I gave a lightning presentation at (the most excellent) CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s New Business Models for News Summit. A riff pulling from my prior blog posts. Slides and notes below.
In the not-too-distant future, every site will be a news publisher. Every site is about something, and will publish news about their topic of interest.
It may sound far-fetched, but if 10 years ago you were told that every site would run ads, that would have sounded pretty crazy. But Google automated the process and made it so easy and so efficient to run ads that, sure enough, every site has an ad unit somewhere.
So if, in the not-too-distant future, it were as easy as AdSense to add content to one’s site, a lot more sites will be adding fresh content about whatever their area of interest may be. And maybe that future isn’t so distant…
Purina is a company that makes cat and dog food. They’ve also launched a news portal for pet lovers, with news, photos, and videos. Using an editor + Daylife. Again, this is a cat and dog food company.
In a world where you have thousands of news publishers all of a sudden, who wins?
Well, one thing hasn’t changed. To quote my friend Chris Willis, “navigation and convenience are the new pipes.” Offline, controlling distribution meant owning paper, printing presses, and trucks. Or broadcast towers. Or thousands of miles of cable. Online, it’s about who offers the best navigation and convenience. Google is the most convenient way to navigate the world of web sites. YouTube is the most convenient way to navigate the world of videos.
Who’s going to be the most convenient way to navigate the world of basketball news, or politics news, or pet news?
To put the question to any news publisher: “How can you offer the best navigation of the world beyond your own content?”
Or to phrase it as Edward Roussel of the Telegraph did (riffing off of Jeff Jarvis), how do you “do what you do best and outsource the rest?”
That’s where Daylife can help. Daylife is a platform for adding to your site thousands or millions of pages of content that are refreshed and run automatically.
Daylife can help you bring the rest of the world to your site…
…as the Telegraph did when they launched their Earth Pulse section, augmenting their original reporting with Daylife power.
Daylife scales, letting you add thousand or millions of pages without adding head count…
…as Turner Sports did to launch portals about the NBA, PGA, MLB, and NASCAR.
This only works, however, if it truly is your site. The nice thing about the malleability of the Daylife platform is that you can seamlessly blend it into your own service, with your own voice, point of view, and look and feel…
…as USA Today has done, for example.
It’s all a moot point, however, if these Daylife-assisted pages can’t support real ad inventory (sponsor-friendly, high-value, not remnant). Fortunately, our customers report that they are able to sell Daylife-powered pages at the same CPMs as their original editorial pages.
And once you outsource the heavy engineering, analysis, and operations to a service like Daylife, editors and engineers are free to be creative, play with new ideas, and discover ways to navigate the world of content…
That’s all folks!
