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About Times: The New York Times
Broadens the Focus of its Portal Development |
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21 February 2005 |
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The "whys" of the New York Times' acquisition of About.com
from its magazine-oriented parent Primedia were pegged by
our own Janice McCallum nearly two weeks ago in our weblog
as a good move for Primedia, which never seemed to know how
to get the most out of it. Much of the media twist on this
sale is less than complimentary to the Times, but there's
plenty of method in its purported madness. When you're
stuck between weblogs getting more attention on breaking
news and search engines becoming the "go to" place for
research, it helps to build a business model that looks
more like a general content portal such as Yahoo! than
yesterday's newspapers. There's no better time to expand
your business model than when others can't figure out what
their model is supposed to be. |
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While much
of the mainstream media struggled to make heads or tails of
The New York Times' acquisition of About.com from Primedia
own Senior Analyst
Janice McCallum had much of the "why" of the transaction
outlined
nearly two weeks ago in our weblog. Like Dow Jones and its
recent acquisition of MarketWatch, more pages for ad inventory
was certainly a key factor, as online content from traditional
publishers compete for ad dollars in an ocean of clicks
attracted to quality content in many forms. As Janice pointed
out, when Primedia spun off Sprinks ad-serving to Google and
failed to develop significant synergies with its own online
properties a sale by Primedia seemed to be an eminent
opportunity to generate some cash for other strategic purposes.
Yet eyebrows have been raised at both the price (towards the
bottom of the predicted range) and the purchaser (another
nervous media company buying an overpriced online asset?). Is
the Times picking the right time to pick up About.com?
Beyond a certain point the timing is
moot. During the dot-com bust not too many newspapers were
focusing on becoming multi-purpose portal properties offering
page-by-page destination content available from search engines.
As papers became more online-savvy, much of their focus was on
cutting deals for Web assets that would shore up their core
functions such as classified ads. There was much to do and not
a lot of time in which to do it and learn about it. So let's
cut the Times some slack for tending to its core concerns while
developing some stability to support a wider vision. The real
question is, what's the vision? In this sense, The New York
Times is getting just the kind of destination content that it
needs at a time when the expectations for rich, multi-layered
content are getting stronger in the eyes of online readers.
With billions of ad dollars streaming off
to major search engines and straight news coverage facing more
competition than ever from weblogs and other new sources of
breaking news, the point is being reached when major news sites
are failing to keep up with revenue expectations on a
story-by-story basis. News stories need more content
surrounding them contextually to be different from the next
text-monger and newspapers' lifestyle content needs more
breadth and depth to keep up with major portal providers such
as Yahoo! So it's not just the destination pages that count for
the Times but how the Times needs to act as an aggregator of
general-interest content. As a company that's learning how to
leverage a well-known consumer content brand into a brand that
services its readers in more contexts the breadth and depth of
About.com content gives The New York Times an opportunity to
continue its moves beyond mere news and become a more textured
content brand. Here are a few ways in which the deal works out
pretty well from the purchaser's perspective:
- Content managed with a distributed
editorial voice. About.com has kept one core factor since
its inception: a stable of editorial voices known to readers
who maintain content control and quality for their areas of
topical expertise. This was prescient in its own way,
foretelling the rise of weblog-based subject matter experts -
no surprise that most of About.com's content can be taken in
RSS site feeds, then.. Today's content is more than bylines
or titles, it's a series of trusted individual voices who
build their reputation a click at a time. In taking on
About.com The New York Times gets kind of distributed
editorial authority more in line with the multitude of
independent content producers available on the open Web - all
in a common production and ad management framework.
- Additional content to wrap around
core news. It's not just a story that captures readers
but the supporting content that's available from a source
which can be wrapped around a story. By having a wide range
of subject matter experts maintaining materials The New York
Times winds up with a deep and wide reservoir of content that
can be contextualized with news stories - and which gains
their own ad dollars when clicked through to for details. In
this sense one of About.com's weaknesses - a rather bland
utilitarian wrapping - plays as an asset for content
repackaging, a captive "rich man's Wikipedia" if you will.
- Answer-oriented content. The
editorial focus of About.com materials is not on creating
deathless prose but more on providing practical information
and answers to questions people are likely to be looking for
via search engines. There's still plenty of links out to the
Web from About.com for "in the wild" content, but there's
also plenty of handy tips and outlines of key subject areas,
a buffered approach to link management that gives a chance to
retain clicks on-site before people go off to other sites.
This in-between approach to pulling in content from other Web
sources may be timid by open Web standards, but probably a
good match for a newspaper that's trying to get more leverage
over more subject areas for destination content visits.
It's not surprising that a manager of a
stable of magazine and guide titles such as Primedia would
finally give up on About.com. When you're trying to maintain a
wide range of individual print and online titles appealing to
highly targeted audiences, parallel content on the Web won't do
much to solidify those audiences. But when you're only one
"title" with a wide array of topics servicing an audience in as
many dimensions as possible, About.com becomes a nice fit. In
the meantime online titles are having a hard time surviving as
self-contained destination content sites aimed mostly at
promoting print sales. It's unclear where Primedia goes
from here, but hopefully it's in a direction that takes the
needs of their highly targeted audiences into a more
sophisticated plane of content services. In the meantime,
expect players such as The New York Times to charge ahead with
a broad array of content that will crop up when and where its
readers need it.
-
John Blossom
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