June 24, 2009
by tolles at 2:07 PM
Peter Kafka of AllthingsD, got Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in to project what the "online newspaper for tomorrow" might look like.
Mark posited that with 40MM monthly pageviews, and $560k of revenue (half is which is from a network of blogs or some Outside.in like stuff, not part of the core site), a reasonably sized city paper could afford a staff of around 20 people.
Two problems.
Only a handful of newspapers have the 40MM pageviews. like less than 20.
And, next, you are estimating a $7.00 eCPM sitewide, and a pretty healthy eCPm for your 3rd party network revenue. Now, I'm rooting for those guys at Outside.in to deliver on this kind of revenue, but we have used every single ad network on the web here at Topix, and let me tell you, getting $7.00 sitewide eCPM on news is really really tough.
So, what's the solutuion? Personally, after talking to Tim Redmond at the Bay Guardian and Billy Jensen at Village Voice Media, I think the alt weeklies have a pretty good balance of print and online and a sales effort that makes sense for a locality, and those publications are in fact right in line with the staffing that Mark is talking about, have a good shot at selling lcoal advertising and seem to be doing ok.
But.
There's no way that your typical midtier local newspaper is getting to 40MM monthly pageviews any time soon, and that means a staff of 20 is probably going to be pushing it for a local online only publication.
June 10, 2009
by amy at 12:26 PM
You know what the Internet is good for? Shopping. Researching the best deal. Sleuthing quality through reviews. And shopping.
And I'm not talking about e-commerce (although I'm as big a fan of Zappos as anyone). I'm talking about finding out the best deals on products in my town.
Since Topix has news & community for every city and town in the U.S., it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with services looking to leverage the growing, national footprint of local audiences we've built.
But as with the news we aggregate, it can be a challenge to present these myriad partnerships in a way that's compelling and clear to visitors. In an effort to accomplish that -- for every city in the U.S. no less -- we've built a new shopping page, which gathers together our commercial partnerships in one, handy place.
This example for San Mateo, California, offers electronics and appliances from Krillion.com, clothes and accessories from Nearbynow.com, useful product reviews from Wize.com, yellow page listings, and coupons from local businesses.
Looking for a car, place to live, a pet or a date? This new page also helps visitors find our existing classified partnerships with SimplyHired.com, Cars.com, Apartments.com, Trulia.com, Oodle.com, and Match.com.
Happy shopping.
May 29, 2009
by amy at 2:14 PM
Here at Topix, we receive a lot of press releases. Since we post our news by aggregation or volunteer editors, these releases usually end up in the circular file.
But this press release caught my eye today, when it came in on the fax:
Staunton, IL is proud to host the 21st Annual Tour de Donut and 4th Annual Rib Cook-off on Saturday, July 11, 2009. The Tour de Donut is a unique bike race, in which you can eat donuts at the designated stops in order to reduce your race time. Last year, more than 850 riders participated in the race. Registration for the race is now open. In conjunction with the race, a Rib Cook-off will be occurring in which food will be served starting at 9am, with the ribs being served at 5pm. Entertainment will be provided by Five and Dimers, The Wherehouse Project, and Gumbohead. For more information visit, bebikeclub.com or stauntonil.com.
Sounds like the Bay to Breakers in SF has some competition for wacky.
May 18, 2009
by amy at 1:18 PM
Many thanks to the Topix community and CNET Webware editors for voting Topix a Webware 100 Winner in the Location-Based Services category.
The 2009 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation. Webware editors received and reviewed thousands of entries. Then, the Web 2.0 user community cast more than 630,000 votes in an online voting poll which ultimately selected the winners.
“This annual listing has become such an essential resource for people who want to learn more about Web 2.0 and the many ways it can help them stay connected,” said Rafe Needleman, editor at Webware and CNET. “The Web 2.0 community and our editors ultimately selected the very best sites, services and applications that have made a lasting impression.”
The Webware editors had some kind words for Topix, specifically, "It's an ever-swirling page of news that's updated at all hours, and on all topics."
We're proud of the recognition from the CNET Webware editors, and the support from our community. You can join in on the news and community in your own town today.
April 27, 2009
by tolles at 1:33 PM
Virginia Heffernan's article Comment is King in yesterday's Sunday NY Times magazine was an insightful piece around the role of commentary on news sites like the Washington Post, Salte and others -- although perhaps more insightful than she intended..
For what Ms. Heffernan really shines light on is the way that journalists at publications see comments, commentary and commenters.
"Most journalists hate to read it, because it’s stinging and distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections unless they intend to post something themselves."
