Poor old Johnny Hartigan begin again

Via the Inquisitr and Andrew Bolt's blog comes the transcript of local News Corp boos John Hartigan's Canutian address to the endless waves of the blogosphere crashing over his sandcastle business.

As Duncan points out in the Inq piece, it's now a tired old cliche for journalists to attack the blogosphere for being unprofessional, as if that's the cause of the problem, when the actual issue is the gutting of advertising revenues from the classified rivers of gold. I almost fell asleep writing that, it's such a hoary chestnut of an argument. So old that journos fall into it like a pair of old slippers.

Hartigan is running the new Murdoch line of browbeating the public into paying for journalism, which goes against centuries of tradition.

I believe people will pay for content if it is:
- Original...
- Exclusive...
- Has the authority
- and is relevant to our audiences

Let's look at these four criteria, especially in the context of successful paywall-funded local online enterprises such as Crikey and the various share trading newsletters. Originality is a given, no arguments there. Exclusivity of content is not so important, in my view. In some ways, putting a paywall around content makes it inherently exclusive of those who don't pay. Does a Crikey or a Marcus Padley need to have scoops from a Hillary Bray insider type to sell subscriptions? Not necessarily, though it helps to build the brand. Authority is also overblown, I think. To me, that word is redolent of an elite class sermonising to faithful devotees, a model that just doesn't work in a media environment where the hoi polloi have as much publishing power online as do the journalists. If you set yourself up as the authority on something, how do you deal with a reader who corrects you in the comments on a story? You're just setting yourself up for a fall. A more successful approach is to collaborate with the readership to get the story right, to be accessible. Finally, the word "relevant" also smacks to me of a lack of connection with the audience. Why not use language that indicates you are listening to your readers directly, instead of paying consultants to find out for you?

Hartigan makes a big song and dance about the integration of digital and print functions in the newsroom. I don't know how truthful that is, but it can't be worse than the poisonous atmosphere between Fairfax Digital and the rump of the old guard at their paper premises. News must look like sweetness and light in comparison.

Hartigan goes on later in the speech to list what News is going to do online to halt the rot:

tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers

The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as
- Where to find the cheapest petrol
- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and
- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day

I see coverage of politics, courts and crime changing dramatically - with less of the adversarial conflict we report now to coverage that gives readers more insight about the issues.

I see changes in the news mix – less of the negative stuff and more content that inspires, surprises and delights readers, more humour, more escapism.

- give them what they need to make decisions
- and equip them to act on those decisions

Very little of this describes actual journalism. As with much of a typical newspaper already these days, it's just public relations and marketing dressed in journalism's still-bloodied hide. The last snippet in particular screams out to me that News is determined to build a new river of gold - or at least pewter - out of cost-per-action and/or affiliate "content", so that instead of relying on classifieds for steady cashflow they will build their revenue streams on the likes of Ben Barren-built truelocal.com.au, which isn't journalism at all. The line between editorial and advertising in such brochureware is shaky at best in print but is functionally non-existent in an online context.

For the last decade or two, newspapers have been stealing shamelessly from the formats of periodical magazines, particularly "lifestyle" mags. Not coincidentally, many of the mags that the News tabloids are aping are owned by ACP, continuing on the battles in days of yore between Murdoch and Packer media properties long past Kerry's death.

It appears to me from the last section of that speech, despite Hartigan's early bluster, that the News Ltd approach is going to continue to be to leave the majority of the serious journalism to the broadsheets, radio and ABC/SBS, with The Australian used less as an instrument of democratic journalistic principles and more of an attack dog to support the editorial staff's rabid political leanings. The Herald-Sun and Daily Telegraph are going to look more and more like bits of ACP magazines stitched together. The front and back pages are going to get more and more shrill in their shouting for eyeballs.

Post 2.0 Web advertising: make it up in volume

For those wondering what I have been doing in the long periods between posts on this blog, I have been spending just about all my time on FanFooty, my original startup which is now over four years old and finally looking like making a go of it. Traffic is projected at about 2 million page impressions per week for the upcoming AFL season, so I have a lot of ad inventory to fill.

