Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

I’ve been reluctant to write more about publishers issues
with monetization having recently written pieces here, here, here and here but the
recent spotlight cast by Rupurt Murdoch on Google’s traffic and sympathetic follow up pieces by respected writers like Tom Foremski and Michael Arrington have now boiled me over.

Having spent the better part of a decade optimizing and
monetizing both natural and paid search traffic on a daily basis I want to
directly address the two memes now gaining velocity. One is that search traffic is
“low quality.”  The other is that
publishers should leave Google and form a Bing “collective.” Both concepts are
ludicrous.

The Quality of Search
Traffic:

Search traffic is inarguably the best traffic that exists on
the web for monetization because of the recovery or discovery goals that are
expressed in the query. The referring URL passes along rich data sets with it that
can be further parsed for optimization. Search traffic also trends in remarkably
predictable temporal patterns as do the event driven behaviors associated with
it.

So the issue is not that the traffic quality is low but that
sites like the Wall Street Journal and many others do little or no site side
optimization for it. The referrer data is robust enough for the WSJ to deliver
an amazingly relevant, compelling and dynamic experience. The technology is there to do
a myriad of things with this search traffic especially reducing bounce rates, increase
subscriptions, collecting leads and funneling visitors into higher value areas
of the content. If publishers treated every page like a landing page and thought of themselves as much marketers as publishers they would be generating much more revenue. After all, user intent is generated
on the publishers domain. It only gets fulfilled on Google.

How inept are newspapers? Let’s take the data that they
themselves provided in the recent American Press Institute Revenue Initiative
Report (09/14/09).

• Net monthly visitor rates have not increased since 2003
• Percentage of 2009 total online revenue from SEO (large sites like WSJ): 0%
• Percentage of 2009 total online revenue from SEM (large sites like WSJ): 1%
• Only 23% of publishers are monetizing registration
• Only 11% of unique visitors are registered
• Only 25% use registration data for ad targeting

Publishers should be disgusted with these efforts and should take a long look in the mirror before they start blaming others for their demise.

Publishers Leaving
Google:

Let’s get one thing straight. Google is the number one brand in
the world and a more trusted and valued
brand to the general public than your newspaper. Google has been getting better
and better helping people for a long time now and keeps extending its useful
reach. At the same time news has become more and more commoditized and less
and less trusted. The Google habit is real. People are not going to stop using Google because your content is not
included in their index. It is this exact arrogance about content that has lead
to the demise of traditional media – at first devaluing the web as a medium, then
devaluing search and now devaluing the users of the medium (see above).

One more data point from the API revenue report that is
relevant here:

• Preserving print revenue is a primary driver to paid online
  access models [71%]

Search fractures the content hierarchies and information architectures publishers created to assist them in deriving revenue from their media. As someone that has worked with a number of the most well know publishers I sympathize with their being held accountable to many old media bosses and their legacy goals. There are a number of really smart people in this space especially at places like CNET and WPNI. Still, I cry no tears for their demise. Digital bits move at the speed of light. Digital strategy and execution must move along side it.