Should the Post Be More Like Politico?

Here in Washington, many are jumping on the sale of the Washington Post as an opportunity to highlight the success of Politico as a missed opportunity. When I worked at the Post's web site in the early 2000s, the politics section was already one of the larger verticals within the site.

Part of the problem with sustaining a politics based site is the advertising cycles are very cyclical around elections. There were dozens of 'dot-bomb' era efforts that hoped to capture just a portion of the online advertising, then would have to lay people off  after the election was over. The fact that Politico has become a moderate success is the exception rather than the rule in my mind. While Politico may have done well in the 2012 election season, they need to survive a dry spell at least to get to 2014 in my mind. In theory, you could say that the Post missed the chance to launch PTI by letting Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon go work at ESPN.

At the same time, since Politico has launched, the Post has built a Wonkblog site around Ezra Klein and a small team of bloggers, and more recently a tech policy blog. So it is not as if it has ignored the success of Politico. There was also a previous iteration of the tech policy concept called WashTech, which was eventually shut down. The Post even hired writers such as Joshua Topolsky of Engadget and The Verge to write a column in print. But the Wonkblog model seems to be more viable, as ESPN has sort of done the same thing with Nate Silver, and to some extent, the New York Times' elevation of Andrew Ross Sorkin.

If anything this seems to be the model of the moment. The Atlantic has done something of the same thing, partnering with Richard Florida to launch its Cities site. But the Post hiring some one like Topolsky or Barry Ritzholtz to write something for the 'dead tree' edition on weekends doesn't do much for me.

Here in the Post's own back yard, the Marginal Revolution site has a fairly passionate following. At least online, I'd like to see them elevating some like Tyler Cowen to the level that the Times has with people like Paul Krugman. I also would like to see Jamie Mottram doing something on the sports side, as he is a native Washingtonian. Tim Stevens also comes to mind as the person who most recently left Engadget.

Lastly, the Post is late to the game in erecting a paywall. Part of me thinks this is a mistake, as sites like the San Francisco Chronicle are actually abandoning their paywall scheme, which I'm guessing wasn't even breaking even. Building the e-commerce backend around a paywall isn't cheap, and you are certainly going to see your ad impressions go down, so it doesn't seem like a great idea for a mid-tier newspaper to spend all that money hoping that paid subscriptions stop the bleeding. Even Andrew Sullivan's paywall adventures have been far from a grand slam, and he has a relatively large following.

If I want to pay $100 a year for news content, I will subscribe to the Economist. But if you offered me a $4.99 per month plan that gave me full access to the New York Times, even with a little advertising on it, I'd probably do that. If that doesn't pay for itself, then I probably would say don't bother with the paywall. Would I rather pay $80 a year for Amazon Prime or a subscription to the Washington Post? Pretty sure I'd rather have Prime.

Season 2 of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

If you own a Roku or some other streaming device, you may want to add Crackle just for Jerry Seinfeld's series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee." The second season has been decent so far, with some slightly younger faces, including Sarah Silverman, Seth Meyers and Chris Rock, in addition to the old guard guys like Don Rickles.

I did try to watch Da Vinci Code on Crackle using my old Roku 1, and either our connection was bad or there were just way too many ad breaks, but Seinfeld series gets it right, with just one ad at the beginning and then another towards the end.

I also like how the Acura sponsorship works in a way that isn't super annoying. I used to work with the AOL Autos team, and it was always a challenge to present content that encouraged new car buying in a way that wasn't too over the top. Given the high ad impression goals for the channel, this became increasingly hard to do, especially when some of the advertisers were not exactly the top tier brands.

I used to be a fan of Acura's in general, but I think they've become more of a yet another SUV dependent car market, as the MDX is really the only model I would think too seriously about. I don't think there's anything great about the TSX, TL or RL at their pricepoints, but then I'm slightly in the bag for Audi at this point.

USATODAY Ends 'Green House' Blog: Where Does 'Green' Content Fit In?

This popped up in my Google Reader, but I was not surprised to see that yet another in a series of 'green' blogs bites the dust.

At one point when I was at AOL, we had 'green' blogs for several different content verticals, whether they be home improvement, autos, careers, tech, finance ... the list went on and on. They often were chasing the same stories and never built much of a following.

