Capturing the Cat-Herders

In my last post, I mused philosophical about the segment of media that exists between large media outlets (many of the "Old" variety) and the platforms that enable simple sharing and dissemination of all forms of media - for simplification purposes, the Twitters of the world.

The gap between the publication of "iron-core" original content and simple retweets is filled by cacophony of voices that represent the professional and advanced amateur segments of the blogosphere. These are the folks producing consistent, medium-to-high quality content, often using other media as a starting point or central focus. Generally speaking, this is the "here's my take on this issue" crowd.

The value of this type of media production is the context it provides for larger issues, or the refocusing of those issues for other populations. The context can be subject-based ("what this means for science"), geographically-based ("what this means for western Kentucky"), or demographically-based ("what this means for hemaphroditic cat-herders"). In each case, the original value of the content has been augmented by way of analysis and personalization. It's good stuff.



From the standpoint of the media industry, however, it's a serious problem. People are repurposing content that cost good money to produce and disseminating it to thousands of niche audiences that are hard to find, nearly impossible to market to. Potential advertising revenue is flying out the door and into the ether, newspapers are closing, the proverbial sky is falling.

But the problem isn't that value of content is declining - in fact, I'd argue it's increasing. Instead, media is faced with the gargantuan problem of creating a new system to capture the value of a fast-paced, diffusion-based content ecosystem. From my perspective, there are three things that need to happen in order for advertisers to take advantage of these niche audiences and begin capturing some of the value being created by the landscape of content production.

1) Content Standards - Somehow, some way, we need to create some meta-data standards that allow individual content items to be discovered. This is not, like the AP's failed attempt, a measure to increase ownership and prevent dissemination. It's exactly the opposite - a measure to ensure that the cat-herders can easily find content that's relevant to them, and so the marketers and advertisers can find the cat-herders and make relevant offers that add real value to their lives.

2) New Aggregation Systems - As sources become more abundant and more diffuse, expecting each of these small content publishers to exist as a standalone destination site isn't realistic. We need new aggregation systems that go beyond simple source aggregation (the RSS model) and include the ability to aggregate content by topic, using the meta-data referred to above and more importantly, leveraging the power of the social web to help like-minded users discover relevant content. Think Digg meets AllTop meets a personalized RSS bundle. This is, in some ways, the cable channel model, where shows are packaged according to interests and subjects (Golf Channel, HGTV, Food Network, etc) with one key difference: the content produces aren't subject to those that control the pipes, allowing for much more niche-focused content to be produced and discovered by its audience. The critical mass necessary to support topical programming is orders of magnitude lower on the internet than on television. Getting readers in one place, even if content comes for a thousand of them, will allow more of the value to be captured.

3) Intelligent Ad Networks - Where are the cat-herders today? What are they reading? These are the questions that the next generation of advertising technology will have to answer. Matching static display adds with individual pages or sources is a losing battle and can never achieve the kind of relevance the web demands. The internet is increasingly becoming a narrowcast ecosystem, and trying to apply advertising techniques from the broadcast world is a lost cause - but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Instead of doing demographic surveys and guessing about who might be reading a publication, the increasing specificity of content production is doing the targeting for advertisers. It's no secret who is reading the cat-herder blogs, but the advertisers will have to create new systems to reach them. Following the social media pulse and gathering real-time traffic metrics will be key to helping future advertisers find out exactly where their customers are, when.

This is a complicated market to tap, but the players (there will be many) who help to create solutions for an industry in the midst of disruption will reap vast benefits while at the same time helping both producers and consumers of content.

Defining Quality Content

As the media landscape continues to change and we move away from traditional forms of content like daily newspapers and monthly magazines, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish quality content from the barrage of information that's available everyday.

At Pinyadda, we've made a commitment to present our users with content that's "high-quality" - but like many others, we continue to find it incredibly difficult to define a set of standards for internet content. Before we try to answer that question, let's go back to the beginning:

Used to be there were newspapers - big newspapers. At least one in every city. What they printed was considered fact; it could be reasonably asserted that leads had been followed, investigations had been performed, sources checked, editors consulted. With relatively few exceptions, these papers represented the definitive source of information for businesspeople, laymen, and housewives alike. They print it, you read it. Simple game.

Over time we saw the reach of radio and television extend, but the mechanics remained the same. It took lots of money and smarts to run a station or a channel, and the barriers to entry remained high: formal training, infrastructure, and approval from the media cohort. One could still reasonably assume that these sources met at least some minimum standards of professionalism and journalistic integrity - otherwise they wouldn't be on the air.

Yet once the internet gave everyone the ability to become a publisher, these assurances vanished altogether. Certain old media stalwarts (and some new ones, ProPublica and Politico come to mind) have successfully established brands that serve the purpose of validating the quality of their content. So create a powerful brand, problem solved. Instant legitimacy.

But what about the other 10,000 sites that are producing quality content on a daily basis? The small-to-medium blogs with a couple of writers who focus on local and niche issues, and probably do it better than the big brands - what about them? Here's where it gets tricky.

From our standpoint, there's a very fine line between providing readers with the information they want and maintaining high standards of quality. So we have to establish some benchmarks - a job much easier said than done. There are a few basic metrics:

Traffic:
Unique visitors over time.
Pros: Gives an accurate approximation of how many people read and/or trust a given web property.
Cons: Quantity doesn't necessarily denote quality.

Staff:
Does the source have professional (paid) content staff?
Pros: Professional staff indicates a seriousness of purpose that definitely increases the likelihood of quality content.
Cons: Tough benchmark for many sites to meet.

Frequency of Publication:
How often does the source publish?
Pros: Acknowledges and recognizes obligation to an audience (or perceived audience).
Cons: Publishing poor content every day doesn't make it good content.


None of these are decisive metrics, and none can be used in isolation. Furthermore, each of them ignores the most subjective aspect of the debate: quality is, in many ways, in the eyes of the beholder. Who's to say that the NYTimes is of any higher quality than TMZ? Both have lots of readers, both publish oodles of content, both have full-time staff. And for some readers, TMZ's content might be far more interesting.

We tend to say something along these lines: "Nonsense. The NYTimes is a much higher quality source than TMZ. It's all fact-checked and very serious. TMZ is nothing but unfounded gossip." But is it really true? What about the Op-Ed section? The blogs? Suddenly the two sites seem closer than we thought. The example is a bit of a stretch, but the concept holds.

And what about a well-reasoned, thoughtfully-prepared, and oft-published blog that has little traffic? It might well be the most "quality" source available on a given niche topic, but if no one reads it, who cares? It a blog post falls in the internet forest, does it make a sound? More importantly, should it?

These are hard questions, and ones that have vast implications for the future of media on the internet. Without a way to define legitimacy, the big boys will continue to feel the air sucked out of their advertising revenues, as more and more traffic defects to the little guys. But it's our hope that finding a way to create a set of standards for quality content will raise the bar a little for everyone, creating a media ecosystem where everyone is encouraged to do more with less, not more of less. In other words, finding a way to grant legitimacy to sources who deserve it can both improve margins for those that meet expectations, and encourage others who might be capable of high quality content production to step up to the plate a little sooner.