Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

The arrival of social networks has allowed for quick dissemination of content – in a few hours, articles can fly over the whole of the internet, and YouTube videos can have millions of views.

Social networks have become an important channel for news sites. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, the way people consume news has changed. Readers suddenly don’t need to go to the home page of the news site – it’s enough to follow Facebook and news will come to them (either from friends or directly from the Facebook page of the media outlet).

Creating content with the potential to be shared a lot – if they want to keep their visitors – has thus become one of the most important missions of news-providing media. As has paying careful attention to their Facebook page. The key is to post the right statuses and keep in close contact with their readers.

The arrival of social networks, however, has also given news-providing websites one particular problem: creating viral content is not easy and cannot be made “on request” – sometimes it works, and sometimes it simply doesn’t. Similarly, not every article is popular on social networks and, as such, it doesn’t make sense to spread every text you write, but only some of them.

What kind of content do people like the most

What content do people like enough to share? What do they find to be the most fun? What type of content produced by news-providing sites works in the context of social networking?

Kristofer Mencak, a Swedish marketing specialist on viral content who has published books on the subject, has defined 12 indicators of virality. They include most of the viral content produced by news-providing sites.

Let’s look at them. You’ll probably find most of them familiar, but have you thought about them while you were posting a link to an article on Facebook?

Something funny – a large majority of content that goes viral falls into the funny category. In relation to news sites, the funny element works even better as it actually reflects real events “from real life”, which works much better than had the content been made up. A good example was an article “Married couple got high on a side dish” – three paragraphs describing how a couple exchanged marijuana for spinach received more than a thousand shares on Facebook and a few hundred thousand reads within a few hours.

Something wondrous – “The best example that the wondrous or miraculous works is the circus,” says Mencak. “Everyone wants to see something that is impossible” An example of such an article could be “Hero of the day – Captain Sully landed on river Hudson” about the miraculous maneuver performed by the American civilian airplane captain, who managed an emergency landing on the river, thus saving the lives of many people.

Something sexy – all tabloid themes with a sexual context, especially if they include something surprising, are also strong subjects. An example is the article, “Doctors say looking at busty women for 10 minutes a day is good for your health” on this tabloid site.

Something taboo – subjects people don’t like to talk about but think about a lot attract much attention. The more taboo a subject is, the more reactions it draws.

Secrecy – if something is secret, its price automatically increases regardless of whether the information itself has any value for the reader. Good examples are news articles containing secret documents or recordings such as documents published by WikiLeaks.org.

Something very personal – content which concerns specific groups of people – the information can be either personal in the right sense of the word or information that addresses them directly in another way. An example would be information about how an increase in taxation affects a certain category of earner.

Something controversial – if some social phenomenon draws different opinions, it usually spreads massively.

Something very current, with an uncertain outcome – in the case of sites providing news, this usually means informing about natural disasters, wars, coups and other significant events – especially if their outcome is uncertain.

American scientist Yury Lifshits in a study “Social analytics for online news” analyzed for Yahoo Labs what is read the most on news websites. In the study, he analysed the way the 45 biggest American sites share their content on social networks. “The 40 most-shared news items include much about lifestyle, photo galleries, interactive infographics, humour and relaxing reads. Four of the 40 most-shared articles are about current political affairs, three about celebrities. But the most popular are opinions and analyses,” says the study. According to Lifshits, the key is surprise. “Content that you can imagine someone emailing with either ‘Awesome!’ or ‘WTF?’ in the subject line gets spread”, the author says in Nieman Journalism Lab.

Four hints on how to make your Facebook page more interesting

Does your online news-site have a Facebook page? If so, here are four hints to attract more attention to your posts and thus more readers for your site:

• Choose well – don’t post too much, but choose articles suitable for social networks. You can see above which ones they are. Two to three posts per day are an acceptable maximum. Post more only in special circumstances (for example during elections, natural disasters – i.e. in times when people are more interested in getting information).
• Include a fun status – even if you are a serious news provider, be more personal and relaxed on social networks. This tip really works – try adding a bit of the funny and cool to your statuses and comments. Your credit won’t go down –on the contrary.
• Select content out of your website – do you have a great caricature? Don’t link to your website– post it directly as a photo. Do the same with video or a whole funny passage of your text. Are you worried that it won’t increase number of visits to your site? Perhaps not today, but a good picture will increase the reach of your page, so the next time you post a link, more people will read it.
• Don’t post yourself only – don’t be afraid to post links to other websites. Your readers want good content – they don’t mind that this time it’s not produced by you. If you give them good content, they will read your posts. Even those in which you promote yourself.

Three quick hints on how to reach more people by your Facebook posts

Until now, we have discussed mainly what kind of content is the most interesting, but very often the form is the key as well. Web page blog.bufferup.com summarized research about how to make your posts more attractive.

• Photo better than a status: A saying goes that it’s better to see once than to hear a thousand times. In translation to Facebook, it means that according to statistics, photos receive 53% more likes than comments and have a 84% higher click-through rate than text posts. If you can tell something with a picture rather than a text status, don’t hesitate to do so.
• Be brief: Are you in a mood to elaborate? Not a good idea: short posts (less than 250 characters) get two-thirds more people than long posts.
• The right days and the right hours: When should you write? If you have a Facebook page, you have surely noticed that time is crucial. The rule goes that the best time is when people aren’t working but are still not away from the internet. Ideal then would be the evening before sleep (around 10 pm), in the morning before work or during lunch. As far as days during the week go, statistics say that Thursday and Friday seem the best. But it’s often more complicated than that. The weather plays a significant role for example– if it’s the first beautiful day after weeks of weather misery, don’t expect people to stand in line to like your posts. Similarly, a rainy Sunday afternoon can turn out to be the best time.

Every new website faces a daunting problem: “How do I get people to visit my site?” Most websites have only a handful of options. They can spend money to promote their brand and URL through advertising networks and other websites, bringing traffic to the site directly. They can invest in developing their content management system and their online reporting techniques to draw traffic from Google and other search engines, commonly called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Or they can build a social media following on Twitter, Facebook or any of the dozens of other specialized social media platforms available today that refer traffic to the website. This last technique is often called Social Media Marketing. When planning a new website, each of these audience development techniques should be planned into all aspects of the site – content, software and hosting.

