Google is serious about making money off YouTube, it just added ads to the mobile sitehttp://j.mp/cpUp2B »

Greg Beitchman, global editor of Reuters says tapping into citizen journalism video is a “priority” http://j.mp/bW12Hj »

The #1 reason to include digits in your headlines: they get shared more on Facebookhttp://j.mp/9Ona7w »

Marketing firm exec advocates freemium: “it’s not enough to have a big audience on the Internet” http://j.mp/bNFegP »

Jay Rosen recalls reading the piece and being blown away by the concept. “I read this article,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’”

The open-source movement has, since then, evolved from “amazing” to “amazingly common” — so much so, in fact, that the concept became the unofficial theme of a conference held Saturday, one whose official theme was education: TEDxNYED, an independently organized TED confab held in New York City. As media-and-information experts — Rosen was joined by, among others, Jeff Jarvis, Lawrence Lessig, NPR social-media guru Andy Carvin, YouTube anthropologist Mike Wesch, and Ning cofounder Gina Bianchini — discussed the future of education in an increasingly digitized world, the idea that emerged was open source’s broad application to life beyond the media and even beyond education: to social interactions, to economic relationships, and to learning as a lifelong, rather than formal, pursuit.

“One of the things that’s changing our world and disrupting our industry,” Rosen noted during his talk, is “the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, pool what they know, collaborate, and publish the results back to the world. This is what makes open-source culture possible.” It’s also what makes possible Rosen’s notion of ‘audience atomization overcome‘: the connective and collaborative power of the Web trumping people’s geographical and psychic separation. At the conference, Jarvis applied that idea to education when he decried the top-down information structures of the past (“one-way, one-size-fits-all”) and advocated for a kind of open-source approach to teaching and learning: one that trades instruction for collaboration, rote memorization for more dynamic discourse.

“We must stop looking at education as a product — in which we turn out every student giving the same answer — to a process, in which every student looks for new answers,” Jarvis said. “Life is a beta.”

This is an echo, of course, of the argument Jarvis makes about journalism: journalism-as-a-process-not-a-product is an idea that is quickly solidifying into conventional wisdom among the meta-media set. But it also represents a tension — and a deep one — in contemporary journalism: How do you sell a process? How do you commodify community? This weekend alone, as the TEDx conference convened on the Upper West Side, The New York Times published a Public Editor column that suggested, as Felix Salmon points out, a deep discomfort with the external link in blogging — much of that discomfort rooted in newspapers’ assumption that information is, indeed, a proprietary thing.

Life may be a beta, but journalism, after all, is a business. It has, along with obligations to audiences/truth/democracy/etc., obligations to sell its products so that it might stay around to keep its other promises. It’s this reality that notions of open-source culture — information, education, the notion of process in general — will have to contend with.

In the meantime, the TEDxNYED presentations will soon be available for viewing on the conference’s YouTube channel. Highly recommended.

FT digital strategist hints at paywall for video: “It’s certainly not a given that video should be free” http://j.mp/bM8tqm »

Stories published on the weekend are more likely to be shared on Facebook than those from the week http://j.mp/9k8AHq »

Look out, Foursquare! Facebook will allow location-sharing starting next month, @nickbilton reports http://j.mp/dhl0Io »

What ad decline? The new Vogue Turkey is 562 pages long…and 252 of them are ad pages http://j.mp/adgzZe »

“Apps for Inclusion,” a joint @FCC / @KnightFdn contest, to reward apps that ease access to civic services http://j.mp/cy56T5 »

Google dominates 88% of all searches in UK (vs. 64% in the US). Bing is about to overtake Yahoo for 2nd place http://j.mp/9NXbax »

Here’s the slide deck from Varian’s presentation, entitled “Newspaper Economics, Online and Offline”:

(Lab readers may recognize some of the slides and data as having appeared here previously. I provided some input to Varian as he prepared his talk. Varian also posted the presentation and a summary of his remarks at the Google Public Policy Blog.)

Varian took a leave of absence from academia a few years ago to take charge, among other things, of tweaking and explaining the workings of Google’s brilliantly clever auction pricing mechanisms for text ads. He’s also involved in analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy.

Google has been in the crosshairs of the newspaper industry as newspapers struggle to hold onto print revenue in the face of digital onslaughts, including the text ads that bring Google the bulk of its $24 billion 2009 revenue (equivalent to about 85 percent of the entire newspaper industry’s ad sales). The industry’s biggest beef with the search giant is that it sees content aggregation on Google News as pilfering, without compensation, page views that ought to be going to newspaper sites; Google counters that it delivers a hefty share of total traffic at news sites (and that publishers can opt out of Google News if they really want to).

Varian offered no magic potion for newspapers, other than exhorting the industry to “experiment, experiment, experiment,” and to get better at analyzing and exploiting the information they can glean from their site visitor data. He began with a series of slides illustrating the dismal trend lines of the newspaper industry and its place in the media environment:

• Newspapers’ share of total ad expenditures have been dropping pretty steadily since the 1940s, from a 37 percent share down to barely 10 percent today.
• Newspaper ad revenue kept pace with GDP until the mid-1980s (both inflation-adjusted), but since then, it has disconnected and fallen — not just during periods of recession but during the entire 2002-2008 expansion as well.
• Online ad revenue at newspapers has grown to just 5 percent of total ad revenue, failing to offset the declines suffered in other categories, particularly classified.
• Circulation as been falling from its 1970-1990 plateau of about 60 million copies, but on a per-household basis has dropped steadily from 1.2 copies per household in 1947 to about 0.4 copies per household currently.
• While television still predominates as a source of national and international news for most people, in 2009 “Internet” surpassed newspapers as a source reported by consumers.

Twenty-six percent of all Americans (46 percent of those under 50) access news by mobile phone, and an astonishing 80 percent get news from e-mailed links, Varian said. But (as first analyzed right here at the Lab), only three percent of all consumption of newspaper-generated content happens online; 97 percent is still consumed in printed newspapers. This is true whether you measure pageviews in print and online, or time spent with printed newspapers versus newspaper web sites.

Still, news consumption ranks high among online activities of consumers, with 39 percent getting online news “yesterday” (according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2008), ranking it the third-most-popular reported activity (after e-mailing at 56 percent and using search engines at 49 percent).

Using Google data, Varian showed that accessing news exceeds search on weekdays, but drops to a fraction of its weekday level on weekends, when search leads. From this he concludes that much access to news and newspaper sites happens in the workplace, when consumers have time only for quick checks of headlines, not for in-depth reading.

