Walls of Mass Destruction (continued)

Joseph Nocera is writing some of the most interesting business commentary these days.  I posted about his column on Wal-Mart last weekend.

This weekend he takes on one of my favorite topics right now - the Times Select program. He does that in the Times itself which is kind of cool. They are allowing their own columnists to write about the TImes' business.

I didn't link to Joseph's column in last week's post and I am not going to link to his column in this post either.  And its not because I am somehow protesting the wall that the Times has put up between their audience and their columnist (although I personally hate it).

I have written before that links are the currency of the Internet. That continues to be lost on the major media. As I browse around the New York Times online this afternoon, I find so few links in the stories.  They should look like Wikipedia, not a newspaper.  This is the Internet after all.

Links are so fundamental on the Internet.  Not using links is like not using commas or periods. If you think about Google, the current king (or at least Starbucks) of the Internet, they have built their whole platform on links. The New York Times doesn't link out very much.  So how do they expect others to want to link back?

I use the Internet like I follow a conversation, I read something, it contains a link, I follow it, I read more, I learn more, and so on and so forth.

The big problem with Times Select and one that Joseph Nocera misses in his otherwise excellent column, is that its a damn wall in the link love that exists online.  I'll be following a conversation and digging and learning and bamm, I hit the frickin wall.  Stopped dead in my tracks.  Now some percent of the Internet will pay the $50 and the wall will come down for them.  But not for most of the people online.  And a conversation that is not inclusive is not a conversation I want to be part of.

So I don't pay the $50 and I don't join Times Select.  And I never will.

Comments

[Zach Coelius]

Maybe the time has returned for the micro payments idea again. As much as I am a proponent of advertising as a way to pay for online content, the NYT currently has a cost structure of $200 million a year that can't be paid for alone with online ads at their current discounted price. A few years from now no problem. But not now. So they either have to drastically restructure their business model to lower costs for the new environment or figure out a way to supplement their income. Given that I easily read a 1000+ times articles a year they could just add five-cent micro charge to each article. And if that is added to Mark Cuban's idea of making links like an affiliate model where they pay a portion to the linker they could easily recoup revenue while at the same time making it cheap and easy enough not to disrupt the link flow online.

I think Nocera has a good point that given the cyclical nature of the advertising business it is really hard to sustain such a expensive infrastructure in the bad years and terribly problematic to be scaling up in the booms and cutting down every time there is a down turn if you rely on ad revenues alone.

[Dick Costolo]

oy, micropayments. It's like the old kreplach joke....(boy has an aversion to kreplach, exclaiming "Oy, kreplach!" and running away when presented with it. The concerned mother consults with a wise old rabbi. The rabbi explains to the boy what it is and how good it is for you and doesn't the boy love everything that goes into kreplach. The boy takes this in, smiling and nodding. The rabbi advises the mother that all is now well. When she next puts kreplach in front of the boy, he screams "Oy, kreplach!" and runs away)....everybody has no problem with the ingredients of micropayments but when they finally see them in action - "oy, micropayments". The thing nocera touched on that he claims some of the columnists hate is "loss of influence". Well, unfortunately for those columnists, influence is gold in this emerging continuous partial attention economy, and the times is cannibalizing the influence of their columnists in exchange for short term success. The challenge they will face is that as their columnists' influence wanes due to link starvation, the value in Time Select will so wane. "traditional media" like to labor under the illusion that there are only a few really talented writers and guess what, most of em work at four or five publications. I think the rest of us realize that's not the case. In a year or so, most people will run into the wall you ran into and think "oy, times select" and run away.

[Chris H.]

You couldn't have put it more eloquently than “links are the currency of the Internet." I'm often accused (or maybe just worried about it myself) of being too link-happy. Yes, it can distract from a post or article when every word or subject is linked but in general, links are valuable. I don’t understand when articles don’t link to the subjects or keywords that they reference. There’s a difference between being extremely link-happy and Wikipedia; most newspapers are on the completely opposite side of the linking spectrum.

This is what the web is for, making connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information. I love having these "ah-hah" moments where I can link together different pieces of information to create new knowledge. RSS is helping people (and maybe Web2.0 will be the ultimate vehicle) for finding, creating, monitoring, and tracking these ah-hah moments as I'm reading and surfing the internet; it could be a real valuable knowledge-generating application.

[jj]

Has "triage" made the cliche list yet? VC's are investors, not doctors. Until we start using scalpels and sutures to separate the good ideas from the bad, we should stop using the word triage "stat". The only exception I'll give is MD's turned VC's who are investing in medical device companies, but even that's a stretch.

BTW, you would have loved Neil Young's 19th annual (all-acoustic) Bridge School Benefit. A bill that included Los Lobos (doing "Bertha" and "Cinnamon Girl" - the latter with Neil), Good Charlotte, Emmylou (with surprise guest Linda Ronstadt for "High Sierra"), Norah Jones, a very political John Mellencamp, CSNY and Jerry Lee Lewis doing all his standards. The Killer brought the house down.

Keep up the good work.

[Zachery Coelius]

Dick,
Point well taken on micro payments. Though I am not all that certain I understand the basis behind your renunciation other then their failure the last time around. Maybe you have other reasons but I am a little skeptical when people simply say that since something didn’t work last time in a markedly different environment (broadband, consumer evolution and maturation, significant technological advances, connectivity’s saturation of daily life, internet commerce becoming normalized… all point to a very different context now compared to the 90’s) that it won’t work now. I believe many of the ideas that flopped in the 90’s did so because they were predicated on an internet only beginning to exist now rather then because they were bad ideas (stupid execution didn’t help any).

As far as the influence of the NYT columnists I think you are right on but you are missing one key factor. The real reason why they have the considerable influence they have is the $200 million a year the times spends to maintain the massive infrastructure of quality content creation they operate within. It is because of the Times’ ability to attract a massive broad-based, high-quality, decision-making audience with consistently world class content (some idiots ignored) that their columnists are able to influence. Your right, switch Friedman for Fukuyama or any number of other smart capable writers out there and nothing really changes. On the other hand if the times can’t maintain that infrastructure- and it will be interesting to see if they can, I am concerned- then the individual writers for the times become no different then all the rest of us throwing our words into the maelstrom. And so while I agree with your that their cute little garden is doing tremendous damage, I think we also have to recognize that without consistent and profitable monetization of that influence the very reason why they have that influence in the first place will wane and die.

As you can tell I just don't buy the idea that all we have to do is create any kind of value and monitization will follow.

[Dick Costolo]

Well, Zach, that's a very cogent argument regarding influence. My point about micropayments isn't just that they won't work because they didn't work before - I happen to still think WebVan is a great idea :) - rather, it's that people "in theory" like the concepts around micropayments, but when reality sets in, the result is never clean, you can't get the marginal transaction costs down low enough, etc.

[Zachery Coelius]

I have to admit that I have not invested the time into exploring micro payments to know enough to take things any further. It was one of those fire-and-forget ideas. On the other hand there is no doubt that the time has come to sell dog food online.

I am a little saddened that this is not going to turn into a massive conflagration of ideas and arguments. No better way to spend a nice Sunday afternoon then arguing with smart people about the ideas we are using to change the world (ohh that sounds a little grandiose, well, to change a little corner of the internet, that’s cool enough). Keep up the great work at Feedburner. I will most likely be giving you a call at some point in the future. My company is building a brand new way for shops like yours to buy and sell advertising and I would be really interested to hear your feedback.

[scott partee]

WAIT A MINUTE! NYT has a $200MM cost structure? *puts head back together*. Is that for the website only? If so, I need to talk to their technical architects and business people. That's *insane*!