When Ujyaalo 90 Network in Nepal began planning their online presence in 2011, they faced a problem. Google, the dominant search engine in Nepal, was still relatively under-developed in the Nepali language, the primary language of Ujyaalo 90. They faced an environment in which depending on Google alone to drive traffic might not show immediate results. In addition, they faced a market that was moving online quickly, but predominantly through mobile phones. So after internal discussion and analysis, Ujyaalo Online developed a plan to build their Facebook fan base as their primary online marketing tool. Facebook gave them access to Nepal’s rapidly growing online audience and a familiar mobile platform to build on. SEO was also pursued but only as part of the development of the site’s content management system. The timeline below explains how Ujyaalo used Facebook to grow into one of Nepal’s largest social media and online media outlets.

When did you first start integrating PolicyMic with Facebook and Twitter, and why?

Well, the company was founded in 2011 and as soon as it started they already had Facebook and Twitter. I initially worked doing SEO, basically whatever is trending on Google. So my experience with PolicyMic initially was driving organic traffic to the site from Google. Even at that point, 2011, there was still a separation between Google and facebook. We wrote articles and posted them on the blog and we posted them on Facebook and we posted them on Twitter. Now, I think that is totally integrated. Even when you think about which topics to write about, you have to already think how is it going to be tweeted, how is it going to shared on Facebook, what are the key works that work – basically how you present, or how you curate, that content on Facebook and Twitter. So going back to my old path there. Probably last year, 2012, probably in November, I switched to doing just Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and twitter are main social networks. Facebook is much larger. We have typically 50-60 percent of traffic comes from Google. We have 7 million visits a month. So we are growing. We are still not the Huffington Post, which is like 15 million or something. So we get a little bit more than two thirds from Google and then social traffic is the rest, like 30 plus percent is Facebook, and Twitter is much smaller than that. So of our social pie, Facebook is probably two thirds, and then one third is Twitter. When there is a news event or people are tweeting a lot, or one of our articles goes viral on Twitter, we get much more traffic form Twitter that week or month, but still Facebook is the main thing for now. And we do have Pinterest and Tumblr and Goggle+, but the traffic we drive from there is not that significant at all. For us it is more like a presence at this point.

Do you see an increase of the people that are referred from social media?

Yes, definitely. For the last year social traffic has grown. It has been slowly but steady.

What about traffic from Google?

It is growing too. As we get older we get a better ranking on Google, our stories get ranked better, so we will keep getting more traffic, hopefully, from Google.

What about direct?

That started out really, really small, and now it is getting larger.

So it is really just direct, Google and Facebook that drive traffic to your news site?

Yes, and then Twitter and Facebook are different. Like I said before, we used to post a blog and then post a story and then post it on Facebook. Now we are actually creating content specifically for Facebook. We are just like any other company or organization that has adjusted their social media efforts over time. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work tomorrow. It is very unstable like that. But I want to close with Twitter and Facebook saying that the content people share on Facebook is more targeted to emotions. Or if you are the first to break a news story, it is just going to go crazy. One example is the Boston bombing. Someone tweeted a photo on Twitter right away and posted it on Facebook and it got shared like crazy. And then Facebook gives you the alternative that if you post a photo you can actually edit the blur, so you can just break a story on Facebook and then you can just link it to your post and it keeps going viral. So that is one way of getting Facebook traffic.

So you don’t post an article on your news site and then share it with a headline and a link on Facebook?

That is what we used to do. And think that is fine. But now we are trying the exploit the breaking news aspect of Facebook. So if, let’s say, they pass gay marriage, right. If you are one of the first pages to break it, it is going to go viral. But if you in a week from now post a story saying, ‘this is the legislation, this is what it means, and this is how it is going to work, and you post that on Facebook, it is not going to go anywhere because people have already heard about it all week. You also won’t get a lot of traffic posting a story that is not breaking but is kind of like a divisive story – women’s rights, gay marriage, abortion, religion – it’s a no no! You do get engagement from comments. (On Facebook you have different ways of measuring your impact, and it is going to depend on your strategy and whatever you are looking for. You can have likes, you can have shares, you can have comments.) But from these political, divisive issues you don’t get a lot of likes. You get a lot of comments and they are very toxic. By toxic I mean, you have to monitor it, making sure it is not something crazy, outrageous that you have to hide or delete. It is really not worth, going that way – for us right now, for our sort of objective company. For other ultra liberal or ultra conservative news companies that have really passionate followings, they of course are going to get all that traffic. But for us right now, that is not what we are doing.

So where do you see any kind of business opportunities emerge on these platforms for a news company?

Hm, I don’t work in the sales department. But we use Twitter to get more engagement and create more awareness of our brand. Our brand is becoming more well-know because of Twitter where we get tweeted and retweeted by professional polits or TV personalities, and huge traffic from that. So in that sense, it helps our brand. And then you have the chance to connect and network with other media. Yesterday, we had a mention in the New York Times, in one of the columns. So we got to interact on Twitter with the writer, Charles Blow, so in that sense that was a way to create awareness about our news brand. Absolutely!

What about loyalty? Do you think people that interact on Facebook and Twitter tend to be engaged with your site, or be more loyal readers?

Well, I found out that Facebook is probably a better place to create loyalty than Twitter – just because Twitter is very fast and the feeds come by the second. But you do get, I guess… The way we started our brand is sort of like crowd sourced knowledge or opinion for and by millennials, so in the same way our social presence is very crowd sourced in the sense that I’m in charge of PolicyMic’s Twitter feed, but let’s say some story get published, then more than just me tweeting this story on behalf of PolicyMic, I would rather have the same writer who wrote the story, tweet it from his or her personal social media account so you can see the face of the writer, and then his or her following gets that crowd sourced feeling. So there is loyalty in the sense that there is going to Twitter users that are interested in women’s right so every time our women’s right, writers post something or tweet something there is going to be that engagement; they are going to retweet it or they are going to reply, and there is going to a conversation based on that article and whatever hashtag about what people are for, or against. Like for example, they think Monsanto is awful or they love Monsanto, or whatever it is. You have people constantly engaging in the news.

And do you see that benefitting the financial viability of your website?