The challenge for newspapers, therefore, is to “increase involvement in the news by turning it back into a leisure-time activity.” He sees tablets and mobile phones as helping to do that.

ComScore data shows that search engines send 35 to 40 percent of traffic to major U.S. news sites — so, assuming that this traffic monetizes about the same as other traffic, search engines must be driving 35 to 40 percent of revenue, as well, Varian said. But he suggested newspapers could do a better job using the data that comes along with the search click (the keywords used in the search), and using it to categorize the reader’s interests and tailor content suggestions and advertising accordingly.

One problem with this, I’ve found, is that about half of visits that come via search engines tend to be generic — users type the name of the paper, the URL, or a variant thereof, into the search field, using it in lieu of their browser’s address bar. But of the non-generic search clicks, Varian pointed out that most are for categories like sports, news/current events, and local (Google’s categories), which are difficult to monetize, while few are for the more lucrative areas of travel, health, shopping, computers, and electronics. “So the news narrowly defined is pretty hard to monetize.”

What about charging the consumer for news online, then? Varian’s answer:

My view is, yes, I mean, you should try for sure. But there is this difficulty that you run into when you start thinking about the economics of it is that you can really only charge for thing ifs they’re differentiated. There are a lot of substitutes for a product then it’s hard to charge for it. Then you have this problem, what economists call Bertrand competition…You get this competing down to the lowest common denominator.

So you really have to have news that’s highly differentiated in order to support a charging model. One time I thought, well, local news, that’s highly differentiated. Local football scores, things like that. Then I realized all of the moms and dads are in the audience on twitter with the mobile phones, maybe the news isn’t so highly differentiated after all, they’ve got mostly specialized industry content, points of view, analyses are not easily imitated are also a case that they can differentiate news. I’m agnostic on whether the charging will work. I think it’s worth a try, but you can only try it for something that’s going to be unique content. It’s very hard to charge for, let’s say, the weather, or something of that sort.

Varian concluded with this exhortation to publishers: “The three things newspapers should do is experiment, experiment, experiment!” He cited a few options from Google, like Living Stories and starred stories that can be followed for updates during the day.

“I’m a big fan of the new devices,” he said. The iPad, Kindle and other tablets introduce a “completely different ergonomics for accessing the news…so what I believe they’ll see is a merger of the TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper experience. You’ll have a device which will access all of the different medias. Give you a deeper — potentially deeper involvement with the news…So I would like to see this — this area develop and we’re doing what we can to help that happen.”

Finally, Varian urged newspapers to better exploit the information they have:

You know, in many cases, the newspaper website is seen as — as something that for the techies or the person who’s managing the web log [stats] is doing it just to look at how performance is working. But it’s hugely valuable information in those web logs [stats] — both from an editorial point of view and from a marketing point of view. There’s lots of interesting things that you can do when you understand why people are coming to your site, where they’re spending the most time, what they’re coming back to. It’s just extremely valuable information. I think newspapers can spend more time on analyzing that information and end up with better ad effectiveness measuring better contextual targeting and editorial targeting.

Here’s a full transcript of Varian’s remarks, as recorded by the FTC’s transcription service. (Note: This is not fully cleaned up or compared with a recorded version. I’ve inserted the slide numbers at the appropriate points.)

Wow, thank you very much for that kind introduction. Happy to be here. [1] As you heard, we’re going to talk about on-line and off line economics of newspapers. [2] And basically this is going to be mostly a fact-based presentation, looking at revenue, costs, advertising level change, composition, and so on. Most of the talk is from the data from the newspaper association of America that’s put up a lot of trends on the website, a key foundation of some of the other sources and a little bit of Google data that’s also emerged with this report.

[3] So I want to start off with a little overview of what revenues and costs look like for newspapers. And basically the bottom line here is 80% of the revenue roughly comes from advertising, 20% from sales. If you break down the cost side of newspapers, turns out that about 50% of the costs are production and distribution, that is the physical production and distribution of the newspaper, obviously it’s attractive if you can reduce your costs by 50% for any business. So the promise to the internet is just to reduce costs. I understand we’re going to hear much more detail about that this afternoon.

[4] If you look at ad spend by medium in the United States, I pulled this data from the U.S. Statistical Abstract. Of course, the big gorilla in the room is TV. You look at broadcast and cable TV, you’ve got by far the largest expenditure on advertising on those two media. Surprising enough, the next biggest thing is direct mail. Then after direct mail comes the — comes the newspapers. You look at how things have changed over the years, broadcast TV has gone down a little bit. Cable TV has grown by quite a bit, almost a factor of three. The internet’s grown from nothing in 1995 to about 5% of ad expenditures in 2008. And newspapers, As you can see, have contracted from about 23% down to maybe 13% or so. So the big changes are apparent in this diagram. And I guess the next talk is going to be perhaps some more up-to-date figures on the advertising business and newspapers. Newspapers, of course, are still about three times as large in terms of ad revenue as the internet, so there’s still quite a major force in the advertising world.

[5] This is another chart showing pretty much the same thing. If you look at newspapers, that’s the blue line, they’ve been going down since basically 1950 in terms of media share. If you look at the yellow line, that’s TV and cable. That’s been going up quite dramatically over the same period. And way down there in the bottom right-hand corner, that light blue line, is the internet which came from pretty much nothing up until the — maybe late 1990 s started to become a force in — in advertising and other media stayed more or less the same.

[6] Now this is a plot of GDP which I just put there to have a general measure of economic activity and newspaper ad revenue. And I’ve adjusted it but the consumer price index that you can see what the changes will be in the real term. So basically we have real GDP and real newspaper ad revenue. And you can see, it’s pretty much pieced back in the late ‘80 s, since then, more or less conference in the last couple of years where it took a big dropdown. By the way, the vertical grade bars are recessions. One thing to note is that typically during recessions, advertising expenditures are quite sensitive to cyclical conditions so you can see GDP dropping and advertising expenditures dropping as well. The last couple of years have been dropping outside and even more than the economy would indicate and we’ll see an echo of that in one of the — one of the later slides. The important point is that newspaper ad revenue pretty much Maxed out way before the internet came on the — on the scene.

[7] This is a picture of what ad revenue looks like by type, again, measured in constant dollars. So typically it’s broken down into four different categories, retail, which would tend to be local stores, national, which would be national brand advertising, classified, the blue segment there, and then on-line is the tiny little green segment that kind of popped up a few years ago. You can see what’s going on is retail advertising has been growing over this period. The brand advertising has been contracting and classified advertising stayed pretty much the same up until the last few years at which point it dropped fairly precipitously.

