That was the heart of the debate Thursday in the opening session of the 2015 Newsroom Conference, organised by the World Editors Forum at PPF Media’s Futuroom complex in Prague. Santiago de la Mora, Head of Print Content Partnerships for Google News in Europe, cited the massive traffic figure. But Matt Kelly, Associate Editor of the Daily Mirror and mirror.co.uk, questions its value.
“Some of our competitors have 30 million unique users a month, and you would think that any business that has 30 million unique users would be the happiest in the world. But they’re not. They’re worried,” Kelly said.
The reason is simple: Users have been trained by Google and by the “cheap worthless technological news solutions out there” to graze many different websites for content with no value going back to the creator of that content. “Often they have no idea which website provided the information they found interesting.” And, as a consequence, advertisers are not interested because there is no real audience in the traditional sense.
But Kelly doesn’t blame Google for what he calls “parasitic consumption.”
“We are the ones who are to blame, for allowing ourselves to be talked into letting search engine optimization become the be-all and end-all of website design, for the short-term bragging rights of monthly unique visitors, an absurd metric that values one random visit from one random Google News visitor,” he said.
If such practices continue, content value will continue to erode, he says.
He recommends going back to creating traditional, loyal audiences.
“Concentrate on what is unique and special about our content and worry less about disseminating it to the widest possible audience.”
Kelly was speaking in a session on paid content versus free content on the web. Read more from the session, and from other conference presentations, on the Editors Weblog.
About the World Editors Forum
WAN-IFRA says: "The World Editors Forum is the organisation of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) that represents editors-in-chief and other senior news executives. WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry."