Well, again Twitter is a smaller piece of our social traffic pie, but that is an interesting question. We have some writers prefer to … at the bottom of their article they say follow me on Twitter or get in on the conversation on Twitter. Some people feel that it is going to take away comments from the actual comment section on our site, and other people on the contrary people believe that is going to compound the whole thing. I think more the latter. I do believe that the more interaction outside our site is good as long as you constantly have your social presence connected to your site, constantly trying to refer people back to your site, and vice versa – to your Twitter feed and your Facebook page.

So what do you do on your site to connect your Facebook page and Twitter feed to it?

Well, right now we our redesigning our page. So we are going to have much more social buttons all over the place. We don’t have as many right now. Also we encourage our writers to a) under their Twitter bio say, ‘I write for Policy Mic’, so you can click at it and get directly back to our site, and b) on our site we have writers saying at the button of their article, ‘follow me on Twitter’ or ‘these are the topics that I’m interested in on Twitter’, so basically trying to bounce that traffic back and fourth. That is the goal.

Do you see that happening right now?

Yes, social traffic is definitely increasing from Twitter. But it is also a matter of working along side the writers, sort of like coaching them on Twitter as well. Not a lot of people are on Twitter and if they are they don’t tweet as often. So we constantly give our writers tips on how to get better at Twitter. To me, it is supposed to leverage your audiences. And the way I see our Twitter and Facebook feeds right know, is almost like another section of our site. So we have politics, we have feminism, we have international and then I see Facebook and Twitter as just some sections that we create content for and get traffic back from.

So the type content that sits well with people on social media sites is more like breaking news, you said?

Yes, for Twitter it is breaking news, and also social groups the users belong to and identify with. So if you grew up an immigrant, or you are a European, or gay, or fighting for women’s rights, anything, African-Americans, Latinos. If it is things that people feel strongly about they are going to take action. That is what social media is about, triggering action. It is not about people looking at their feed thinking whatever. But it is about getting them to reply or retweet.

So you send out something on social media sites to creation action?

Absolutely. That should be the goal.

Does every journalist from PolicyMic dedicate a specific amount of time to Facebook and Twitter?

We post 100 articles per day right now, so every time an article comes out … well, we publish one hundred and … you know, on Twitter you can tweet everything, it doesn’t matter. But on Facebook, we have to space it out. Otherwise people would see it as spam. So you don’t get to post everything that you want on Facebook.

Why is that different?

I think it is because there are much more tweets, there are like million of tweets. On Facebook people post whatever on their personal pages, but for a brand you could risk being annoying or polarizing. It is a reason for people to just unfollow.

But that doesn’t happen on Twitter?

I don’t think so. On Facebook you may have like 500 or 700 friends, on Twitter people have 20,000 so the turn around is much faster. The thing with social media is, you know, we all use social media more of less, so when you send out news you have to put yourself in the user’s shoes, thinking what annoys you, what would you like, what would you tweet and retweet. So I guess, you have less Facebook friends and you may think that the first article about IRS or Obama is great, but the when the second one comes, you think what is next, I’m over it. So for that reason we don’t get to post as many articles on Facebook. So instead we post a story and then we also post an infographic or some image from a company or a peer research, so we don’t get perceived as too pushy or self-promoting or self-serving – that annoys people, and they will just unfollow you. So for that reason you cant really push everything on Facebook. And that is what I fight with editors and writers about every day. They are like, ‘post my article, post my article’. Also, Facebook is very performance based, so if you want to keep it free your posts have to perform. So you post something and it gets all these likes, then the next post is going to have a large audience. But if you post something that doesn’t get a lot of reaction, your next post is going to get just a couple of likes, just forget it. It is just going to reduce your audience. I know you can pay for it by getting people to promote your posts, but we are not on that phase yet. At some point we will start doing it. But for us right now it is just about making our content perform well, so we can get as much traffic as possible. The same as we did, and keep doing, with Google.

So was it the individual journalist or you that share the news on social media?

Both. But in my ideal world, the journalists are very engaged on social media and have a large following, so they can always post their own articles. Again, it comes back to leverage, you know. It is much better if we have a community where people engage, than having only one or two person engage. It is an exponential-effect. That is what social media and viral reality is about. It is basically exponential, you know, two times four, and then six and then eight. So that would be ideal.

How many hours a day do you think the average journalists from PolicyMic spend on Facebook and Twitter right now?

Hm, I will say, uh … uh, probably three to four hours a day on average. Again, we are sort of changing into an integrated, simultaneous culture, where you have a tap open on your site, a tap open on Twitter, a tap open on Facebook, etc. because you are constantly getting ideas from Facebook as well as breaking news from Twitter that is feeding into your news feed. So it is not anymore about writing one article and then posting it, it is more like … do you know, those tweet-curated sites? One of them is called TweetSheet. It is basically a blog that, instead of writing about some news story, mine Twitter for the power users and the actual sources tweeting about it in real time, and then they lay out all the tweets. That is how they tell the whole story. I think that is where media is going. So that is where PolicyMic should be going, I think. So it really has to be simultaneous. With Twitter being so instantaneous and so fast, if you disconnect for a couple of hours to write a story, you have things happening and changing in the meantime with your story. So it is just going be faster and more real-time. It kind of sucks because you have pros and cons. You may have to comprise with accuracy and so on. You saw it with the Boston bombing where CNN and the big ones were on fire.

Do you have any benchmarks for success with your strategies on Facebook and Twitter?

Well, our strategy is to drive as much traffic as possible. We have ads of course, but we also have investors, venture capitals, so they are going to be looking at the numbers and the reach – social and Google. So for us, it is about driving as much high-quality traffic in our demographic, which is millennialls. In the past, we were doing stuff with pop culture and driving all this traffic from celebrities. And it was great. We had a lot of traffic. But it is not necessarily one hundred percent in tune with our mission and with our demographic.

So you are looking mostly at volume metrics?

Yes definitely. But also … I guess another business opportunity would be to partner with other similar news news sites and personalities, or even larger sites like the New York Times. Just to keep that engagement with them and hopefully get them to mention our brand on their much larger sites so we can bring even more traffic and also even more people to write for our site, which will in turn help our brand. We have posts from Paul Franc, the former congress man from Massachusetts, Paul Ryan, the senator that is probably going to be the presidential candidate, Clare Macasgo, etc. It has been great because, for instance Senator Clare Macasgo wrote about sexual assaults in the military, so we gained not only specific traffic concerned with that particular issue, and internal engagement on Twitter and Facebook, but also … we were one of the first sites to report on that news story, and it became a big issue in the mainstream media, so that was a gain for us in terms of traffic and brand wise – having our name associated with a United State senator. It gives us a lot of credibility.