[8] This is the same chart only measured in shares so you can see the share and we’ll have a lot more clearly. I think the important point to note here is the on-line ad revenue is still — as of 2008, at least — is substantially less than 5%.

[9] What about circulation? If you look at circulation, the chart on the upper left-hand corner, the circulation stayed constant for a long period of time and drop in the last couple of years, but, of course, it’s a little bit misleading just to look at total circulation, what you’re most interested in, most likely, is circulation per house hold. So if you look at paid circulation per person, over on the right, you can see it was declining since the ‘60 s and pretty much a steady manner. The interesting thing is, if you look at ad revenue per reader, or ad revenue per circulation, it actually was increasing since the late ‘60 s with a few up s and downs in the recessionary periods and so on, but by in large increasing up until very recently in the last few years. But the ad revenue per circulation is going up even though ad revenue is going down because the circulation has been going down so much. So it’s the denominator that’s been causing this effect.

[10] And here’s another chart just showing circulation which, again, has been remarkably constant between say 55 million and 60 million copies.

[11] And here’s a chart of circulation per household, which is also been pretty stable in terms of its decline. Back in 1947, you were seeing a little over one newspaper per house hold, which I presume is morning and evening editions in many cases. But that’s gone down to something like 40 — .4 newspapers per household in today’s world.

[12] And this is the chart that — well, we just heard Susan refer to that now the internet has surpassed physical newspapers as the popular way of accessing information. I would say television is — got a pretty substantial lead on both of them. And, of course, most of the internet access is access to newspaper sites. So they aren’t, of course, the physical paper.

[13] In that same report, there were some interesting trends about getting news by phone. 26% of all Americans said that they actually access news on their phones and 43% of those under 50 — so this is yet another medium by which people can access news. But in many cases, given the interface that’s available, people are looking at weather or at current events because reading in depth on your phone may be somewhat inconvenient. I thought one of the more fascinating numbers that came out of the PEW report is that 8 80% of people get news by e-mailed links. That’s one of the more popular distribution mechanisms now. You see an interesting story, you send it to their friends. You go to the websites, you see the most mailed stories MRKS are accessed on people’s computers and now, increasingly, on handheld devices. And we shouldn’t think of a single medium per person. Half the population surveyed said they used four to six different media for accessing news. So it’s important to distinguish in these discussions between newspapers traditionally considered as the physical newspaper and, of course, all the other ways you can access news, on TV, on your phone, on your computer, your lap top, etc.

[14] Now, if you add it all up and you look at the difference between physical newspaper reading and on-line newspaper reading, you get this kind of amazing statistic that’s due to Martin Langeveld at Harvard['s Nieman Journalism Lab]. Only about 3% of total news comes on the computer. Most of it comes from looking at physical newspapers. You get nice numbers looking at the web data. This is data from the Newspaper Association Of America. People are spend 38 minutes per month on on-line news which works out about 70 seconds a day. Whereas a person who reads a physical newspaper tends to spend about 25 minutes a day. There’s also time use studies to back these numbers up. So even though accessing news on-line is a very popular thing to do, it’s actually the case that people are not spending nearly as much time on the newspaper on-line as those people are who are reading physical newspaper. Of course, they’re different populations, so you have to compare these carefully. But roughly speaking, about 3% of either page views or time accessing on-line news — sorry — 3% of the total access to newspapers is done on-line. On the other hand, it’s accessed quite often.

[15] This is from data from the U.S. statistical abstract. Also it came from Pew, that roughly 40% of adult internet users say they accessed news yesterday. And. In, if you look at those with household incomes of $75,000 or more, it’s about 53%. So it’s very popular to access that on-line news, it’s just that people aren’t spending a huge amount of time on it, at least compared to the people who are reading the physical newspaper.

[16] If you look, for example, at total number of hours per year where people are accessing newspapers or reading newspapers, it’s about — let’s see, in 2008, 168 hours per year. So roughly works out to 25 minutes a day. In terms of physical newspaper consumption — that’s the same order of magnitude as the time people spend on the internet.

[17] News — the third most popular activity on-line, sending a regular e-mail, using a search engine, getting news on-line. Those are, again, the three top things that people do on the internet, but they’re spending a lot more time, for example, reading e-mail than they are looking at the on-line news. Now this is a little bit of a paradox. Let me stop for a minute and show you the charts. The paradox is, it’s popular to access news on-line, but they don’t spend time doing it. Why is that? That’s the mystery. How much time they do it compared to physically reading the newspaper.

[18] So I pulled some Google data and I looked at the time use pattern of access to Google news. So what you got down there on the bottom are the hours in the over a couple of weeks. The two little small bumps are the weekend access. And the — the five bumps between them are the daily access. So the red line is search activities. This is how many people are searching Google for things. And the blue line is the news activity. So I plotted both of these charts from the area of — each graph is normalized to be one, so it’s measured in percentage terms.

So what’s the first thing you see in the blue line is a lot further up than the red line. What that says is that people are accessing the news during the day a lot more frequently than they’re doing searches. And if you go over to look at the weekend, you can see the searches dramatically exceed the news, people are doing searches more on the weekend than they’re accessing the news. What that suggests to me is that people are accessing on-line news a lot during business hours. It’s not so surprising that they’re not spending a whole lot of time on it because offline news reading is a leisure-time activity. You do it over a cup of coffee, you do it in the evening, maybe. Whereas on-line news reading, that’s a labor time activity. People snatch a few minutes out of the day to check the sports scores or the headlines or something of that sort. So if that’s true, people are spending much less time looking at on-line news than they traditionally spent reading on-line news because they’re doing it during working hours, much less during leisure ours. During leisure hours, you might sit and watch TV, as a matter of fact, it would be a common thing to do.

So the challenge, I think, that’s facing the newspaper industry is to try to turn that on-line newspaper access which is much more attractive way to reach a broader audience is to increase involvement of the news by turning it back to a leisure-time activity.

[19] If you look at the value of clicks sent to newspapers, according to COMSCORE, it’s 35% to 40% of the traffic to news sites. That monetizes about as well as other traffic, that means that search engines are driving about 35% to 40% of traffic of revenues, on-line news sites. Which is a substantial amount. However I have to remind you that the on-line news revenue is about 5% of the total. So even though they’re driving a substantial fracture of the on-line revenue that’s still a relatively small amount of the total revenue.

