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Former newspaper editor here. One thing that strikes me is that these auto-generated videos add no additional information to news reports; they merely present
by jawns 10y ago
Former newspaper editor here.
One thing that strikes me is that these auto-generated videos add no additional information to news reports; they merely present the content in a different way.
While that may be a way to broaden consumption of the content -- the auto-playing videos on Facebook feeds is a good example -- I don't think it does much to change readers'/viewers' perception of the quality of that content. If anything, it has the potential to cause them to perceive it as of lower quality than if they'd just read the article it was based on.
I see this as the next version of slideshows. News orgs used to like them because each new slide could be treated as a new page view. But readers found them to be, at best, of little additional value, and at worst, really frustrating to get through.
What news orgs really need is to invest resources to automate things that increase readers' perception of quality, and then figure out a way to monetize them, rather than looking at ways to monetize and then figuring out how to package content to fit the monetization strategy.
One initiative that can do that -- and this is where I think more resources should be invested -- is data science. Sifting through large public datasets and identifying trends, aberrations, etc. is something a computer can do as well or better than a human, and I would imagine that the fruits of those investments would be ripe for monetization.
Just one example: We have become conditioned to expect news content to be free, but we're more willing to pay for services. So imagine a news org that said, "Hey, we'll let you view all of our articles for free ... but then for a dollar a pop, you can sign up to receive an instant email notification when we publish a follow-up to a story you are interested in." I'd pay $1 to get notifications of follow-up stories to a particularly enthralling court case, or some local news of significant relevance to me. Best part is, news orgs already largely have the metadata that would make such a service work. They just need to invest in making computers do the work.
- AJ007 10y agoCan publishers handle advanced math? They are taking the same audience, same advertisers, and just dividing it up in to more pieces - and like you said, at a lower quality. I suspect the growth in online advertising has done a good job in masking the long term destruction being done to the publisher's revenue. Facebook has made it rain for a few years. That is coming to an end just as Google rolls its news traffic over to AMP. I don't want to own any publicly traded publishers right now. Auto generated video is just a grab for using press release content for auto play video ads. Upon closer inspection, there is really no business left. It looks more like Demand Media's content farm now, to see who can provide the thinnest layer between traffic source & advertiser. The business I see is Google/FB providing the audience and Google/FB providing the advertisers. Making a higher quantity of videos no one wants to see is not going to recapture ad dollars from some kid playing a video game that an audience wants to see. The only thing that amazes me is how many big publishers, including popular tech blogs, are able to run sites which barely function on a late model iPhone. I have no idea what metrics they are looking at. The past few months I've gone back to RSS feeds and bloggers so I can get readable content again. An end to my worthless rant is publishers will probably have to deal with less glamour and focus on producing extremely high quality content that users will pay for. Most verticals have no market for paid content. Those probably have to turn in to donor based non-profits or business models shift to selling products.
- Retric 10y agoAdvertising has held fairly steady as a percentage of US GDP for ~100+ years (1-2%). However, GDP has grown so there is room for more players esp if the growth is in a tiny sector of advertising spending. Further, It's at the low end of it's normal 1-2% band we might see a bounce back if the economy starts taking off. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-century-of-flat-line-growth http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisin...
- petra 10y agoI'm curious, what does a former newspaper editor use, when he want low noise, high value content, for casual stuff(not necessarily extremely fresh), both in browsing and in search ?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thelastestate 10y agoMy side-project is trying to achieve some semblance of this. From your experience what makes you think people would be willing to pay? Wouldn't you need a massive user base consuming hard to create local content like what Patch was supposed to be? http://patch.com/ http://patch.com/
- visarga 10y ago> for a dollar a pop, you can sign up to receive an instant email notification It's very probable that they would make just a fraction of the advertising revenue they were making before and free notification services will pop up.