So in that way social media helps you attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess. Because if you want to sell a product to millennialls, and you see that the United State senator is writing on our page, it probably has more credibility than more amateurish college blogs – not that there is something wrong with these blogs and all companies have different targets, like … but I guess in that sense, I mean, I haven’t seen the actual metrics on how social media has helped bring in more brands, but if browse on our site you are going to see big brands advertise on a regular basis. So I think it has made a positive business opportunity.

Do you think social engagement metrics will help attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess from an advertiser’s point of view you want to see the numbers on their traffic, but also their Facebook and Twitter feeds. You want so see how many fans, followers and likes they have, and if people interact on every single post. I’m not in advertising but we do advertising ideas in a way, so I would say the more social engagement you have, the better for attracting advertisers and also business opportunity partnerships. Right now, we have a potential partnership in the works with one of the big media companies, so in way they have been able to find us because of tweets or Facebook posts they saw somewhere, a share and then they tracked back to the site. So absolutely!

To answer your question about if it is worthwhile to engage in these social networks, I would say as long as it is free and easy to use, absolutely. Beside free and easy to use, the advantage is that you can pretty much mole that into your mission statement or your brand identity. And Twitter is just like … I can’t tell people enough how amazing Twitter is. I started on Twitter in 08, and people didn’t get it and it annoyed me a little bit. But I would say stick with it, get into it because not only do you get these business opportunities, it’s basically like you have a real time focus group in your pocket, in your Twitter app. Anything you want to know about anything basically you can see there. You see what kind of opinions people have in real time. It is probably not terribly scientific as a pole, but still it is very useful.

So Twitter is more about feeling what is out there, getting to know your audience, whereas Facebook from a business perspective is a generator of traffic?

Yes, well, Twitter is also about breaking news like the Boston marathon. So you keep tweeting about it and if you do it the right way, you get a lot of mentions and retweets and favorites, which is going to rank your tweets up. So people who are searching for some news story will see your tweets first. So it is all about keeping your ranking up there, just like on Google. Twitter is the same. And yes, you basically want to keep an engaged and hopefully large audience.

But since Twitter is not as much a generator of traffic, it is still worthwhile for a news company to integrate with from a business perspective?

Yes, for us it is not that large, but there are other news sites that get all there traffic from Twitter because they have a different strategy and different missions and different approaches. I don’t know if you know Buzzfeed – it is a viral blog. Almost 100 percent of there traffic is from Facebook as opposed to Google. So it depends on how you approach it. But even if you don’t generate traffic from Twitter, you create a lot of brand awareness, or…

Yes, but you kind of need the traffic to create brand awareness as well. If you don’t get a lot of traffic, they won’t be aware. But if people retweet your content, your brand will get around on Twitter, right?

Yes, absolutely! But you better realize that there are a lot of people that get their news from their Twitter feeds, who don’t necessarily go to your site. So I guess in that sense you definitely need to be out there. Ideally, you have a lot of engagement and brand presence. But people are going to be searching. They are going to search “New York Times Facebook” because they want to go to that particular company Facebook page or Twitter page. I don’t know exactly how many, but I don’t see a lot of people doing that, so I would say that it is probably decreasing that you go to a browser and then directly to nytimes.com as opposed to going to a news aggregator, like FlipBoard or Twitter or Facebook. Some times they even break the news first on Twitter, like the AP [Associated Press] for instance they break it there seconds before they break it on the actual site, so getting in the mix of Twitter totally makes sense.

Do you see any disadvantages of integrating with Facebook and Twitter? Any risks that you may be taking?

Uh, well, I would say, you risk being inaccurate in the name of being fast and being first, which is not going to change. We are a for-profit company, we are running a business, so we need the traffic, we need to make the calls everyday, we are going to try to break the news first. There is going to be some risks, like, you have to say this information may not be confirmed yet, or if the New York Times said or the CNN said it, you say it. So I guess the disadvantage for your brand is that if you are trying to be a respected news organization. But I guess that is the risk that you have to learn how to manage, because people are going to be tweeting, and as much as the users are going to complain, they are going to be the first to search for breaking news on Twitter. They want to be the first to get the information to tell their friends or coworkers. You don’t want to be the last guy knowing that Michael Jackson died. You want to be the first one, so people can say “holly shit”. So yes, that would be a downside.

Do you think there is a risk in linking out your news items on social media or to other news aggregators? Perhaps, readers won’t come back to your site.

Yes, that is something you also have to work on. I worked on mobile advertising before and we had these conversions. People actually pay per-click in that business. So you actually want that traffic coming back to your site, and not only do you want them to come back to your site, you want them to perform an action, whether it is buying something or, in our case, share the news story. So you definitely want that, and that is tricky. But I don’t think it is different from traditional advertising, where you have to track how many people come to your products, and how do you do that? I guess that is also another risk internally. It depends on how you measure your success.

How do you do that?

Like I said before, ideally it is about driving traffic to our site. Secondary, it is about increasing our social media footprint. So even if a hundred percent of people from that tweet or that post don’t come to our site, if their friends see on their profiles that someone liked a PolicyMic article that is still a win for us, because maybe that person will be like, “oh that looks interesting.” The bottom line is driving traffic into a site. And if you are selling products, you better have people auditing that product. That is the bottom line.

So are you actually taking a bigger risk not being on these platforms?

