Welcome to Content Farmville!
If the social or virtual goods market is exploding, expect it to also affect content online. Find a way to commoditize virtual content. So forget the Zygna virtual goodsvilles for a second, and start seeing 2010 as the year of ubiquitous “content farming” – where all of the serious digital publishers start long-term planning. Writers and journalists will be told by their editors to create articles that – unless tabloid topical in nature – hold future or lifetime value. I.e., articles that stand the test of time, they don’t rest after a week, but gain continued readings culminating in a heady 50,000 and up read count. Writers will be paid on ultimates: initial viewings, repeat viewings, sharing via social outlets,
The value of these lifetime posts? Well, to a Demand Media/Studios, AOL, Mahalo or similar, it’s a matter of quality (and quantity), think of it as quality based on what people are organically searching on Google, and quantity in terms of creating enough of a base of content that the YouTube’s of the world treat you as regulars. As YouTube’s video search is becoming a natural extension of text search, the ability to create posts in text and video is rapidly changing the landscape of content consumption. Users will start with the 10-step best of written articles, then graduate to video tutorials leading eventually to the user referring the post to others, include religious comment reading and the potential original user comment.
Sites like Huffington Post, the Gawker Network and other blog networks (blog nets) have been built on aggregated editorials – e.g., taking original posts from other relatively well funded or traditional media outlets and adding a little personal spin. That approach, while it’s worked out to a recent $300M valuation for Gawker’s templated Movable Type-hacked sites, may be changing as advertisers and publishers start jumping on the long tailed horse. Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Dec. 31, 2009
Last day of the year, and pulling out those excerpts that have been gathering dust in the draft box. Stay tuned for the New Medici network to go live in Q1 2010, as well as a breakdown of media companies for last year and going forward into the new year.
via How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions – WSJ.com
It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
via How Google Can Combat Content Farms
- Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn, who further wrote that “the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem.”
- Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky’s post on “Algorithmic Authority.”
- Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli.
- Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger. Read more >>