BuzzMachine

You must be happy about this trend: The New York Times reported this morning that news organizations are actually starting to embrace linking to other online publications (“Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites“).

I like your focus on local news. I think that is where the biggest value add is created.

I think your WWGD idea is misguided. Keyword search advertising has nothing to do with online news publication, in my opinion. Apples and oranges — keyword search is closely connected to an ecommerce transaction, while online news is not.

My suggestion: do a bit more with the only other area of online advertising (other than keyword search) that works: classified advertising pageviews. A presentation filed by Yahoo! with the SEC earlier this year showed an expected CPM for search page views of $40 and an expected CPM for classified page views of $50. Classified page views actually pay better than search page views, according to Yahoo!

Here is a link to that presentation from Yahoo!:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1011006/000095013408004973/f38938exv99w2.htm

Your focus on local news ties in nicely with classified advertising. There could be an opportunity there for your industry.

While you’re in the process of destroying old institutions and making up new business models, maybe you could kill off that old 1960s six-grade science artifact retread called “The Powerpoint Presentation”. They are facile and dumb down thought.

Now, as for your model, it depends too heavily on linkage. Linkage belongs to a closed society, the society of the bazaar, where relationships and connections and long hours to parse metadata (or huge info dumps to take the place of long f2f hours). It’s only one way to run an economy, and not the modern way. Modern economies have spent centuries trying to free human beings from forced reliance on connections to engage in commerce or consume. You, like other technocommunists, want to collectivize us all again and put us back in the dark ages. It’s ok to have Tupperware Parties and Renaissance Faires and sell through connectivity and linkage, but it can’t be the only type of economy.

The modern economy depends on search, but also freedom from metadata, you don’t need a relationship to find and buy something put at a public price tag, the marketplace instead of the bazaar. The Internet succeeded not because copyleftists like you stripped away the connection between private property, intellectual property, and commerce, but because despite your engineering and collectivist boostering (like Creative Commons), businesses like ebay and amazon were able to get started and thrive. It’s when ebay tried to start layering in “reputations” and too-high threshold costs, and when amazon began to layer in sales ranking that they grew less free. When Facebook changed the news feed to favour linkage-mania recently, they saw a 25 percent or more drop in revenue from APIs.

A creepy thing we already see about local news as a panacea is that all kinds of APIs and aggregator sites are springing up to generically suck local social media and MSM feeds and pipe them into prefabbed templates. No thanks.

I also have to wonder what sort of business model you could possibly mean when you recommend Google to take over the business of telecoms, too. Ugh. And to think that one of the biggest complaints of the geeks about telecoms is that they have no competition (of course they do).