Absolutely! As long as it stays free and easy to use. They have huge audiences that you can reach. I mean, how could you not want to reach that? Any downside that it could have, the benefits totally outweigh. Going back to your question if it is worthwhile for a news company to spend human capital or money on Facebook and Twitter, it is going to depend on your strategy, but you definitely should have a social media presence. Right now, on Pinterest and Tumblr we do have a smaller audience and we post, and every here and there a post go viral and we get traffic from that, but we don’t have people dedicated completely to these platforms. Maybe if we hire someone else, someone who can dedicate more time to Pinterest or Tumblr that would be great. But you have to allocate your resources depending on what your priorities are. So if you have one guy doing social media and if you see that you get much more traffic and conversions from Facebook than on Twitter, by all means invest more time and effort on Facebook, but do not neglect the other ones. And as you get more resources you can basically allocate them better. But I guess the bottom line is, how could you not be on social media, whether you are a NGO or a vitamin shop. You know, Jamba Juice they have all these promos and stuff that creates huge engagement. And they are not charging you for that on Facebook or Twitter. They could charge you for that. Facebook encourages you to use promoted posts, and yes if you have the budget and you want to promote posts by all means. The reason why Yahoo bought Tumblr is because they are now doing promoted posts, so they are going to start charging people who want to reach specific demographics. You know, it makes sense.

For MENA’s media players however, the report made for a more sobering read.

Two-thirds of the MENA population is under the age of 30, so younger demographics are too big for news organisations and content providers to ignore.

Nonetheless, the findings of this survey suggest that traditional news outlets are losing the battle to retain the trust and interest of younger audiences. To reverse this trend news organisations will need to adapt and innovate. Failure to do so will see this young – tech savvy – consumer base continue to haemorrhage.

Three key challenges: trust, social media and plurality of news sources

TV aside, old media in the Middle East is becoming less important as a news source for young people. The daily consumption of newspapers, radio and magazines by this age group has dropped by over 50 percent since 2011. Although almost half of young Arabs update themselves daily on news and current affairs, online and social media are the sources they increasingly turn to.

Despite TV remaining the primary source of news for Middle East youth, TV Executives cannot rest on their laurels.

When asked: “In your opinion what is the most trusted source of news?”, 48 percent of the survey’s 3,000 respondents selected websites (26 percent) or social media (22 percent), up from a combined figure of 27 percent just the year before.

In contrast, TV scored 40 percent, down from a 60 percent peak in 2011.

Media consumption therefore should not always be taken as a proxy for audience trust or credibility.

For newspaper proprietors, their drop in the trust league table was even more pronounced, part of a wider shift away from this medium, and a migration amongst Arab Youth towards a preference for social channels. Coupled with declining consumption, ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller CEO Sunil John described this as “an alarming development for newspaper publishers.”

The digital opportunity: you have to be in it, to win it

With 81 percent of Arab Youth online every day (one source reported that 40 percent are online for at least five hours a day), the lesson to media players is clear; you have to be as active online as the audience you are chasing.

This is especially true given the decline in offline news consumption. Research from Booz and Co and Google recently noted that:

“roughly 85 percent … (of 15-35 year olds) … now spend less than one hour [a day] with print media.”

The same report also observed that 78 percent of the Arab Digital Generation prefers the Internet to TV.

As Jaber Al Harami,  editor-in-chief of the Qatari newspaper Al Sharq, has argued:

“This generation is the keyboard generation. 140 characters is all you need – media should be restructured.”

Connecting with the right content and concerns

Many of the socioeconomic preoccupations of Arab Youth – rising living costs, unemployment and the challenge of home ownership – are the same as those shared by young people across the globe. Whether the Arab media adequately addresses or reflects these concerns is a moot point. If young people feel they do not, then this may contribute to the drift away from traditional news outlets.

The popularity of blogs – which are read by  48 per cent of Arab Youth and posted on by 38 per cent of them – offer a hint that perhaps mainstream media is not providing the range of content,  or opportunities for interaction, which many young people want to see.

Fashion, news and current affairs, celebrity news and technology, are the most popular genres for blog readers. Publishers need to ask themselves if they’re offering enough of this type of content.

Don’t forget video and social networks

YouTube enjoys 167 million playbacks a day in the region, so media players also need to consider the importance of video online. Vice Media’s  documentary on a heavy metal band in Iraq – and their live streaming from Turkey’s Taksim Square – suggest this may be one way to reconnect with youth audiences.

The increasingly influential role of social media as a primary – and trusted – source of news also poses some interesting questions for news groups. (As shown in the chart above, social media easily surpassed newspapers, radio and magazines in both the survey’s consumption and trust categories.)

Given the dynamics of these networks, media companies will need to actively engage with fellow users and produce content tailored for these medium. With 64 percent of all Arab youth saying they have a Facebook account and nearly half saying they respond to tweets from others, one way of doing this is to create bite-sized content which is perfect for social sharing. That may include blog posts, video clips, infographics, tweets or pictures, all designed for the digital space.

Finally, it is important to note that whilst the Arab Youth Survey shows trends across the MENA region, the 15 countries featured in the study are not homogenous. They do share common characteristics, not least a renewed pride in their Arab identity, but there will be variations across national markets. (Perhaps the most pronounced of these is that 92 percent of Algerians say they regularly read blogs, compared  to 24 percent in Bahrain.)

Reports like the Arab Youth Survey offer great insights, but news groups will also benefit from digging deeper into the needs and behaviours of their audiences, so that they can tailor their efforts accordingly.

More insights are available from the study’s dedicated website: www.arabyouthsurvey.com

In a statement, Patrick Grove, CEO of Catcha Media was transparent about the goal of the RM60 m (nearly $20 m) tie-up:

Digital marketing is the future; social media marketing is the apex of this future and is the fastest growing media category on the planet.

This new company offers a tremendous opportunity to dominate the future of digital marketing in Malaysia by pairing two clear leaders in the space in a manner that creates a holistic and complete solution for any brand looking to ride the crest of the new media wave.

It is not just a general new media trend that Catcha is looking to ride but rather the group hopes to take advantage of Malaysians’ social media obsession. Says.com is a social news aggregator that crowdsources trending news items from social media users. It encourages these social media leaders to curate and share news items by paying them when they share advertiser-sponsored content. It’s a low-cost editorial model that differs greatly from traditional news sites, but it is a model that has attracted major global brands including Nike, Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

“Says.com is designed to put advertiser content at the centre of social attention, positioning brands to capture the new generation of consumers,” site co-founder and CEO Khailee Ng told Digital News Asia. Says operates country-specific sites, and Ng says the site is looking to expand to the Philippines, Singapore and India, according to the Next Web. Ng added that the two companies saw a number of opportunities for the “future of advertising” in combining Says.com’s model of social media distribution and Catcha Media’s content.

