BusinessWeek: Judging The Must Read
Posted on October 19, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake, Advertising/Marketing |
“Business Week’s web presence has certainly grown,” says the Financial Times. “In August, BusinessWeek reached more than 7.1m unique users, its highest yet, and page views were nearly 50m. Online advertising at BusinessWeek.com rose 61 per cent year on year. Print advertising was largely flat.”
FT.com / Technology - BusinessWeek looks to web in battle for readers
Business Week’s success in increasing online content and ad income is a good palce to start looking at personalised news and crowd news versus editorialised. So to the debate on ad rates we might say when you get it right, you get it right. The other issue through is being the must read and how well BusinessWeek editors handle that value judgements. on readers’ behalf.
Earlier I posted on how I thought the aggregators that try to read your pattern of information use, to refine your news feeds, face the problem of you changing your mind all too often - under the influence of a more efficient news market.
Editors were traditionally good at anticipating your needs. They’re now challenged by personalised news and by the crowd type news sites such as DIGG. Can they compete?
Well, BusinessWeek seems to be doing ok but I suspect what will have to happen is the frequency and scope of coverage will have to speed up and broaden out (which is already in train) and some content visibility tools as well as better search return prioritising will have to come into their online play.
I tried the search term “parenting” on businessweek online and was surprised to get over 1,000 returns. So coverage scope: not bad. Just I had to wade through the first three returns’ pages to realise nothing interested me. Not that the material was bad, but it didn’t get to what I thought might be critical - what are the business implications of today’s parenting crisis? I actually got parenting blogs on this business site, which is not where I would go to share parenting concernes.
The search returns were also a mix of blog posts and articles - though I had no idea just looking at the list. I don’t mind going to a Working Parents Blog on BusinessWeek but before I make the trip I’d like to see a signal that says blog. Even on the landing page it’s not clear it’s a blog, or who edits the blog, if anybody.
The search term “cooking” again got a mix, this time also including articles on the US economy overheating.
The site is successful and the editors seem to have theire finger on the pulse but the technology and some structural decisions could improve matters, and perhaps leaving to the blogosphere some of the issues that we as consuemrs are good at - sharing with each other our concerns and solutions.
technorati tags:BusinessWeek, online, ads, news, aggregators, readers
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