Reviewing Content

July 10th, 2007

Everyone likes good publicity: just look at the film posters quoting reviews of the movie. Of course, these can be misleading. A recent blurb for the TV movie The Girl in the Café quoted The Oregonian newspaper:

“An endearing romantic comedy.”

However, what The Oregonian actually said was:

“This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.”

You can see more of these at Gelf Magazine.

A company like the one I work for doesn’t need to be so economical with the actualité: these days Regus is well used to good news stories so one of the content ideas I’ve been examining is a gallery of what professional news organisations say about Regus, a sort of online scrapbook.

Of course content usually comes with a price, and as Regus discovered recently with a CNBC video clip of or CEO, Mark Dixon, simply linking to a video or article is not enough to guarantee of page views and good-linking SEO. Within hours of linking to the clip on CNBC, they imposed a subscription-only tag. There’s nothing suspicious here: in a charged-content model, content is usually free for a set period before the curtain comes down.

News providers like magazines, newspapers and broadcast media have been arguing for years about charging for content (news agencies like Reuters and the Press Association survive by charging for content, but their main customers are the aforesaid magazines, newspapers and broadcast media). Yet because the enduring ethos of the Internet is still “everything is free”, it’s been very difficult to get drive-by surfers to pay for anything. Some have tried. Most have failed. My former employers, TIME magazine, charged for content from their printed magazine for four years and made a profit — the only part of the operation that did!! — but when their sister site AOL decided to open up their content to everyone, TIME decided to drop the “curtain” — and still made a profit!

Incidentally, TIME used to charge for magazine content seven days after it hit the newsstands on the basis that people would pay for a magazine online which they couldn’t buy on the streets. The exception to this rule was religious stories — which they charged for immediately: religious feeling as it is in the U.S., readers would pay for that content at any time. Religious stories were the big money earners!

The experience at Regus is that a “What They Say About Us” page runs into the buffers because some of the content linked to will be off limits to non-payers (or at least non-subscribers), and to ensure that dead links are kept to a minimum — an absolute must for SEO — requires a high-maintenance solution: checking all links all the time.