Catcha Media is building what it hopes will be one of the most profitable new media businesses across Southeast Asia, and Grove said that the Catcha Media will be considering an initial public offering in the next 12 months. It operates Microsoft’s online presence in Malaysia, including the MSN portal and Windows Live site. The group also has 15 national magazines, an Asian auto classifieds business and a luxury goods e-commerce site, Hauteavenue.com. The merger of content, classifieds and e-commerce mirrors the international strategies of other media groups such as Scandinavia’s Schibsted and South Africa’s Naspers.

The fight for advertising

While Says.com doesn’t look like or work like a traditional news website, its low-cost editorial model smartly leverages the intense social media activity in South and Southeast Asia.

One of the most damaging mistakes that news groups in developed digital markets have made was to underestimate the impact of non-traditional news sites like Says.com on the business of journalism. Too many editors, journalists and ad teams didn’t realise the competitive threat these sites posed, either because they defined their competitors too narrowly, seeing only other newspapers or broadcasters as competition, or because they sneered at what they saw as low quality content.

With this merger, it should be clear that Catcha and Says.com mean business, and they already count lucrative international advertisers as customers. In the digital era, anyone who competes for digital advertising is your competitor, and as publishers, media executives and sales team leaders, you need to be able to compete not just against your traditional competitors but also this new breed of business.

To respond to this threat:

• Think of how you can fight for the attention of social media users. Develop strategies to reflect, capture and retain the attention of social media users in your audience.
• Don’t narrowly define your competition for attention and advertising too narrowly as digital grows. Newspapers and magazines are producing more audio and video that could compete with broadcasters, and any ad-supported site is a competitor for digital ad revenue.
• Be creative with your advertising products and strategy. The business and advertising model of Says.com isn’t complicated, but it has obviously been attractive to advertisers. How can you make your advertising products more social?
• Know your audience, which in digital means investing in market research and analytics. It will make for stronger journalism and a stronger proposition for advertisers.

It’s also important in the early stages of the digital transition in your market to be proactive in developing not just your digital editorial but also your digital business. This will put you on a better footing to compete with national and international players when they enter your market.

Major news organisations including Reuters, Al Jazeera, CBS, NPR, the BBC, The Guardian and the Associated Press have all made headlines in the past year after hackers took over their Twitter accounts. The attacks are always embarrassing and can negatively impact the reputation of your news organisation, but the attacks can also cause panic and real damage, as we saw recently.

The fake tweet posted to the AP Twitter account said:

Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.

Literally, within a minute after the fake tweet was posted, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 150 points. Bloomberg reported that the attack wiped out $136 bn of market value from the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. Within three minutes of the tweet being posted, AP journalists were posting on their own accounts that the tweet was a hoax and that the news organisation had been hacked.

While major international English and Arabic news organisations have been targets, the same tactics are being used by politically motivated hackers everywhere. In the lead up to the general election in Malaysia, the Twitter accounts of the independent news website Malaysiakini were hacked and taken control of by a group calling itself Sarkas-Siber. (For transparency, Media Development Investment Fund, which publishes Knowledge Bridge, has provided debt and equity financing and strategic advice to Malaysiakini.)

Twitter warned news organistions that the attacks will continue, and that journalists and news groups will “continue to be high value targets to hackers”. The microblogging platform is working on tightening security on its platform, but as it does, it offered up a number of recommendations for news groups to keep their accounts secure.

Victims of ‘spear phishing’

Like most hacks, most of these attacks against the BBC, The Guardian and the Associated Press weren’t technically sophisticated. Contrary to the movie stereotype of elite hackers defeating advanced computer security, the attacks didn’t rely on technical wizardry but rather on social engineering, which is just a fancy computer security term for scamming users out of username and password information. All three news organisations were targeted and successfully compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses western news organisations of spreading “lies and slander about Syria“.

All three news organisations say that they were the target of phishing attacks. Most people know phishing from the suspicious emails that appear from scammers trying to trick you out of your credit card and bank details. These attacks, often known as spear phishing due to their targeted nature, are much more targeted, more personalised and much harder to spot as frauds than the standard email fraud schemes. James Ball, the data editor at the Guardian, wrote on Twitter:

The guys doing the Guardian phishing attack I mentioned yesterday (it’s SEA) are really very good: sustained, changing, mails today.

He mentioned earlier that the emails were specifically targeting Guardian journalists. As one of the commenters says on a Naked Security blog post discussing the attack, “spoofing” an email – faking the sender’s email address – is trivial for most hackers. Both the AP and the BBC reported phishing attacks around the time that their Twitter accounts were compromised. According to the USA Today newspaper, the BBC warned staff about the suspicious emails:

The BBC’s email to staff said the “phishing” emails contained what appeared to be links to The Guardian newspaper or Human Rights Watch online and bring users to a fake webmail portal.

Twitter scrambles to respond

Twitter made a number of recommendations to news organisations to help them protect themselves. Some of the the tips are sensible online security such as changing passwords on a regular basis and having strong passwords. Twitter suggested that the passwords should be 20 characters long and a mix of characters and numbers or random words. Most security experts advise against using words that appear the dictionary, although a mix of random words would be more difficult to crack.

Other advice that Twitter offered news groups is impractical. They suggested that news organisations should have a dedicated computer to post to Twitter that they didn’t use to access email or the web.

Twitter did reach out to news organisations asking that they work more closely with the company. Twitter wrote in a memo to news groups:

Help us protect you. We’re working to make sure we have the most updated information on our partners’ accounts.

The advice is not just coming from Twitter but is also being given to Twitter to step up its own security. Specifically, a number of security experts have encouraged the company to adopt two-step authentication, something that Google rolled out after high-profile hacking attacks that were revealed in 2010. Two-step authentication often requires a user to register a mobile phone so that codes can be sent as a second step to log into an account on a new computer or device. Facebook, Google and Yahoo! all use the added security feature.

Protecting yourself against spear phishing

However, the best line of defence begins by educating all editors, managers and staff on security best practices. Hackers and phishers are always developing new ways to trick you into compromising your own security, and as Twitter says, journalists are now targets not only for politically motivated hacktivists but also by unfriendly governments.

