Man vs. Machine: Google, AOL and the Future of News

Earlier this month, there was word of Google filing a patent entitled Systems and Methods for Improving for Improving the Ranking of News Articles, which organized and ranked news links partially based on a quality score of the news source. Last week, I came across an article on Pinyadda fromMediaPost AOL Readies Its Robot News-Writing Army, which discussed a similar strategy AOL is implementing with regards to an automated, algorithmic process for picking news stories for the site. These are hardly the first two instances of automated editorial services - The Huffington Post has a very clever way of automating A/B testing for article titles. Editorial boards shifting from man-power to machine powered is coming rapidly and causing a great stir among original content producers. Anybody who has wifi has sure followed the Google-NewsCorp feud over the past several weeks.

While I can understand the frustration of pouring time and resources in to making content and have its value diminish quickly as content is pumped out at break-neck pace all over the web, I think those trying to fight the changes brought about by the Internet by insisting on pay walls and resisting distribution technologies such as Google have the wrong focus. Many journalists are nervous that real-time search may make them extinct, but I believe we will see quality producers who create content strategically for an on-demand world thrive as technologies emerge that help users organize the torrent of information and cherry-pick what is most valuable to them. Where content publishers need to be focusing their efforts is on developing better forms of advertising that align with the content they produce along with better information architectures that help drive user's to valuable advertisements.

For example, as displayed in the graph below, sites such as NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com and HuffingtonPost.com receive collectively receive around 30 million unique visitors per month. This is an awful lot of traffic that is not effectively being monetized because of poor advertising practices and lack of innovation on behalf of the publishers. Take a trip to NYTimes or WashingtonPost and click on the Sports sections. I perused each for about five minutes and was only displayed one sports related advertisement - the rest were for cars and financial services. At the very least, news sites like the Times and Post need to be serving contextually relevant ads to begin monetizing their large amounts of traffic. Imagine if Google's search ads weren't relevant to the search query entered by a user - would they make nearly as much money as they do if this were the case? Of course not.

I will put together another post in the coming weeks digging in deeper to the architectural and contextual failures of online pubs such as the Times and the Post but before I do I would love to hear other's thoughts on advertising you have seen on these sites. What do you think pubs need to do in order to monetize their traffic? Can these sites survive off of advertising alone?