I recently switched ad providers from Google AdSense to Platform 9, a division of ninemsn which runs a video ad platform and an auction-based display ad serving system as well. At the start of this year, as many Web publishers will know, CPMs (cost per thousand page impressions, i.e. the amount of money I make from ads per thousand times a page is viewed) went into the toilet in a huge amount of sectors. The Australian sport sector was no different. I look back at my 2007 CPMs and can only feel depressed about the numbers from all the providers I have tried in 2009.

Of course, the simple economics of supply and demand have dictated much of the collapse of CPMs for Web publishers. Supply of ad inventory has increased markedly in recent times, particularly by social media sites who have destroyed entire sectors by flooding them with low quality inventory. Demand has also dried up, as can be evidenced by looking at my own numbers, which were decimated (under the now-archaic meaning of dropping to 10% of their previous levels) at the turn of the year as new quarterly budgets came into effect with far fewer bids for major keywords.

Today was a big day for FanFooty because we turned on our first ad campaign from Betfair, which is our first major direct advertisement sale. It seems every large or small football-related media site in Australia has developed a partnership with one of the new breed of gambling providers, and we are no different.

I was looking at Duncan Riley's site The Inquisitr today, and couldn't help but feel as if I have been missing out. The Inq had seven ad units on its story pages: three from Google, one from Technorati Media and three that pointed to other servers I didn't recognise. Meanwhile, I have been stuck at FanFooty with the AdSense-encouraged three-unit policy since the site was established. Am I the idiot for not getting with the new program? This is what I was thinking: the obvious solution for publishers who are getting crappier CPMs per ad unit is to spam the units as much as the page will allow, and maybe more. The page looks less classy, and readability suffers, but is that what "pros" like Duncan have realised long before deadshits like me?

I'm not sure I want to be like the Fairfaxes of this world. I have blogged here before about their ridiculously high ad rates, though I suspect they haven't got anywhere near their listed CPMs for a while now. The RealFooty home page has seven ad units also, albeit two of them being tiny ones for BigPond, and their story pages have fully 12 units, including three for their own gambling partner, plus a Google box and two other text link ad boxes. Meanwhile, News Ltd's Superfooty home page has five units, all huge, and just four on its story pages, also including one Google unit.

My instinct has always been primarily as a journalist, whereby I have left room for three standard ads on each page and hoped that the ad agencies could deliver enough CPM that I didn't have to worry about it. In these recessionary times, that is probably not enough, and I should be thinking more like a publisher, not an editor. Do I have to hit the corporate carpets and sell sponsorships myself? Would the dinky little units here and there get in the way of the user experience? Would FanFooty cease to be something the fans enjoy if there were a dozen freakin' ad units on every blog entry?

I believe strongly in the distasteful effect of "kipple", the crap that tends to accumulate on a Web site as it ossifies. I do not want to put 12 ads on a page on FanFooty. Any more than three or four starts my eyebrows twitching as I hear the words of Jakob Nielsen, not to mention Strunk & White. The new desperation of large publishing companies spamming their users with ads seems counter-productive in the long term.

Then again, I do need to eat. :(

Gabe Rivera, Superego 2.0

I was watching the excellent Shrink Rap show the other day, the episode with Stephen Fry pouring out his life problems to Pamela Connolly. Like many overachievers, he has major father issues, primary among them being that his father has become the internalised voice of the cultural superego inside his head, telling Stephen that he's never good enough compared to great men of years past, and critiquing every second of his existence. Many of us can relate. Like Stephen, many of us are highly productive and well respected by our colleagues and friends, yet that little voice is always reminding us of our helpless inadequacy when faced with a seemingly impossible series of unfair objectives that are the fiendish creations of our unconscious minds.