I'll skip the knock about unsubstatiated generalizations, since I think she's right -- print and old school journalists do hate commentary. And I will give a shout out to MS. Hefferman here for what opened that paragraph:
"Someone should be paying more attention, especially since online newspaper commenters as a whole seem to have (at least) the stamina, drive and spare time to become a cogent part of online journalism."
Well, they are. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch regularly responds in the comments of his news site. And if you were following what the AP was up to, the comments were where it was at for that story, with Jim Kennedy and Arrington mixing it up. And, here at Topix, we're powering through the lack of local reporting by enabling the people to power that news themselves through commentary in over 20,000 cities and towns.
What she's missing here, and what informs the relationship here around journalists and commentary is that commentary makes the story secondary. In commentary, the original article becomes the seed of a conversation or discussion. And, the commentary is not merely some sort of add on to the article, but the main point of the exercise.
The Internet is not, at the end of the day, a distribution vehicle for your content. The Internet is a place for people to interact and participate with your content, add to it, and make something new. The people transform what they get to touch.
The article describes some of the more common behaviors in online commnetary -- the back and forth between commenters, and the observations that most commentary is written for the commenter themselves. If the article had enabled commentary, I would have perhaps pointed out that the Internet does not have "signature 'fact-checking'", or rather, it's called fisking
Perhaps more telling is her point that the fact checking "rarely potent enough to compel corrections by The Post". Maybe it's because the comments are petty and banal. Or maybe the Post (and other publications) aren't really involved or paying attention. Or both.
. And maybe nothing can — or even should — be done to curb entirely the brute urge of readers to defy what they’ve read.
Despite Ms. Heffernan's clear bias here, she gets a lot of it right, and if you care about the future of what news looks like, and why journalists and journalism will fight that future into bankruptcy, this is a great piece.
April 21, 2009
by tolles at 7:34 AM
In March of 2005, we received investment from the three largest newspaper companies in the US, Gannett, Tribune and Knight Ridder. Flash forward four years: In March 2009, we edged out USA TODAY to become their #1 media property at 6.5M unique visitors (comScore) with a focus on hyper local participation. Out of US newspaper sites, only the New York Times has more unique visitors.
News Site Unique Visitors (000)
NYTimes.com 10,942
Topix.com 6,495
USA Today Sites 5,960
WashingtonPost.com 5,829
LATimes.com 5,173
Source: comScore, Media Metrix, March 2009
The folks I’ve worked with over the past four years are smart, savvy and realize where they stand. They wanted to make sure they had a stake in a news aggregator with Google having just launched Google news. A little while into their investment, we told them that news aggregation was a great start to a business, but it wasn’t very interesting, from either a traffic or a revenue standpoint. And that doubling down on hyper local news – especially where there currently wasn’t any – was the strategy we were going to pursue.
As Robert Scoble points out in his recent post, Topix and our pursuit of a model to deal with hyperlocal news, is one of the online efforts our newspaper investors have a stake in, and also that local is a pretty major part of the future of the news busienss
While we started out as a broad-based news aggregator, we noticed that what people wanted most was news about their town. So, we moved to augment our news with comments and stories from our visitors. And today it’s great to see that our strategy has paid traffic dividends, and being the #1 site with respect to unique visitors with company like the Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and USA TODAY is something we’re pretty proud of here at Topix.
There has been a lot of hue and cry about decisions made by the newspaper companies. Looking at the moves made by Gannett, Tribune and Knight Ridder (acquired by McClatchy), it is not like they did nothing. They created the #1 job site online, Careerbuilder, some of the largest classified sites online (cars.com. apartments.com, homegain, and the #1 local news site online – Topix). Despite what journalists think, with the decoupling of classified revenues, there is going to be a huge restructuring in the news business, and it’s going to be bloody. There’s really nothing that would have prevented most of what’s happening here.
Over the past four years, we have grown Topix with its roots in aggregation technology, to the place where people discuss the news and issues important to where the live and work. Embracing audience participation is for us the critical engine for content creation and traffic growth.
Local news is not a search problem, it’s a community opportunity.
There’s still a lot of work to do here, but it feels good to tell my board that we are their #1 most visited site.
April 10, 2009
by tolles at 4:26 PM
Mark Dienger, roving reporter for the LAist interviewed my at the Web 2.0 show, and I think he teased out a pretty good overview of Topix, the opportunity for local content and advertising as well as my take on LA vs. SF tech....
April 9, 2009
by tolles at 1:33 PM
Lots of discussion around the fate of the news business -- for us, connecting our local audiences to business wanting to reach them seems to be a growing part of our revenues, and I'm on the road talking about that to people at conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo.
Here's a video from Jolie O'Dell who's reporting for Brian Solis' Bub.licio.us where I talk to Jolie about Topix and what's going on in the local space...
