the article.
–
Search engine optimization is an option, but a limited one. Sure, you can likely scrounge together some visits and show some growth but you won’t build direct traffic or a direct audience through it. To make matters worse, even long-tail queries—think “daily vitamins for German Shepherds”—can be very competitive. Only Wikipedia has pulled off the trick of building a leading Web property through SEO, and they needed 2% of Google’s total traffic to do it.
I must respectfully disagree with these statements. SEO is an extremely beneficial practice, and I have worked with several clients over the past few years who virtually rely on SEO to drive traffic to their site. A good example of a site that has built a business around good SEO practices is HowStuffWorks. Known for years as one of the most entertaining and authoritative online reference sites, they have worked hard to obtain high rankings in search results for thousands of terms. Search on Google for “wi-fi” or “Bluetooth” to see what I mean. These are obviously very popular and well-discussed topics online, and yet they still manage to have their pages rank within the first few results. This was done entirely through careful SEO practices.
It is worth mentioning, however, that there are a lot of companies out there that will try to get you to pay large amounts of money in order for them to “guarantee” you top ranking in a major search engine. If you are approached by a company like this, run the other way. There is absolutely no way for anyone to guarantee you good rankings in organic search, and in all likelihood, any changes they have you make to your site will actually be detrimental to your ranking rather than helpful. A good SEO consultant will not guarantee result placement, but will make recommendations for site improvements based on industry best practices and a detailed audit of your site.
If you are an established media company, your offline brand probably won’t translate into a large, ready-made online audience. The web is an entirely different medium, and old brands have lots of trouble translating. Just ask the newspapers and magazines how their online brands are doing.
Oh, I don’t have to ask… they’ve told me. I’ve worked with a number of well-known media brands such as Time.com and NYTimes.com, and they’re actually doing quite well. In fact, many newspapers have a better audience online than they do offline. The key, as many digital publications are finding, is personalizing the experience for online readers.
Stealing the competition’s audience doesn’t work online. The two traditional ways of stealing market share – price competition and convenience – don’t work. Media on the web is free and every site is literally one click away. Product is the only way to build an audience. And the product you build has to deliver a unique experience. And that’s no small feat.
Product is the only way to build an audience online; that’s true. However, saying that convenience doesn’t play a part in online competition is simply not true in my opinion. Convenience is often a big part of the experience. For example, there are a number of web-based Twitter clients (Seesmic and Brizzly are two of my favorites). At their core, they all do the same thing: they give you a way to read and post updates to Twitter’s microblogging service. What differentiates one Twitter client from another, though, is their ease of use. How many clicks does it take me to add a new follower? Is there built-in support for posting photos? Whichever program is the easiest to use is the one I will use most often. And when I like something well enough to use often, I tell my friends, and the application’s user base increases. This is the very basis of social media marketing at work.
If, in spite of all of these obstacles, you are successful in building an audience, here’s your reward: low monetization rates. Ad rates online are priced by CPMs (cost per thousand impressions). Your typical news or media site (i.e. not search or ecommerce) probably commands, on average, CPMs of a buck or two — site-wide. If the site is a social network, a forum page or other community offering, that number goes down to $0.15-$0.30. To make any real money, you need to serve A LOT of page views.
…or be able to offer highly targeted content. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, with advanced privacy controls and detailed profiles, can command much higher CPMs than sites where users remain completely anonymous (such as a news portal).
In other words, online is not for the faint of heart. It’s very far from an easy place to build an audience, much less make any real money. Ecommerce and search are the only really proven businesses online – and those have a whole host of other issues that go along with them.
This seems to be a very generalized statement without any numbers to back it up. There are plenty of businesses online that make money and do not fall into the e-commerce or search categories, including the ones I mentioned earlier in this post.
–
In conclusion, let me just say this: My point in analyzing this article was not simply to disagree with all the points the author made, but rather to highlight a number of rather common misconceptions regarding online media, and to help educate our customers and the community at large so that they can make better decisions for their business.
What do you think? Am I completely off the mark here? Or have you, like many of my clients, seen significant success in their online ventures? I’d love to read your stories in the comments.
Back to top