blog.collarity.com

There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogoshere in the past week about whether search engines help or hurt web news properties like the Wall Street Journal, who seem to be wondering out loud about blocking the indexing of their content. Publishers feel too much of their content is being consumed on news search/aggregation sites, effectively cutting them out of the revenue generation loop. The search engines say they are the launching point for a huge percentage of  the publishers’ daily web visitors, increasing the publishers’ ad earnings on every arrival.

With so much pressure on publisher business models to pull out of their current nose dive, it’s understandable that the debate is happening. However, there is no agreement on how the web landscape shifts if media sites like the WSJ pull the indexing plug. The situation is even less clear, now that social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are playing major roles in the daily news routines of the average web surfer.

Collarity believes that media publisher business models could be strengthened if they concentrate on making the most out of every visitor who does arrive at their site from a search engine. The key is audience engagement. The first page view must lead to a second and a third, if publishers hope to thrive online. Publishers must actively engage each visitor (like the classic proactive deli-counter sales person — “what else can I get you today?”) with additional content suggestions and relevant advertising. The trick is, of course, how do you choose which content suggestions and which ads to serve on that initial visit? If it isn’t an intent-driven real-time formula,  based on anonymous site segment actions, it is doomed to failure.

In addition, our experience shows that publishers need to be paying attention to the attention their visitors are paying on sites like Facebook and Twitter. We are working on some new solutions to help publishers in that area — more soon.