The internet is dead

Welcome back the world wide web.

The world wide web. It’s the next big thing.

The internet is moving from being domain based to event based supported by embedded applications that do not necessarily reside in the host domain. Users are moving from one supplier of information, goods and experiences to another just as they do on the high street but rather than jumping through search and bookmarks (ok, both of which are still growing) they jump within social networks or the pages of one habitually visited website.

These websites can be social networks i.e. linkedin, facebook providing applications from slideshare or mobwars respectively; or aggregators like Google Reader. So the information, goods and experiences that people have, will come through a net of sites that are caught by the owner of a customer. Domains no longer own a customer. Only the supplier of the experience.

Welcome back the world wide web and goodbye to the internet. All products, even financial products where regulation interrupts immediate sales as it requires rigorous investor background checking and open consumer protection. Why? Because it’s who owns the customer that counts, it always has. Consider KYC, anti money laundering and fraud regulations that must be fulfilled prior to a transaction of buying a term deposit, shares or even the use of a credit card occurring. In these cases whoever owns the customer is king.

When the customer commits to a supplier it stops them from shopping around unless they join all providers of that security/account/card. But what if you could sign up to one provider who got you through all the regulatory necessities so as a customer you can plug into any provider at any time? Your choice would then depend on product selection and price right? The free market wills it. The providers increasingly unproductive cost base requires it.

Also consider accommodation affiliate marketing where a nice brochure website syndicates the customer out to a chosen provider for booking a cottage. Why not give the customer the choice and have all the cottage providers on a best price basis so they compete for your customer’s dollar in real time?

Syndication of information, goods and experiences can appear as an event in part of the work flow of any website with relevant content. As soon as you get your head around that fact, the possibilities move well beyond your domain being the centre of your universe. You save money on advertising to get them to your site because someone else is already doing it. You scale quickly in return for providing a revenue source to portals struggling to justify their costs of content creation. You lend off someone else’s brand to gain trust for the customer to hand over cash. You close the sale before they search for a trademe/amazon/strawberrynet solution. Domain led internet businesses are not the future.

The internet that concentrates on the biggest sites or search engines is not the future. Passive browsing that moves the customer between events in a continuous work flow is the future.  So goodbye to the internet and welcome back the world wide web. The next big web thing doesn’t operate on a domain.  It operates on any domain.

Newspapers – what could they do differently?

After reading this brilliant rant against the established media, mainly News Limited’s criticism of Google, I eventually arrived at the ‘yeah but’ question.

Newspapers have repeatedly struggled with the internet due to a lack of understanding on its mechanics and the power of the internet to substitute them.

They’ve attempted different business models and all the while alienating users due to their constant change.

One such attempt was content subscriptions. Two examples were Reuters and Fairfax. Reuters won because they learned the key is distribution to enhance someone else’s website. Fairfax failed because they thought they were the centre of the universe and tried to make the reader pay. Unfortunately as a business model most choose to follow the Fairfax and most of these attempts have now disappeared.

But it hasn’t been all bad either. Newspapers do get a lot of traffic, their websites do make money from advertising. This in itself is a great platform to begin truly exploring their potential on web.

So what do they have as assets?

1. Content creation
2. Established advertising sales capability
3. A brand that signifies the quality, subject and/or politics of the content
4. Existing real estate to launch
5. Existing ad trafficking technology

If you had just one of these assets you’d be on to a winner. So four has to be a winning formula. So here are some things that Newspapers could do quickly, that enhances the web and changes the business model.

Enhance my ecom website

Like Reuters on our share trading website, why don’t newspapers explore how they might enhance ecommerce websites. Book reviews, product reviews, movie guides, news and other content all make for better ecommerce websites. It is expensive to do yourself if you aren’t in the business of doing it. Distribution should not be precious, just add a self service content shop to your own website they every web owner can subscribe to.

Sell advertising for others

APN in New Zealand run advertising networks for other websites. They take too big a cut for my liking but it is the right step in leveraging the trafficking technoogy and sales force reach.

Crowd journalism

If you want to become part of the web, stop editing and open your pages to people to become the commentators and journalists. The reason blogs and aggregators are killing you is that they do not moderate to an agenda or stop real contribution.

Having a comments page at the bottom is not contribution, it’s a sop. Allow people to add their voice to the article and even develop the story for you. Readers are more likely to read your news and follow a story as it is develops. It could be so simple by letting users tweet the story on the page.

Don’t stop aggregation, embrace it

Stop pretending you own the news and start understanding you only have ownership of the paper or web page you print it on. If you change your perspective you will put your efforts where they should be – in distribution. The wider your distribution, the more ways you will find to make money from it.

An example of this is affiliate networks. I have a widget that I sell on my site. I also let others sell my widget on there website for a cut of the revenue. You could apply this to news by opening up your content for others to make money from with their own news site. Properly delivered you could get a fee per impression of their advertising revenue. It works where your brand lends credibility to the affiliates website.

Don’t create content, use someone else’s

Editorial teams now have a great choice of picking up quality stories from blogs and aggregators. Now you just have to sell the adverts.

Think cable

Recognise that you have the possibility of scale unimagined. Stop writing stories for your own mass market publication and write for syndication and delivery on a global scale to particular market niches.  The same as cable TV.

Get into the new portals

Why can’t I see my news on Facebook?

Change the mindset

All up, these are not big leaps but they do require a change of mindset from a market for ‘the paper’ to a market of ‘me’.