Social Media

Traffic Alone is Not a Business: Reddit-Conde Nast Edition

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It’s easy to hate on deals of the Conde Nast-Reddit variety. When a big traditional publisher snaps up a website with no clear strategy in mind — or at least no strategy made public — it begs more questions than it answers. What does an old-line company who excels at matching blue-chip advertisers with its gorgeous, glossy tomes want with a Digg-like site where readers suggest headlines and then are voted up or down by peers in the community? (Sample: “Do periods attract bears? Can they really smell the menstruation?”)

How Reddit fits into Conde’s future wasn’t obvious when the deal was done in 2006 and it’s less so now, what with Reddit asking for money from its community. It’s sad to see a site with such a strong community reduced to groveling for more funds to hire enough engineers to basically keep the site up and add some features. There are lessons here for those who still look at big traffic figures — and with 280 million views a month, Reddit pulls a ton — and assume that audience alone will prop up a business.

Here are a few things a ton of traffic won’t fix:

1. No revenue. Ok, This is a bit chicken-and eggy. In most cases, audience is the first step towards making a content outfit some money, but without any scratch a mature site like Reddit isn’t going to be a favorite of corporate overlords. That’s essentially Reddit’s explanation of what’s going on and it seems straightforward. As the Ning saga recently demonstrated, the days of tossing around big numbers of uniqiue visitors or page views as though they themselves indicated the health of a business have come and gone. Less simple is who to blame or where to go from here.

2. No clear path to real revenue. I’m not a regular Reddit user and I may be missing something, but it seems that the main way the site makes money is a little ad unit tucked into the right rail. This morning, it featured a house ad soliciting advertising. That’s unacceptable for an operation with the consumer traction Reddit has — even just from the advertising perspective. As a heavily-trafficked platform whose main laborers are its readers, Reddit should scale. Helping it do so, you would think, should have been job number-one for Conde.

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  • 08 Jul 2010 at 1:46 PM

The Squid and the Fail: What’s Wrong ‘The Social Network”s Trailer

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I’m necessarily fascinated by Facebook. I adore the movies of David Fincher. I can tolerate Aaron Sorkin’s schtickiness. Jesse Eisenberg did young neurotic well in “The Squid and the Whale.”

So why am I not excited about “The Social Network,” the forthcoming fil-um about the shady-to-the-max early days of the social network?

Probably because the most recent trailer, the second so far, makes it looks like the movie will be an uber-serious, talky-to-a-fault snoozefest investigation into whether Mark Zuckerberg snatched the idea for Facebook from its original founders. I’m envsioning “Zodiac,” another Fincher effort, also uber-serious and talky but not necessarily too long, adapted for a maybe-maybe not-maybe-ok probably theft of intellectual property.

The trailer, while nicely produced, feels off tonally.

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GM’s ‘Chevy’ Screw-Up: A New Coke for the Twitter Age

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Don McClean speaks out on the Chevy-Chevrolet DebateFor years now and despite all its woes, General Motors has been one of the more aggressive adopters of social marketing tactics among the big old American corporations. It has a social media team that pushes its products and fields complaints, using platforms from Twitter and Facebook down to Gowalla. Social’s been a big at GM for a while, with departed vice chairman Bob Lutz’ Fastlane blog being among the first of such corporate sites to gain traction. But in the new, post-bankruptcy GM social’s going to be an even more important part how the automaker relates to its customers, if we’re to believe this quote from Scott Lawson, director of customer and relationship services:

“In the old GM, we said you need to call us or you need to write us a letter. That’s not treating them how they want to be treated. In the new GM, we’re going to be where our customers want us to be.”

Too bad that doesn’t extend to what customers want to call your most famous products.

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  • 07 Jun 2010 at 12:50 PM

Betty White Hosted an SNL Episode; Now We Need @BPGlobalPR to Write One

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As much damage as has been done to BP—its market cap slashed by more than a third, its image decimated, its executives shown to be rich bumblers—you could pretty easily argue it’s only gotten a fraction of the pain it deserves. It hasn’t even been able to stop the flow of oil, let alone begin the long process of the remediating the gulf region it’s destroyed, yet somehow the force of public condemnation doesn’t seem strong enough. In amoral fashion, financial types are already discussing whether BP stock is now cheap enough to be a smart buy, and this Reuters story provides a tally of the consumer opposition to the company. It’s a rather gloomy accounting unless you’re roused by a handful of Facebook groups that add up to tens of thousands of people.

Which is why we need to get all Betty White on BP’s ass.

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Testing a Truncated RSS Feed on Above the Law: The Results Are In

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It’s time to wrap up the month-long trial of truncated RSS feeds on Above the Law. I had somewhat put the conclusion cart before the research horse, in that I marked the last day of this experiment in my calendar with the phrase “eat humble pie re. RSS.” And if you wait just a minute I will feed myself at least a small slice, but first let me share our findings.