[20] One thing that’s interesting to do is if you look at a search click that goes to the newspaper site, the newspaper is sent a query — or any site, not just the newspaper site, the site is sent a query that generated that search click. And that means that the site that received the search click could direct the user to the appropriate section of the site. So you can take those queries that people are issuing when they click on news sites and ask, what are the categories? What are people looking for when they go to these on-line news sites?

And I’ve done that. It turns out that the kinds of things that people are looking for when they’re going to these on-line news sites are sports, news and current events, and local — those are the top-level categories that we use at Google categorize search clicks. But there’s relatively the same in travel, shopping, so on. And roughly the same in entertainment, computers, and electronics. I’m comparing searches that go to newspapers to just searches in general that go to sites that aren’t specifically classified as newspapers. I say newspapers, I mean sites indexed by Google news.

Now the bad thing — or maybe not the bad thing, just a fact is, that if you look at the money in on-line advertising, the money is in categories like travel, health, shopping, and consumer electronics. But if you look at the revenue that’s going to newspapers. That’s in sports, news, and current events and local. And believe me, it’s very, very hard to monetize those categories because there isn’t as much consumer dollars spent in those areas as there are in areas like travel, health, and shopping.

[21] So the news narrowly defined is pretty hard to monetize. Despite the fact that it’s popular and frequently accessed, there’s a relatively low level of involvement because of the time constraints that people face, and it’s typically not a highly commercial activity. In fact, newspapers have never made money from news. You look at where the revenue came from, they made money from the business page, the automotive page, home and garden, travel and technology, all those parts of the newspaper that wasn’t the raw news, not the newspapers. Why? You can target ads, not surprising that people who read the automotive page are interested in buying cars or people who look at the travel section might be interested in taking trips.You can see targeted ads in the physical newspaper but tied to the sections. Then it’s the revenue generated from those sections which are used to cross subsidize the actual production of news.

And what’s happened is, this has been a problem with this intermediation that now people can go directly to finance sites, to auto sites, to consumer electronics, books, to travel sites, real estate sites, and so on, so people go directly to seeking those specific sources of information, they tend to bypass the traditional sections of the newspaper and so the cross subsiization model that’s worked for many years has not really work ed now. It’s very hard to do conceptual targeting of the news. If you’re reading the travel section and you see a story about Hawaii, you wouldn’t be surprised to see ads for travel to Hawaii next to that story. If you read the news section and you see bombing in Baghdad, you’re not likely to see travel ads or anything else particularly relevant to that story. So it’s very, very difficult to do the same kind of cross subsidization we’ve seen work in the past.

[22] If you go look at advertising verticals for newspapers, you can see 20% is general merchandise, 14% financial. That would tend to be in the business section of the paper, home supplies, furniture and so on. So you look at the breakdown of where the money is coming from, then it tends to be somewhat different from the kinds of things that people are making money on on search engines and general internet advertising. Of course, all this doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t valuable. You heard earlier — I would absolutely second that is critical both from the individuals and societal point of view. People find it valuable because people are going to look at news on-line. We see half of internet users read news on-line at some time or another. They just don’t spend a whole lot of time on it.

[23] I’ve seen this big debate on whether you can charge for news, replace the advertising model. My view is, yes, I mean, you should try for sure. But there is this difficulty that you run into when you start thinking about the economics of it is that you can really only charge for thing ifs they’re differentiated. There are a lot of substitutes for a product then it’s hard to charge for it. Then you have this problem, what economists call Bertrand competition — one seller sets it price here, one could sell it down. You get this competing down to the lowest common denominator.

So you really have to have news that’s highly differentiated in order to support a charging model. One time I thought, well, local news, that’s highly differentiated. Local football scores, things like that. Then I realized all of the moms and dads are in the audience on twitter with the mobile phones, maybe the news isn’t so highly differentiated after all, they’ve got mostly specialized industry content, points of view, analyses are not easily imitated are also a case that they can differentiate news. I’m agnostic on whether the charging will work. I think it’s worth a try, but you can only try it for something that’s going to be unique content. It’s very hard to charge for, let’s say, the weather, or something of that sort.

[24] So, in summary, if you go through and look at all of this, newspaper ad revenue is pretty much cost adjusted for dollars. The circulation per capita is going down since 1947. The really big increase of advertising revenues come from cable TV and that’s way before the internet. You do have this problem with on-line news that people are using it differently than they’ve used offline news. They tend to access it more episodically, and the challenge that the newspapers face is how can they use that to — how can they turn that deeper access to the news to the kind of deeper involvement that they would like to have? Maybe what you need, everyone said this is maybe not the news, but engagement. You need to increase the engagement with news.

[25] And the three things newspapers should do is experiment, experiment, experiment. Google has been working on doing some of the experimentations, I think a promising avenue is try to link news access during the day so you use this rather brief occasional access to stories, to a much bigger engagement, partially by shifting some of the access to leisure time.

So we’ve done things like living stories where you work with major newspapers to try to string together all of the items about a particular story as the newspaper developed through the day. Got this capability called star stories, you can look at a story and star it and then you can follow what happens in that story. Maybe look at it later when you have some free time, and other things like that. I’m a big fan of the new devices. I think that things like the ipad or the kindle and this whole group of tab let computing is going to potentially make a big difference because it gives you completely different ergonomics for accessing the news. If people are accessing on-line news at their workstation, computer, or their laptop during the day and they have a lot of things going on, when you come home, probably you don’t want to go sit in front of your laptop or your workstation at home to do the same thing. What you might want to do is sit in your easy chair and look at your tablet where you can follow some of the stories that you might have seen accessed originally at work.

Of course, this isn’t going to be a flat textural description, it’s going to be multimedia in those devices, and so what I believe they’ll see is a merger of the TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper experience. You’ll have a device which will access all of the different medias. Give you a deeper — potentially deeper involvement with the news. Because what happens with TV is you get this emotional experience from the visual side, but in many cases, it’s frustrating because you can’t go deeper in to the story because the newspaper, the physical newspaper with textural material you can go deeper in the story but maybe don’t have the same emotional involvement, get them both together, then potentially you can have a very positive and interesting and worthwhile experience. So I would like to see this — this area develop and we’re doing what we can to help that happen.

Finally, the last point is newspapers should better exploit the information they have. You know, in many cases, the newspaper website is seen as — as something that for the techies or the person who’s managing the web blog is doing it just to look at how performance is working. But it’s hugely valuable information in those web logs — both from an editorial point of view and from a marketing point of view. There’s lots of interesting things that you can do when you understand why people are coming to your site, where they’re spending the most time, what they’re coming back to. It’s just extremely valuable information. I think newspapers can spend more time on analyzing that information and end up with better ad effectiveness measuring better contextual targeting and editorial targeting. I think I’ll end there. And thank you very much for your attention.