In some ways, this was a reflection of the 'green washing' that has gone on at least for the past decade, where things like corn-based ethanol are touted as an environmentally-friendly solution to something that is inherently not green at all.

That is not to say that there isn't real progress being made in the 'greening' of America. But some of the concepts just didn't make a lot of sense as content categories.

Perhaps an exception to this would be something like the movie 'No Impact Man' where one writer takes some of these ideas to the extreme. But even something like this has a limited appeal to a broad audience.

The Gray Market of Twitter and Facebook Followers

I have seen a few articles on the topic of fake followers on Twitter and Facebook. Particularly on Twitter, a significant portion of the population seems to be either spambots or dormant users who only follow a few users and never tweet or retweet.

Case in point, Lebron James. According to analysis by Big Lead Sports, only a third of King James' followers appear to be real active users. Serena Williams did even worse, at less than a quarter of her users. She appears to have more 'fake' followers, than real ones.

That's not to say that they necessarily paid for those users to follow them in bulk, but it does indicate that the engagement of their followers may be lower than others. 

On the other side of the coin, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Shaq, where were among the first to join Twitter, naturally have more followers, real and fake, because they have been their since the beginning. 

But it does show the potential value of a lesser-known athlete or blog or individual who's audience is really engaged compared to a big-name property that drive a lot of low-quality eyeballs.

For example, a graphic designer I worked with at AARP, Erin Freedman, was recently named one of the 20 Most Influential People on Pinterest. Even with (only) 600K followers, she has established herself as one of the tastemakers on this burgeoning platform.

Case Study: Washington Post Announces New 'Games' Section

In my time with AARP, it was well known that the Games section was by far the site's biggest page view driver by a wide margin. Thousands, if not millions of users, had bookmarked their favorite free games, whether it be Solitaire, Mahjong, Soduku etc. Of course, these users also spent much more time on the site, compared to a user who would read an article or two and then move on to something else.

So I wasn't totally surprised to see that the Washington Post is getting into the same 'game' at least online, offering many of the same games in addition to their own crossword etc. One thing to note, these games are all Flash-based, so most will not work on mobile. In the comments on the blog post above, one user notes that their employer is blocking Flash-based sites.

News sites have often tried to create original games, such as Marketplace's Budget Hero, with varying levels of success. I'm sure the New York Times Crosswords section is a huge driver of repeat traffic. In fact, it appears to be a decent revenue driver and it's own iPhone app. There's a documentary called 'Wordplay' that is almost an infomercial for the hallowed NYT crossword.

Features like weather, games, and to a certain extent, comics and photo galleries, are not always sexy, but they are often crucial to building repeat visitors.

HT: Potomac TechWire

Case Study: AARP Tax Tips

AARP Tax Tips

Helping seniors with their taxes is very important to AARP. They offer free tax advice through their Tax-Aide program.

I arrived at AARP in the fall of 2010 and we almost immediately started planning for the upcoming tax season.

I had previously led the tax coverage for AOL Personal Finance. There was already a lot of legacy tax content in the Money channel, and we had more coming, both in the form of free content from the IRS and premium content from Kiplinger.

How could we get all of this great content to the as many people as possible?

- I created subject pages around tax tips and the most popular federal and state tax forms as additional landing pages for promotional and search traffic.
- I conducted an audit of the existing content, adding internal links to focus promotional and SEO traffic on the most important articles and subject pages and paginating where appropriate.
- We came up with a list of 90 individual 'tips of the day', each of which had a relevant article with more information. We promoted the Tip of the Day on the Money channel and also had the social media team send the tips to Twitter and Facebook from January 15-April 18 (Tax Day 2011.) We ended up repeating some of the tips and not using all of them, but we knew that we had more than we would need.
- This area was promoted multiple times across the AARP.org home page, email newsletters, social media and SEM.

Key Metrics (January 15-Tax Day):
- Traffic to the Taxes subchannel page, as the main hub for the daily tips etc, was up 100x from 2010 to 2011.
- The AARP hosted version of Most Overlooked Deductions article got more than 400K page views alone.
- The three subject matter pages got more than 200K page views over this period, primarily from SEO.

Summary: 90-day content campaign doubled traffic to Tax area year over year, primarily leveraging existing content partners and existing tools, but integrating social media, SEO/SEM and promotional platforms.