I suspect that we’re only in the very early days of seeing how this is going to disrupt just about every media organization built on the idea of hosting a website and selling ads, including highly socially-attuned ones like the Huffington Post. HuffPo is built on the idea that when stories are shared on Twitter or Facebook, that will drive traffic back to huffingtonpost.com, where it can then monetize that traffic by selling it to advertisers. But in the future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.
That was actually the original idea behind Buzzfeed — it would help brands create viral content which would then spread across the web. And then, somehow, buzzfeed.com became a destination site in its own right, which can and will make a lot of money by hosting and selling advertising. The old models still work. But the new, more distributed models are I think much more powerful. They’re great for brands, which just want to reach consumers directly, whatever the best way of doing that might be. But for content creators like Rupert Murdoch, they’re much scarier. Because when something goes viral, you don’t own it any more — it belongs to everyone, and no one.
When, oh, when can I steal your forthcoming (e)book, "How to Become Famous and Wealthy in Journalism Without Much Thought or Insight Just By Hyping A Lot of Ephemeral Bull Hype--And You Can Too!"
'Cause I would totally gleep that & republish under my own name. Parts of it would probably go viral. You're welcome.
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 25 Jan 2012 at 11:30 AM
What old media (and Edward) seem to miss is that something fairly subtle and powerful goes on with reblogging. As long as people link back to you and don't reblog your entire post (still not a cool thing to do), every reblog and retweet is free advertising for two reasons: 1) incoming links boost your article's search engine rank bringing you new customers and 2) because people do care about sources. Why? Because where there's one noteworthy thing, there might be another or dozens. That creates repeat customers.
Web readers navigate content like fishermen in a river. They'll keep fishing upstream toward the source content until they find a rich enough fishing spot. The way to "beat" rebloggers is to make your original content the richest with juicy details and valuable perspective so that readers come back to your fishing hole.
#2 Posted by Stephen Jones, CJR on Thu 26 Jan 2012 at 07:14 PM