I feel like Gabe Rivera, creator of Techmeme, has become that voice inside the heads of many of the high profile technology bloggers of the day. Like Stephen with his forbidding father, these bloggers look to Gabe's site for emotional as well as intellectual approval. By extension this need reaches out to Gabe himself, now that he has admitted that he has been keeping a hand on the algorithmic tiller since 2005.

This Freudian effect has caused major angst lately with many of the so-called A-listers, for various reasons. My mate Duncan Riley has a longstanding feud, with Duncan accusing Gabe of being Mike Arrington's stooge so many times that I don't even need to link to any of them, and Gabe accusing Dunc of making up stories. Robert Scoble has started in on Gabe over the last month with a similarly spiteful campaign to convince him to recognise Scoble's shameless whoring of himself all over Friendfeed and Twitter in Techmeme's algorithms. Now Dave Winer has cussed out Gabe for not allowing him the passing frisson of quasi-parental validation.

In the late-and-not-lamented Tinfinger, I built a site which had a lot of Techmeme-like features, including a news aggregator which used a much less complex algorithm, so I feel I have some small amount of credibility to pass comments on these claims. Before I start, let me say that I like Gabe, and understand a lot of what he has been through, and what's more this blog seems to have a decent amount of memejuice on TM so I haven't gone through the frustration that these A-listers have been experiencing. Thus, please take my comments with the requisite grain of salt.

I like Duncan a lot too, and I want his ventures to succeed, as Dunc well knows. I see similarities between Gabe and Dunc, actually. Both have done marvellous things with limited resources and a hell of a lot of smarts, but my personal opinion is that both have stunted their own potential through not pushing themselves to their own limits - Gabe by not extending his business after his initial breakthrough, and Duncan by staying inside the blogging ghetto and not testing himself with what I would (perhaps uncharitably) call a "true" startup. Duncan knows my feelings on this, and I've said the same to Gabe on multiple occasions. (Then again, that may be Stephen Fry's father talking.)

In any case, Duncan's attacks may or may not have merit. From my knowledge of how algorithms work, I would find it perfectly believable that Gabe did not include any anti-Inquisitr code before Duncan's attacks started, nor consciously exclude Inq stories when he did meddle with the rankings. TechCrunch has authority in aggregators for a good reason, which is that everyone links to it and talks about their stories. The Inq started from zero, and building up links and chatter takes time and effort, which Duncan has put in for countless hours and will have to continue. Even if Arrington did activate his Hypno-Ray 2.0 and order Gabe to block Inq stories as petty revenge, in my opinion it does no good to kick against the system. The currency of this debate is authority, and even if Techmeme doesn't acknowledge the authority of your site, I think you can gain authority in non-numeric terms by being the Big Man and taking the high road. PageRank and clickthroughs are all very well, but respect and dignity of your peers and readers are also valuable commodities.

Scoble's concerns are more complex. His view is that news is happening in increasing frequency on Twitter and FriendFeed, and the fact that Techmeme covers only blogs and the links between them is old hat. Scoble is being completely self-serving, but that's par for the course. He's a marketer, not a journalist. It's part of the job description, and he shouldn't be criticised for it. What about his point, though?

My feeling is that Gabe is right not to pander to the Twitter/FriendFeed mafia. News may very well break on Twitter, but do people really want to open up their faux New York Times to see a headline news report that is only 140 characters long? Or, worse, a breaking issue which you have to comb through 50 one-sentence comments to comprehend? No, for the sort of service Techmeme is, it is correct to stay in the blog and news world, because if TM is to be the replacement for the newspaper frontispiece then each headline has to link to a true work of journalism. No, Robert, it's just not possible to commit a mainstream-consumable act of journalism in a single tweet or FriendFeed comment. Stories that are worth reading take longer than that to be told, and should be told in a longer form which allows a coherent narrative to be constructed - not necessarily by a professional journalist of course, but in a medium which allows for a fully-formed thought to be expressed, not just a whim skimmed off the top of the head. Sure, Techmeme might miss out by five minutes on the breathless pronouncement by Scoble or someone else of the latest Steve Jobs mystery illness, but that's a small price to pay for the quality of the product Gabe wants to put out for the masses.

