Reuter’s Felix Salmon has an interesting take on the The Daily Mail’s internet success.
The site might be a traffic powerhouse, but the internet is full of high-traffic sites which are worth very little. Traffic, in and of itself, is worth very little, and there’s no indication that readers are willing to pay for Mail Online, or that advertisers are willing to pay much for those readers. (The site’s revenue of $7.2 million is about 0.25% of DMGT’s $2.7 billion total revenue.)
Felix Salmon makes an important point about the web and the fallacy of high traffic – many of the internet’s high traffic sites are of little value.
In falling for this fallacy we’re making the mistake of thinking in old media terms where high newspaper circulation numbers or ratings winning TV programs translated directly into advertising dollars.
That model worked because of restricted inventory. There were a limited number of TV stations or newspapers in our cities and regions which most people relied on for the day’s news and entertainment.
In the internet age, inventory is not a problem. We live in an era awash with information and the old models of restricted supply no longer work.
To make money, we have to add value. We can no longer rely on broadcasting licenses or prominent mastheads supported by classified advertisements and real estate puff pieces.
Rewriting other peoples’ stuff in a way that grabs the attention of search engines is a way of getting fleeting readerships but it isn’t adding any value and, as revenues from online advertising continue to fall, it isn’t the way to make money either.
Whoever figures out how to make money out of online news and journalism will be the Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch of the 21st Century. Right now it doesn’t appear The Daily Mail, or competitors like The Huffington Post, will be those champions.
I agree. I’ve stopped reading news sites which merely repeat the reports written by other news outlets and published a couple of days before. I want original news so I go to the sites that feature deep, original reporting. I’m not interested in ephemeral fluff about celebrities and while shock horror crime should be reported this should not crowd out other news in the feature headlines. I want good reporting to be balanced with deep opinion pieces not carping, unfair opinion articles from writers who are wedded to one ideology or another.
“To make money, we have to add value”. This is very true. High ranking publications in internet search engines may receive a lot of traffic but I am not going to pay to read their articles. When they go behind the paywall I’m sure we will see their readers just shift to another free site.