One of my key concerns about the full RSS feed is that it is used by web scrapers to steal our content, which not only means they derive entirely unjustified benefit from our editors’ efforts but also leads to duplicate content that can hurt SEO efforts. On this front, the anecdotal evidence suggests that truncating the feed helped. In the earlier months of this year we had identified anywhere from 2-6 scrapers stealing all our content, but during May when we were truncating the feed we found no new examples. One of the perpetrators we’d already identified continued scraping the content, but was now getting just the abbreviated stories.

Of course the most common complaint from publishers about full RSS feeds is that subscribers get all the content in their readers, don’t click through to the site, and therefore aren’t monetized in any meaningful way. In the case of ATL, truncating the feed definitely increased the number of people clicking through to the site. Visits from our full feed were about 4% of our total traffic before we truncated it, but jumped to about 7% of total traffic in the month of the truncation trial. In our case this translated to something in the region of an additional 100,000 impressions, which isn’t going to make us rich, but would be worth more dollars and cents than we could make running ads in the RSS feed.

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The Big Lesson From the Facebook Flap: The Digital Ad Business Needs to Regulate Itself

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If you were Mark Zuckerberg today, you’d be forgiven for extending your Memorial Day vacation an extra 24 hours and do whatever it is you would do for fun if you were Mark Zuckerberg

Weeks of getting pounded in the media over your company’s approach to privacy had amounted to nothing more a particularly pesky meme that, finally, seems to have run out of steam. Quit Facebook Day came and went, with just over 34,000 announcing their decisions to sign off of the social network. That represents .0000755556 of Facebook’s total user base of 450 million. Surely many more have deactivated their accounts recently, albeit without any public declaration, and it’s a bit arbitrary to call the game for Facebook just because a gimmicky event didn’t result in a user hemorrhage of MySpaceian proportions. But it’s pretty certain that Zuckerberg and company, despite some dubious decision-making and awful PR, have faced down their biggest challenge and won.

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An Imaginary(ish) Conversation Between Carol Bartz and Mark Zuckerberg

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Yesterday was a big day, PR-wise, for Mark Zuckerberg and Carol Bartz. Zuck used the austere pages of the Washington Post to soothe concerns about Facebook’s will to invade privacy, while Bartz showed up on stage at a TechCrunch conference to defend Yahoo against one of its loudest critics, TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington. Both CEOs displayed their usual communication approaches–hers a defensive and blowsy vulgarity and his near-fatal boredom.

What follows is an imaginary conversation based on actual quotes from a video account and the op-ed.

Mark Zuckerberg: Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas.

Carol Bartz: There’s no single strategy at Yahoo.

Zuckerberg: People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.

Bartz: Yahoo is a company that is very, very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one…. People come to check the things they like. You can just get it together… Yahoo is one site people always stop at.

Zuckerberg: Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years.

Bartz: If that’s all you’ve got, you better quit now.

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  • 17 May 2010 at 11:37 AM

The Facebook Exodus Will be Small — And Very Canadian

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When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the social network.

Facebook PrivacySince Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.

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The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

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The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far between, with most media writers chasing their own tails.

There have, however, been a few standout pieces of reportage and analysis of late, a few of which we’ve assembled below for your convenience.
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Was Gawker’s Decision to Identify the ‘Racist’ Harvard Emailer Unethical? We Say Yes.

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The notion of online privacy may be nothing more than a “fallacy,” as one New York judge recently opined, but anyone concerned with both the free-flow of information and with being fair to the subjects of news coverage will confront this question:  Do bloggers and journalists have a responsibility to protect the identities of the subjects? We know that sources enjoy all manner of ethical protection, but what of the people we write about, many of whom who are public figures only in the broadest definition of the term?

This issue hit home just last week when a Harvard law student became famous on the web. Or infamous, rather.  After a conversation with a few friends last November about affirmative action, she raised the possibility that race may be a genetic determinant for intelligence. Unwisely, she made this suggestion via email.

Crimson DNAWhen she had a falling out with one of those friends, that friend-turned-enemy disseminated her old email, including her name, campus group affiliations and the fact that she would be starting a federal clerkship in the fall. It quickly went viral, spreading through the Harvard Law community and among Black Law Student Associations at several top law schools, many of whose members sent it along to us at Above the Law. (Fuller back story on this here.)

If nothing else, it was certainly a lesson in being careful about what you say in emails.

What was of interest to us when we broke the story was the reaction on Harvard’s campus, the propriety of disseminating a private email, and the response from recipients of the email — some of whom suggested that her clerkship be taken from her. Engaged by those issues, we chose not to include the student’s name and instead called her by a pseudonym — “Crimson DNA.” Her identity did not seem integral to the story, and our policy, as we’ve stated before, is to maintain the anonymity of law students. We only name names if (a) the name is already mentioned in a public record (like a police report), OR (b) the name is already mentioned in a mainstream media outlet.

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