The technology site Ars Technica has a tech-savvy group of readers, of which about 40 percent have installed ad-blocking software in their web browsers. That’s a plugin that allows you to avoid seeing most ads on a site. The financial consequence for Ars is “devastating”, editor-in-chief Ken Fisher explained in a post. Ars sells ads based on impressions, not clickthroughs — which means it takes a big financial hit because of browsing habits of its users.

On Friday evening, Ars tried an experiment: Readers running ad blockers got a blank page instead of the story they intended to read. The move was a technical success, but caused an uproar (and confusion) among users. In hindsight, Fisher told me, the site’s experiment in retribution was the “wrong approach,” causing confusion among many readers.

“What we weren’t expecting is so many people were blocking ads and didn’t even know it,” he said. “It left a lot of people very confused. They started digging around, wasting an hour trying to fix their broken computer.” There was nothing on the site to explain to readers why content had been blocked.

But the experiment still generated positive returns for the site’s bottom line. Fisher wrote a lengthy post on Ars (similar to many the site has run before) about its goals and why ad blocking was a big problem for the site:

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.

And since Saturday, Fisher has received about 1,200 emails from users saying they had whitelisted the site — meaning they had told their ad-blocking software it was okay to show Ars’ ads. Based on Ars data from IP addresses, 25,000 users whitelisted the site in a 24-hour period — evidence that the goodwill the site has built up with its audience could be converted into user acts of generosity.

Another 200 users signed up for Ars’ premium accounts, which run $50 a year or $30 for six months. A subscription gets users access to an ad-free version of the site, full-text RSS feeds, printable PDFs of posts, and closed community sections of the site. (But Fisher notes that many subscribers just feel a sense of obligation, not a desire for premium features. “We get many people who subscribe just because they love us. They just want us to survive.”)

I asked if the $50-per-year subscription makes up, financially, for the loss of ad revenue on the ad-free version of the site. It depends on the user, Fisher said. For anyone who visits the site more than its user-average 89 visits per month, probably not. But he doesn’t think of the equation in those terms. Fisher views the subscription fees as covering the cost of specialized content that only the most dedicated user would want, like the online community sections. Ads alone wouldn’t generate the revenue to cover that. An advertising strategy that assumes a broad audience can cover the more general-interest content that audience wants. Having a multi-pronged revenue approach allows the site to provide different kinds of content for different audiences.

Fisher said he’s also had good experiences using a sponsorship model to support specialized content, including in-depth coverage that attracts a highly engaged, technical audience, but not huge pageviews. For instance, IBM sponsored a recent series on the future of collaboration. The writers didn’t know IBM was the backer, and IBM was told only the broad topic for the stories. Topic-specific sponsorship “delivers more value than display advertising, in my opinion,” he said. “It’s much more targeted. It takes the best of contextual advertising.”

But Ars’ bottom line still relies heavily on traditional display advertising. Its particular audience likely has a worse ad-block problem than other sites. But the benefits Fisher found from communicating directly with readers — making the ask along with a gentle but clear nudge — can apply to any site.

“It affects so many sites,” he told me. “And just getting the message out there makes a difference.”

Media exec on the problem with online video: “It’s hard to justify $75 CPMs on Hulu and other big properties” http://j.mp/dz4zEK »

“Be ready to shift gears often”: Our @martinlangeveld’s white paper on publishers’ iPad strategies http://j.mp/djfrb4 »

Meet Mediagazer, Techmeme’s new aggregator of “must read media news” http://bit.ly/aEdvHL »

Ars Technica editor explains why ad blockers are devastating to your favorite sites (even if you wouldn’t click) http://j.mp/di1kYe »

This is what Seadragon is about: it lets you dive in an image down to the smallest detail. All done seamlessly using the internet. The Seadragon deep-zooming system achieves such fluidity by sending requests to a database of “tiles”, each one holding a fraction of the total image. The required tiles load as we zoom and pan. And because each request is of a modest size, it only needs to cover a fraction of our screen, the process works fine with a basic internet connection.

Filloux argues that something like Seadragon might be a new interface for news:

In a prototype, they used a set of 6400 pages of the final editions of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the local daily that folded few months ago. Let’s picture this: a one year of a daily newspaper entirely shown on one screen. 365 days x 50 pages of newspaper on average, that is about 17 800 pages to navigate. At first, this collection is represented using a series of thumbnails that are too small to be identified. One click breaks up the stack by month, another click organizes it in a much more manageable set of weeks. Now, I pick up an issue and dive in…Unlike the hyperlink system I use when going from one page to another, in the Seadragon-based interface I’m not leaving my “newspaper”. I’m staying inside the same zoomable set of elements. As I land on a page of interest, again, I can zoom in to a particular story (which, in passing, reconstructs itself in order to avoid the “old-style” jump to the article’s continuation on another page).

I absolutely agree that we’re nowhere near a stable endpoint for how we present news online — there’s a huge need for innovation. (One of the things I admire most about Gawker Media, for example, is that they are willing to rethink basic elements like comments, post styles, and ad placement. And the chance to try new presentation forms is one of the most exciting things about the iPad.)

But I’d push back against the idea of a Seadragon-like interface being the future. Two reasons:

— People don’t like immersive environments online as much as some would like to think. Compare the amount of hype Second Life got to the actual amount of use it gets today. (How are all those Second Life “news bureaus” doing today?) I remember back when VRML was the future, and that we would all by 2002 be spending our time walking through news corridors and news caves. Aside from World of Warcraft and other games, users have consistently been less interested in immersive experiences than technologists have. When we’re seeking information, as opposed to play, we’ve defaulted to something closer to flat navigation. I don’t think that’s the endpoint of news, but I think it’s an indicator that “diving deep” into a geographic news landscape might not be the metaphor that wins out.

— The main problem with contemporary news navigation is discovery, not depth. Most news consumers are looking for interesting content, stories they’ll enjoy, photos they’ll like to look at, videos they’ll think are worth watching. One reason time-on-site is so low for news sites is that, when a story grabs someone’s interest, news sites do a bad job of showing them other stories that will grab it again. News organizations produce a ton of content, but it’s difficult to present it all well to readers. That, to me, is the big challenge, not the need for the sort of depth that an infinite-zoom metaphor might provide.

But that’s just my quick take. What do you guys think: Is something like Seadragon doing to be a big influence on how we navigate news in the near future?