On Dave Winer's whinge... first, let me clear up a common complaint. Gabe has said on multiple times that news items may appear on Techmeme with no accompanying link item, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one that qualified the original to appear on TM - just that the linking site didn't have enough memejuice to appear itself. Items appearing sans linkage doesn't mean that they've been boosted for nefarious means. Gabe has repeated this arcane piece of algorithmic cruft often enough that I feel that accusations of this sort by A-listers now constitute deliberate obfuscation, as they should know better if they had been paying attention to previous scuffles.

Dave kind of gets the superego effect, judging from later comments in the above-linked FriendFeed discussion, but his reaction is to want to kill part of his own brain. Needless to say, this is not psychically healthy. Building a new Techmeme is not a technically difficult thing to do. I did it, for the most part, and I'm no gun programmer. Half a dozen others did the same thing and got no traction. It is futile at this point, more than at any other time.

After all of that, I have to admit that I don't visit Techmeme any more, and haven't done so consistently for a year or so. I don't find tech news to be relevant to my day, immersed as I am in the sporting niche. For those to whom it is relevant, I don't see that the site has changed all that much since it began. For better or worse, Gabe has made it quite clear that this is the Techmeme we're getting, and he's not prepared to do anything drastic at all to change a winning formula. His intransigence is frustrating for a lot of people, but that's just the way he is, so better to leave him alone and focus on yourselves.

It is perhaps no coincidence that all this Freudian sturm und drang is caused by men fighting over the ownership of the cultural superego, something usually associated with the founding fathers of a society. Arrington is a founding father of Web 2.0, so Duncan is fighting The Man, literally. Scoble and Winer were their own sort of founding fathers in their time, though evidently they are sensitive about their influence waning. Gabe stands in the middle, with his hand ever so slightly guiding the Techmeme tiller, trying to sail to the other side of the teacup. Let us hope he does not succumb to what Sigmund used to call the "primal horde".

The Long-Burning Hack

I was turned on today to the 2009: Year of the Hacker article by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOm by one of Ben Barren's rants, which itself riffs off a Chris Anderson piece for Wired Blogs, which references a Clay Shirky speech, and on and on in curlicues of hyperextension.

The point is that the Time Of Doom Is Upon Us, meaning a bunch of bored techs with more time on their hands, and you know what they say about idle hands. Good movie, woke us up to the potential of poor old Heath Ledger.

Anyway, my thoughts on the matter are coloured by my own experiences, being as they are ahead of the curve in that the recession came for me many years ago, hasn't let up, and has taught me how to burn slowly. All that I'll see of the next recession is lower petrol prices and less parties to wish I'd gone to (or maybe more?).

Tinfinger has been and gone, now mouldering in some squatter's squalid outhouse. FanFooty, while a solid business, pays the hosting bill and no more in non-football months, thus money's too tight to mention, as the old song went. Various little lurks prop up the cashtrickle to something approaching a lifestream.

The point! Yes, the point. My thoughts are that a certain type of hacker, who was only ever working at a startup or corporate for the paycheck, may end up joining the freeware community in the spirit of ESR and such like, but I think Mr Kelleher is poking his silver Supras down the wrong path. For such hackers, much of the motivation for any work they do of their own time may not be to pad their CVs, or to raise their standing in the biz... but to fuck with their former employers. Be that specifically the company that retrenched them, or some other zaibatsu which personifies all they hate about their formerly safe life, revenge is a dish best served like cooled ramen.

Specifically, these spurned spawns of the spluttering economy will have intimate knowledge of just how vulnerable certain companies' revenue streams are, and will be able to come up with ways to use current and future technologies to divert these rivers of gold into others' pockets, even if not their own.