We’ve all become more aware of scammers trying to trick us out of our credit card or bank details. We all know to take care when opening attachments or clicking on links in emails from people we don’t know. But it is important to understand the new and evolving techniques that spear phishers use to trick you into giving up your usernames, passwords and other important details. As the experts at Norton Security say:

The spear phisher thrives on familiarity. He knows your name, your email address, and at least a little about you.

As journalists we live in public, and it will be all that much easier for hackers to build up a profile to target us. Moreover, as Norton notes, spear phishers are stalking you on social networks. Think of all of the information that you post on social networks and how easy it would be for an attacker to dupe you into believing that they are a friend. Norton asks:

How safe you and your information remain depends in part on you being careful. Take a look at your online presence. How much information is out there about you that could be pieced together to scam you? Your name? Email address? Friends’ names? Their email addresses?

Norton recommends that if you receive an email from a friend asking you for a password or other sensitive information that you call them up to verify the email is from them.

As journalists, we’re trained to be sceptical, and it’s important to use that skill to bolster your electronic security. Be wary of emails purportedly from friends or organisations you know asking for or directing you to sites asking you for business sensitive information. That moment of caution could prevent your Twitter account from being compromised, your contacts from being stolen or your news organisation’s office network from being breached.

You’ve probably seen unbelievable images, like the one above, race past on Facebook, Twitter or vKontakte during a breaking news event. Such images spread rapidly, virally, because the images are so gripping and seem to encapsulate what’s happening. Unfortunately, some of the images are hoaxes, others are recycled from previous events.

As a journalist, it is important to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed during the heat of the moment and share or publish something before checking it out. We’re professional sceptics, and many modern journalists have found that a few seconds of scepticism have saved their credibility. We’ll look at some advanced image search techniques and services that will help you find the photos that you need in the deluge of UGC images during a big news event and also to uncover the fakes.

Using Google image search for verification

As Superstorm Sandy bore down on New York, the image above was shared by many of my friends on Facebook. I was sceptical. My first job as a journalist was in Kansas, in a region often referred to as Tornado Alley, and these clouds looked more like clouds from the thunderstorms I saw there rather than the type of storm that Sandy was.

I saved the image from Facebook so that I could use Google Image Search to see where else online it might have appeared. Google Image Search allows you to search by keyword, but you can also do a visual search, searching for images that are visually similar to another image. To do this kind of search, click on the camera icon in the search form.

This will bring up options to either paste in the URL, or web address, of the image that you want to search for, or to upload an image. In this case, the search quickly led me to the original photo, which was taken in 2004 by storm chaser Mike Hollingshead in the state of Nebraska.

Snopes.com, a site that debunks internet myths, said that this wasn’t the first time the photo had been used incorrectly.

The original storm photo is a familiar one on these pages, as it (along with other examples of Mike Hollingshead’s work) has been circulated on the Internet numerous occasions as depicting a variety of different storms throughout the world, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The other value of a search like this is that it can show the other places where the photo has appeared. This can be valuable for verification and, as this example shows, help you locate the source of a photo as well. This will not only help you uncover faked photos, but can also help you find the original photographer if you want to use the photo. Also, as we saw in looking for Creative Commons images on Flickr, you can find out if a person is passing off a photo as their own.

Tineye: Another image search service

Tineye is another image search tool that news organisations are using to help find out where images are used, both to verify and to source images. Tineye works in a very similar way to Google Image Search. You can either upload an image, add a page URL or the URL of the specific image or simply drag and drop an image file on the page.

Based on my experience with Tineye, it is best to upload an image or add the URL of the image, rather than the URL of the page.

If we upload our Statue of Liberty storm image, TinEye finds 181 examples of pages where the image appears. It is pretty clear from these results that the photo is fake, with the second image being named “very-fake-hurricane-pic.jpg”.

TinEye also has a range of browser plugins, for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, so that you can right click on an image and it will allow you to search for that photo. For instance, on this story looking at sifting fake photos from real, and identifying photos that have been heavily edited, we can search for the photo that looks like a diver swimming through a New York subway station.

The story from The Atlantic was one of many sorting fact from fiction, and it was one of the best examples of the kind because it provided sourcing information to back up its fact checking.

Advanced search techniques

There are a number of advanced techniques that you can use with both TinEye and Google Image Search to help you find photos, including photos with Creative Commons licences that you can use to illustrate your stories.

Like all Google search services, Google Image search has a number of advanced options, many of which are available by clicking on the Search tools button after you’ve entered your search keywords. You can search by image size, by image colour, by time and even by type of image such as photo, images with faces, clip art images or animated images.

There are other advanced search options which you can access by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand side of the page. Some of the additional options include being able to restrict your search to a region or to a specific website. One of the most useful options is the ability to search for Creative Commons licenced photos (the last choice in the advanced image search options).

Google breaks down the Creative Commons licence into plain language. You’ll want to use the licences that allow for commercial use. Most of the images that the search will find will be on Flickr, due to its large collection of Creative Commons licenced photos, but Google will also find Creative Commons licenced photos elsewhere as well.

TinEye has a clever feature that will search Creative Commons photos by colour. You can choose up to five colours for your search, and it will show you previews of the images it finds. One thing to note though, you’ll have to click through to the photos to find the licencing terms to make sure that they have the appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Image search has rapidly developed in the past few years, and now you can search not only by keywords but also by the image itself. It can be a great tool to help in verifying and tracing images. And advanced search tools such as Google Image Search and TinEye can also help expand Creative Commons searches beyond Flickr.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that hyperlocal news start-ups would be the next big thing in journalism, I’d be a rich man. But unfortunately, for many of these sites, dollars, in the form of a sustainable business model, have not materialised. The dream has been that targeted local advertising would flow to focused, local content. The problem has been that “hyper” local content, as opposed to simply local content, has been scale. How do you create content that is targeted enough to be relevant to local readers but still captures a large enough audience to be relevant to advertisers? At the recent Street Fight Summit, a conference dedicated to hyperlocal media, Kira Goldenberg of the Columbia Journalism Review gave this pessimistic summary of a panel of hyperlocal news start-ups:

The panel just before lunch at Tuesday’s Street Fight Summit, a two-day conference dedicated to all things hyperlocal, was on hyperlocal “publishing models that work.” But by “work,” organizers seemed to mean models that “have yet to fail”; none of the sites represented by panelists are making money yet.