Microsoft’s (rumored) tablet: just over 1 lb., and around 5″x7″x1″ when closed (it folds). Also comes with…a stylus. http://bit.ly/aO4DqS »

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Using eye-tracking metrics, a survey concludes that the majority of users are “indifferent” to real-time search results http://bit.ly/cWLmJa »

Location-as-platform, cont’d: Google Chrome now supports geotargeting http://bit.ly/9bp8pz »

The online news landscape defined: Much of the discussion about journalism this week revolved around two survey-based studies. I’ll give you an overview on both and the conversation that surrounded them.

The first was a behemoth of a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Here’s Pew’s overview and the full report.) The report, called “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,” is a treasure trove of fascinating statistics and thought-provoking nuggets on a variety of aspects of the world of online news. It breaks down into five basic parts: 1) The news environment in America; 2) How people use and feel about news; 3) news and the Internet; 4) Wireless news access; and 5) Personal, social and participatory news.

I’d suggest taking some time to browse a few of those sections to see what tidbits interest you, but to whet your appetite, the Lab’s Laura McGann has a few that jumped out at her — few people exclusively rely on the Internet for news, only half prefer “objective” news, and so on.

Several of the sections spurred their own discussions, led by the one focusing on the social nature of online news. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram has a good summary of the study’s social-news findings, and Micah Sifry of techPresident highlights the sociological angle of news participation. Tech startup guy Dave Pell calls us “Curation Nation” and notes that for all our sharing, we don’t do much of the things going on in our own backyards. And Steve Yelvington has a short but smart take, noting that the sociality of news online is actually a return to normalcy, and the broadcast age was the weird intermission: “The one-way flow that is characteristic of print and electronic broadcasting is at odds with our nature. The Internet ends that directional tyranny.”

The other section of the study to get significant attention was the one on mobile news. PBS’ Idea Lab has the summary, and Poynter’s Mobile Media blog notes that an FCC study found similar results not long ago. Finally, Jason Fry has some hints for news organizations based on the study (people love weather news, and curation and social media have some value), and Ed Cafasso has some implications for marketing and PR folks.

A web-first philosophy for magazine sites: The Columbia Journalism Review also released another comprehensive, if not quite so sprawling, study on magazines and the web. (Here’s the full report and the CJR feature based on it.) The feature is a great overview of the study’s findings on such subjects on magazines’ missions on the web, their decision-making, their business models, editing, and use of social media and blogs. It’s a long read, but quite engaging for an article on an academic survey.

One of the more surprising (and encouraging) findings of the study is that magazine execs have a truly web-centric view of their online operation. Instead of just using the Internet as an extension of their print product, many execs are seeing the web as a valuable arena in itself. As one respondent put it, “We migrated from a print publication supplemented with online articles to an online publication supplemented with print editions.” That’s a seriously seismic shift in philosophy.

CJR also put up another brief post highlighting the finding that magazine websites on which the print editor makes most of the decisions tend to be less profitable. The New York Times’ report on the study centers on the far lower editing standards that magazines exercise online, and the editing-and-corrections guru Craig Silverman gives a few thoughts on the study’s editing and fact-checking findings.

Facebook patents the news feed: One significant story left over from last week: Facebook was granted a patent for its news feed. All Facebook broke the news, and included the key parts of Facebook’s description of what about the feed it’s patenting. As the tech blog ReadWriteWeb notes, this news could be huge — the news feed is a central concept within the social web and particularly Twitter, which is a news feed. But both blogs came to the tentative conclusion that the patent covers a stream of user activity updates within a social network, not status updates, leaving Twitter unaffected. (ReadWriteWeb’s summary is the best description of the situation.)

The patent still wasn’t popular. NYU news entrepreneur Cody Brown cautioned that patents like this could move innovation overseas, and New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson called the patent “lunacy,” making the case that software patents almost always reward derivative work. Facebook, Wilson says, dominates the world of social news feeds “because they out executed everyone else. But not because they invented the idea.” Meanwhile, The Big Money’s Caitlin McDevitt points out an interesting fact: When Facebook rolled out its news feed in 2006, it was ripped by its users. Now, the feed is a big part of the foundation of the social web.

What’s j-schools’ role in local news?: Last week’s conversation about the newly announced local news partnership between The New York Times and New York University spilled over into a broader discussion about j-schools’ role in preserving local journalism. NYU professor Jay Rosen chatted with the Lab’s Seth Lewis about what the project might mean for other j-schools, and made an interesting connection between journalism education and pragmatism, arguing that “our knowledge develops not when we have the most magnificent theory or the best data but when we have a really, really good problem,” which is where j-schools should start.

An Inside Higher Ed article outlines several of the issues in play in j-school local news partnerships like this one, and Memphis j-prof Carrie Brown-Smith pushes back against the idea that j-schools are exploiting students by keeping enrollment high while the industry contracts. She argues that the skills picked up in a journalism education — thinking critically about information, checking its accuracy, communicating ideas clearly, and so on — are applicable to a wide variety of fields, as well as good old active citizenship itself. News business expert Alan Mutter comes from a similar perspective on the exploitation question, saying that hands-on experience through projects like NYU’s new one is the best thing j-schools can do for their students.

This week in iPad tidbits: Not a heck of a lot happened in the world of the iPad this week, but there’ll be enough regular developments and opinions that I should probably include a short update every week to keep you up to speed. This week, the Associated Press announced plans to create a paid service on the iPad, and the book publisher Penguin gave us a sneak peek at their iPad app and strategy.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and tech writer James Kendrick both opined on whether the iPad will save magazines: Anderson said yes, and Kendrick said no. John Battelle, one of Wired’s founders, told us why he doesn’t like the iPad: “It’s an old school, locked in distribution channel that doesn’t want to play by the new rules of search+social.”

Reading roundup: I’ve got an abnormally large amount of miscellaneous journalism reading for you this week. Let’s start with two conversations to keep an eye on: First, in the last month or so, we’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on science journalism, sparked in part by a couple of major science conferences. This is a robust conversation that’s been ongoing, and it’s worth diving into for anyone at the intersection of those two issues. NYU professor Ivan Oransky made his own splash last week by launching a blog about embargoes in science journalism.

Second, the Lab’s resident nonprofit guru Jim Barnett published a set of criteria for determining whether a nonprofit journalism outfit is legitimate. Jay Rosen objected to the professionalism requirement and created his own list. Some great nuts-and-bolts-of-journalism talk here.