Such labours of hate will not require venture capital backing. Many of them would be better off without it, leaving them free to bend the law to whatever nefarious purpose they feel necessary to undermine the multinationals whose revenue streams they are targeting.

Most of these ventures will be net losses for the economy, too. Like Google advertising being an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on mainstream media sites, these vengeful hackers won't care that they're destroying fattened cash cows whose teats the old companies have spent decades sucking. They will rejoice in turning billion-dollar industries into million-earners. Millionaire factories will be squashed into sectors where a handful of people can make a living at a time.

Why will this happen? Because these people have been inside the old companies, and they hate how they work. They hate the bullshit hierarchies, the Peter Principle, the management gridlock. Geeks have always hated suits, and if there's a way they can control their pet industry to the extent that they can do away with whole swathes of suits, then all the better.

What can the suits do to stop it? They can buy the geeks out early, maybe. That's if they don't wake up one morning to realise that like Russian black ice in a Gibson novel, the virus that the geek ex-employee has left inside the building has already expanded and turned the company into mush.

Me at Google Sydney

Yesterday I spent the day at Google's Sydney office at Darling Park, the guest of the wonderful Mel Ann Chen. I was there to be interviewed by A Current Affair for a story about Google AdSense, with FanFooty being nominated by Google as one of their major publishers in the sport sector. (Just the one photo I'm afraid, they don't allow cameras inside the offices.)

I have heard anecdotally that being featured positively on ACA does wondrous things for your traffic. Here's hoping!

I can has new Web experience

I find myself skimming more and more through my NetVibes these days. Not that I'm losing interest in 2.0, far from it, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot new happening. Maybe I just need to freshen up my blog mix. Nevertheless, TechCrunch delivered today with an interview with Ben Huh, who is now making a living out of a rollup of sites that steal 4chan memes.



You can tell who the journo is in this interview... hint, it's not the dude asking the questions and getting major details wrong. Anyway, there were a couple of key things that I took away from this interview, the main one being that it's that truly Internet-native publishers treat the Internet as a medium all of its own. You can have your Gawker-style blog networks that try too hard to be like the New Yorker. You can have your Hulus which walk the tightrope between Hollywood and Guangdong without ever impressing either the studios or the pirates. Ben seems to get that there is an opportunity to create and/or buy unique media properties which advance the medium... and by the by, engender the kind of "cultural phenomenon" he talks about.

I've had some experience with this myself with FanFooty, which has evolved into a completely different direction that where I thought it was going. These days FanFooty is less like a publication and more like performance art. The live-blogging aspect, combined with live user chat and an intricate series of news update techniques complete with iconic flashes of starbursts, hearts, stars, garbage bins, guns and tombstones, has led to my participation during games being a required part of the process. Where I thought initially that the business was going to run itself after the programming work was done, now I can't visualise FanFooty being successful without someone there at the helm stamping their emotional authority over the user experience.

That's one other aspect that I think Icanhascheezburger shares with FanFooty - the essential goodness of the community, which is a function of how the site has been constructed from the get go. Maybe I'm just turning into a maudlin old man, but I think it's sweet how, once the swearing trolls are banned, the genuine footy fans enjoy themselves so much in an environment where they know they're surrounded by like-minded friends. Much as cat lovers band together, sports fans can achieve a camaraderie and jocularity through online chat that makes the experience fun for not only the community, but also the founder. Many's the time I have found myself laughing along with things that the chat have said, and this is one of the most rewarding parts of running the site. It also warms the cockles of the heart when users thank you unexpectedly. :)

Successful dealings with users are far more pleasing to the soul, in my opinion, which is why I'm still puzzled as to why so many entrepreneurs still focus on business-to-business as their main strategy... sure, you might earn more money that way if the cards fall right, but isn't the main reason you became an entrepreneur was that you hated corporate soullessness and you didn't want to have to kiss the arses of men in suits? Communicating directly with the public should be both the most important and the most soul-nourishing part of a Web start-up.

The substantive bits from Steve Gillmor's TechCrunch articles