The panellists included Daily Voice, DNAInfo and GoLocal24, and all of them said that they were on their way or “on plan” to profitability but still not there yet.

Hard lessons learned

If you want to cut through the hype, it’s worth reading a detailed post by Mike Fourcher, a Chicago-based entrepreneur and publisher of hyperlocal sites in the city. He listed 21 lessons he learned running sites Lakeviewing.com and Center Square Journal, and I’ll highlight just a few here that are relevant to all markets. The post is well worth reading in its entirety because it’s one of those times where someone is highlighting challenges rather than simply promoting success.

The challenges of selling to small- and medium-sized local business – This is one of the advantages that newspapers and other traditional media still hold and must defend: their relationship with local advertisers. For hyperlocal news start-ups, they don’t have these relationships and must build them, a challenge that Fourcher said was much more difficult than building an audience. He pointed out how local small businesses suffer fatigue from being sold to, not only by people wanting to sell advertising but also by their suppliers. He said, “Small business owners are constantly fighting off salespeople with a stick.”

New competitors and challenges in local advertising – In addition to these long-standing challenges in the local ad market, he also said that there were novel challenges that he faced. Chicago was where Groupon was founded, and although it has suffered from competition and trying to scale its own business model, Fourcher said that new Groupon-style businesses are being launched that are signing up advertisers rapidly. Daily deal providers and aggregators are now present in most news markets. He said:

Belly, which is founded by former Grouponers and funded by the Groupon founders’ investment fund, showed up at a local merchant group meeting unannounced. They brought a pile of iPads for businesses that sign up, and  thus signed up everyone in the room in a flash. Now Belly is a major competitor for neighborhood marketing dollars.

Social media giveth. Social media taketh away – As we’ve said frequently here on Knowledge Bridge, news sites have been very successful in building their audiences using social media, but now businesses are turning directly to social media to market to their customers, cutting out intermediary advertisers such as news organisations.

I’ll highlight one more lesson that he learned because I think it’s so crucial in terms of commercial success:

It’s easier to find a good writer than a good sales person. … Lots of people like to write. Very few people like to sell.

Just as editors and publishers know that they need to hire great journalists to create great content to attract audiences, we need to hire great sales staff to attract advertisers. Local journalism is coming under increasing pressure in the digital age, but to maintain sustainability we need to fight for advertisers just as aggressively as we fight for readers and viewers. Fourcher has some important, hard earned, lessons to help you keep winning that fight.

There are no silver bullets, only shrapnel.

It’s a clever way of saying that there is no single solution, no single revenue stream, to address the challenge of journalism businesses trying to make the digital transition.

In country after country, as digital media has disrupted the traditional sources of revenue for news outlets, especially print media, many news executives have lamented that they’ve been forced to give up “print dollars for digital dimes” (a US ten cent coin). Longing for the fat profits of the past will not bring them back, but it is true that digital advertising isn’t coming close to offsetting the declines in traditional revenue. Around the world, digital advertising rates are under pressure, and while many rapidly developing digital markets such as Russia are seeing dramatic growth in digital advertising revenues, as we’ve said many times here at the Knowledge Bridge, much of that new digital ad spend is going to new players such as social media and search engines, not to news businesses.

Rather than long for the past, at Digital First Media, where Brady is the editor-in-chief, they talk about “stacking” digital dimes. While revenues from digital sources may not be as great as revenues in the past, by combining several different digital income streams, digital revenues can start to replace declines in traditional sources. Many news organisations are realising that there are a number of ways to make money from digital media that go far beyond the simple model of selling display or banner ads, which as we have noted before are suffering from downward  pressure.

Could it be that some of the revenue woes that news organisations are facing are made worse by a lack of imagination and a lack of awareness of all the revenue possibilities available to digital media companies? To get a sense of how wide-ranging the revenue possibilities are, a long list of digital and web revenue models was collected in an open document online started by venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

The list includes more than 20 different models for advertising alone, but also includes e-commerce, subscription and transaction-processing models. Not all of these are applicable to news and media, but they start to demonstrate the wide range of possibilities, many of them unexplored by news groups, to start creating a number of complementary revenue streams.

In the advertising section of the document, some of the revenue models cover new ways of increasing the return of digital advertising, such as ad retargeting, which delivers targeted advertising to digital audiences based on their recent activity on online. For instance, if a person visits an e-commerce site and puts something in their shopping cart but doesn’t buy the item, for a limited period of time they would see ads based on the item that they had almost purchased. The thinking is that the person might still be looking for that item as they have expressed a clear interest in buying it, so a seller of a similar item might be more successful targeting that web user than by simply using random display ads.

The advertising sales section also includes affiliate fees or sales. Some news groups, including The Guardian, have used affiliate sales via Amazon in their book reviews: after reading a review of a book, readers have the opportunity to buy it via the e-commerce site and the news outlet receives a small fee for the business referral.

With the rise of smartphones and even less expensive mobile handsets with GPS, location-based services  such as Foursquare have been one area of rapid growth in recent years. If a person checks-in using one of these services – alerting their friends that they are at a certain store, café or restaurant – they might get a coupon. Such local deals might be an untapped source of revenue for local media.

This just scrapes the surface of all of the innovations in advertising that are listed in the document. Under subscriptions, there are three different types of paywall amongst the dozen or so models identified. The paywall models include a full paywall like the one at The Times in London, a metered paywall where readers get a limited number of stories free before being asked to subscribe, such as the ones in use at the News York Times and the Financial Times, and also a freemium model, where some general content is available for free but premium content requires a subscription.

Advertising and subscriptions/paid content are just two of the revenue models. The document also explorers revenue opportunities involving mobile, data and transaction-processing. As we said before, not all of these models would be applicable to news organisations, but it is an incredibly useful list that publishers should keep close to hand.

This isn’t to say that digital success is simply a matter of stringing together a number of random digital revenue streams. You’ll need to look at your market and your audience to prioritise which of these models might deliver the greatest return, but this list of revenue models shows that you have a lot of options and opportunities. A good example of this approach is the Dallas Morning News. They introduced a paywall in March 2011, and they are now also offering marketing solutions and social media support for advertisers as a new source of revenue. News organisations need to apply their creativity not just to creating innovative news products but also in exploring the myriad revenue opportunities available to support the mission of journalism.