Also at the Lab, Martin Langeveld came out with the second part of his analysis on newspapers’ quarterly filings, with info on the Washington Post Co., Scripps, Belo, and Journal Communications. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum drills a bit deeper into the question of how much of online advertising comes from print “upsells.”

The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a provocative post contending that the distinction between creation and aggregation of news content is a false one — all journalism is aggregation, he says. I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion, but it’s a valid challenge to the anti-aggregation mentality of many newspaper execs. And I can certainly get behind Niles’ larger point, that news organization can learn a lot from online news aggregation.

Finally, two great guides to Twitter: One, a comprehensive list of Twitter resources for journalists from former newspaper exec Steve Buttry, and two, some great tips on using Twitter effectively even if you have nothing to say, courtesy of The New York Times. Enjoy.

[Laura Bennett is currently on a Fulbright grant in Madrid to research citizen journalism and the democratization of the mainstream Spanish media. She filed this report about Spain's late (but still talked-about) online news startup, Soitu.es. —Josh]

Spanish news site Soitu.es launched in December 2007 to considerable fanfare. Its homepage boasted flashy graphics and the lofty slogan “no mass media,” a play on the Spanish phrase “no más media” (“no more media”). Within months, Soitu was honored by the Society for News Design and eventually copped two Online News Association awards. The ONA praised its “underlying philosophy of sharing, linking and audience-focused engagement.” It had half a million unique visitors a month and accessed another two million users monthly through its third-party widgets.

In Spain — where the politicized national press has drawn public skepticism in recent years and newspaper circulation and Internet usage are both markedly below most of the country’s European counterparts’ — Soitu was widely regarded as a breath of fresh air.

But in October 2009, the site shuttered after just 22 months. Its main financial backer and principal shareholder, the Spanish bank BBVA, had pulled the plug.

“Soitu was an experiment, a new media laboratory,” founder Gumersindo Lafuente told me. “We have always believed in the socialization of information, but often when people comment on the news, it’s just pure noise. We wanted to capitalize on the whole flow of relevant information that society can contribute using tools that make this influx controllable.”

Soitu hinged on audience participation. Contributors whose photography, articles, or essays were selected for the homepage received 20 euros. Soitu’s web developers created a slew of original widgets that users could post on their own websites and blogs for free — an attempt, in Lafuente’s words, “to keep conquering spaces on the web with the Soitu brand without spending money on advertising.” Utoi was a homegrown microblogging social network — intended to help journalists rummage for story ideas — that allowed multimedia to be embedded directly in posts and could scan text and suggest tags for entries. And the streamlined crowd-aided news aggregator El Selector let hundreds of collaborators from different spheres of the web (tech, medicine, politics, arts, et al) flag stories that they’d read and liked.

“The idea was to share the task of deciding what was news with the readers,” said Lafuente, who previously ran the digital edition of Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “Soitu” is a fusion of the Spanish words “Soy” and “tú,” or “I am you.”

Soitu’s technological tools were groundbreaking. But its business plan, Lafuente admits, was not.

An overly traditional advertising model and excessive dependence on a single investor — the bank BBVA owned 49 percent — proved to be Soitu’s downfall. “We just had neither the size nor the time to find a focus [besides advertising],” Lafuente said. Developing its specialized technology was Soitu’s principal cost, but the relatively plush Madrid headquarters and large in-house staff of editors, journalists, web developers, and graphic designers were also considerable expenses. When the global economic crisis knocked Soitu to its knees, BBVA backed out and Lafuente struggled to track down another investor, to no avail.

So what would he do differently, if he could launch Soitu all over again?

“Clearly I would build a structure that was lighter on expenses,” he said. “I would choose a structure that was lighter on staff with more freelancers. With a product that was more ‘arrevistado’ [formatted similar to a magazine] with two parallel flows of information, one very up-to-date and another with more of its own news and deeper reporting. Nothing in between the two. And fewer structural costs (the office, etc).”

But for the most part, he added, the site itself — the technological tools, the branding — would be the same.

“The most important factor is to build a brand and to know how to speak to your audience,” Lafuente said. “I still think that advertising is the main investment and that to opt for other investments, you first have to cultivate your product and your audience.”

Spanish media experts seemed to agree that despite Soitu’s innovative design, its business plan was woefully shortsighted.

“Soitu was a great spectacle, but it wasn’t a realistic spectacle,” said Concha Edo, a journalism professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the author of several studies on the impact of the Internet on the media in Spain.

In the Spanish press, Soitu was elegized like a beloved politician who had died an untimely death. An editorial about the site’s closure in Spanish newspaper ABC was titled “Requiem for an example of creativity.” El País described Soitu’s collapse as the end of “one of the first completely digital media projects in Spain.”

For Lafuente, there will be other opportunities to experiment. In January he was appointed managing editor of El País, where he oversees elpais.com.

“We knew we were doing something new and therefore risky with Soitu,” Lafuente said. “But that was the goal — to do something different.”

An Internet free of language barriers? The Economist on human/tech-hybrid web page translation http://bit.ly/cOn09g (via @EthanZ) »

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YouTube gets automatic captioning for all videos using Google’s voice recognition softwarehttp://j.mp/dpxg2V »

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Nonprofit outlets almost always measure their success in terms of influence, not audience, because their customers are the donors who’ve donated cash to influence politics, promote justice, or otherwise build a better world.

(His view of the nonprofit drive to change the world is more jaded than mine. What for-profit newspaper writer got into the business not to change the world?)

Whatever your stance, the reality is here: Maximizing impact is a key part of nonprofits’ aims. Outlets like the Center for Public Integrity, The American Independent News Network (where I edited The Washington Independent), ProPublica, and others measure the reach and impact of their work to drum up support. They do this a number of ways. Center for Public Integrity published its work under a Creative Commons license to try to get other publications to reprint it and amplify the message. (They also participate in a young, and struggling, AP-nonprofit distribution program.) The Washington Independent tracks both media pickup and how its work resulted in real change. ProPublica partners with newspapers around the country in printing its stories — all of which is aimed at maximizing their journalism’s impact.

Today ProPublica is unveiling a new approach in increasing impact: a step-by-step reporting guide that shows how its reporters executed a major investigation, with the hopes that state-based reporters and interested citizen journalists will continue their work.

Reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber have created a guide that reverse-engineers how they reported a year-and-a-half-long investigation on how states handle disciplinary action against nurses. The results of their work were alarming, and its consequences were swift: One day after the Los Angeles Times ran a story on how it took years for the state nursing board to take disciplinary action, while allowing dangerous nurses to keep working, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger removed most members of the state nursing board. Newspapers in several other states have picked up on ProPublica’s work and run their own versions.

It took Ornstein and Weber over a year to research their series, but by making the state-based data available and building a guide on how to do the reporting, they say it should be much simpler and less time-consuming for another reporter to follow in their footsteps. The data alone should at least help “find the smoke” in federal reporting-requirement lapses quickly, so a reporter knows where to invest her time, Weber said. They’re both eager to talk to interested reporters, too. (You can contact them directly, or join in on a conference call that will be scheduled soon.)

“When you called all these different states, you realized you were talking to folks who had never talked to journalists before,” Weber told me. “It made me think it was so ripe for local reporters to take a look at this because, frankly, everyone is touched by a nurse.” The guide lays out seven broad steps for reporting out a regulatory board story, with details under each section, including relevant federal law. It also includes relevant links for certain states.

She added the guide’s methods could be applied to any regulatory board, not just those that govern nurses. “This gives them a map to say, ‘Okay, let’s go take a look at this’…They could maybe change the way these boards are overseen in their state if they find, for instance, they never disciplined anyone, which we found, and that just seems impossible.”

Ornstein told me he hopes this experiment, specifically pointing to the online database of disclosure data, creates real change — and impact. “If somebody has to pay $20 to get a copy of a disciplinary order against a nurse, if they’re looking for a home health nurse, is that something they’re really going to do? Is the state really helping them make a smart choice to protect them? I don’t think so. By pointing this out, we’re really doing a service.”

This morning I spoke with Goli Sheikholeslami, the vice president and general manager of digital operations for The Washington Post/ She said that the Post isn’t thinking about the $1.99 a year as a moneymaker in itself.

“It’s not really so much about this from the point of view of a large revenue stream, but trying to gauge how our readers react to paying for content,” she explained. “It really provides us with a platform for experimentation.”

Why $1.99? The Post considered it a price iPhone users are accustomed to paying, so they’d start there. I asked Sheikholeslami if, beyond the annual subscription fee, there might be other premium content available for in-app purchase. Sports Illustrated’s free swimsuit app has generated a lot of $1.99 purchases inside the app for more bikinis. And Rodale has had success selling additional content within its workout apps; one in three users buys additional content within an app.

“That model does sound like a sound one,” Sheikholeslami said. “Offering a product for free and then a premium product inside of it might be something we’d consider. We might want to test around and see if that model works.”

What about online? Is the Post priming customers to pay for the Post’s online content?

“Right now we don’t have any sort of immediate plans [to charge for web content], but we’re definitely thinking about what new products we can create, including on the web,” Sheikholeslami told me. “If it makes sense to charge for it, we would.”

In addition to the subscription fee, the Post’s new app includes a prominent splash-page ad and display ads throughout the app. Some have argued that advertisers might find an audience that’s paid for digital content more attractive to advertisers than one that is surfing freely. But Sheikholeslami told me the ad strategy isn’t connected to the subscription model.

“I wouldn’t say it’s more or less attractive. From an advertising perspective we do think we can attract a sizeable audience, even with a paid iPhone app,” she said.

Parse out the numbers, and they’re quite puzzling.

The average news reader spends little time on newspaper-owned sites, from a 20 minutes a month or so on the New York Times site to eight to 12 minutes on most local newspaper sites. That’s minutes per month. Those numbers, as tracked by Nielsen and reported monthly by Editor and Publisher, are steady at best, showing, in fact, some recent decline. They are, literally, stuck in time.

Then, take the number of minutes Internet users spend on social sites. Nielsen’s January tally showed seven hours of usage a month on Facebook alone, in the U.S., blowing away all competition. That’s some 40 times more time spent on social sites than on any single news site.

Which is a bit deflating for those in the news business. So let’s try to get at what the numbers may be telling us.

Maybe that big Facebook number isn’t as important as we think. We all have long spent much more time in conversation, much of it idle, some of it about what we’re doing right now or plan to do (the “statusphere” of the pre-digital world) than we have in reading the news. So social-site time may replace water-cooler conversation time. Further, do those Nielsen numbers mean that someone is actively perusing Facebook walls (or Twitter feeds) until their eyes fall out — or that they are keeping windows open on their computers? Are they engaged in a way that advertisers care about?

Then again, if Facebook time is a proxy for our new information centers — where we go to find out what’s happening in the community and the wider world — then it is becoming the new home page. Recall how newspaper sites all put up “make us your home page” buttons more than a decade ago? Constructively, that’s what Facebook done, without the button. That’s not surprising; it’s the ultimate page about what we care about most: me. Sure, some of the posts tell us about the wider world, but a good 80 percent or more tell us something personal.

If social sites, including Twitter, are a new center — Nick Negroponte’s “Daily Me” morphed — that’s a new challenge, and maybe opportunity, for the news industry. The challenge: getting the news to where the readers are hanging out, and figuring out to monetize there. The opportunity: If properly seeded in the social sites, the readers themselves do the (free) marketing and distribution of the content. The early tests of Facebook Connect appear promising here, though too few news companies are experimenting at any kind of scale. (See “The Newsonomics of social media optimization“.)

Now, let’s look at the Newsonomics of time-on-site — how well such time is monetized.

We’ll do some extrapolating with Facebook, to figure out what 2010 might look like. Let’s start with January numbers of 113 million U.S. users and seven hours time spent. Let’s be conservative and say for the year, it ends up with 120 million users and the same seven hours. That’s 84 hours a year for the 120 million, or a little over 10 billion hours of time spent.

For newspapers, let’s use one of the higher-achieving companies for comparison. The New York Times has been averaging about 20 million monthly uniques. It’s time-on-site varies considerably, with the news (!). Let’s give it 25 minutes a month on average. That’s 5 hours a year, or in total, about 100 million hours.

So, in time spent, the Times is less than one percent of Facebook.

Now, let’s look broadly, and quickly, at revenue. The Times’ 2009 digital revenue: about $342 million. Or $3.42 for each hour spent on the site.

Facebook’s revenue numbers are unannounced, but smart industry speculators put its 2010 number at about an even billion dollars. Or about a dime an hour of time spent.

$3.42 vs 10 cents. The Times is monetizing its time on site 34 times better than Facebook.

The Times and other big established news brands will say that’s more than fair, given the attention of the audience, the premium nature of the content and the demographics of the audience. Facebook, and its financial and spiritual advisors, will tell you that’s all upside. They’d point to yesterday’s partnership announcement with (Adobe’s) Omniture on ad placements as just one small step to a large revenue future.

Photo by Robbert van der Steeg used under a Creative Commons license.

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