Web crawlers threaten sustainability

Benefits are certainly not one sided – Internet and mobile phone companies are rushing to take advantage of the content that the more traditional media companies can provide.

Dean Singleton, CEO of US company Media News, quoted in one of the presentations, perhaps summarised it best: “We'll do our jobs, they'll do theirs and we'll both benefit. There'll be revenue sharing on both sides. We really see it as 1+1=3.”

Future?

The future for newspapers may be more about news gathering and content than distribution, but there certainly is a future. And it is a future where the choice of partners will be more important than ever before. In fact it seems that newspapers are poised to benefit from the competition between the major search engines and digital media companies.

Mike Smith, executive director of the Media Management Centre at Northwestern University in the US, looked at the partnership formed late last year between Yahoo! and 12 US media companies, representing 264 daily newspapers.

“Who benefits from this kind of development? It's too early really to tell, but at this stage it looks like everyone benefits. The audience benefits with local news and relevant advertising; the newspapers benefit because they are using new technologies to reach a wider audience and a new advertising platform; and Yahoo! benefits because it gets greater exposure, increased credibility and access to a very savvy local sales force.”

Rob Jonas, head of media and publishing for Google Europe, Middle East and Africa, revealed that Google is taking the partnership even further. Like Yahoo!, it is linking online advertisers with newspaper-generated copy, but it is also venturing into print media by auctioning advertising space in local newspapers.

“Its still in alpha stage, not even beta yet,” he warned. “Google's strength is putting small advertisers on the same footing as large advertisers. How do we make that work for print? We don't know yet, but we think there is a lot to be gained from doing that.”

Culture change

Mike Smith agreed that the potential benefits were huge, but said his “biggest concern” was whether newspapers are willing to change their culture. “They need to invest in change management programmes, they need to be able to embrace the changes in their business models,' he said.

It's not just on the internet that newspaper content is finding a new home.

“Norwegians spent €125 million on mobile content in 2006,” said Erik Nord, deputy CEO of Norwegian telecommunications giant Telenor. “More than 70% of this revenue went back to content providers, including newspapers.”

Interestingly, these content hungry mobile phone owners are most likely to be football fans, and aged between 31 and 55 years old. Norwegian football fans are spending €8 million each month to keep up to date with their favourite sport.

Martha Stone, SFN director for the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), was very positive about spinoffs from digital media for the newspaper industry. WAN's new research on revenues and audience at newspaper Internet operations shows that media in general is “growing in leaps and bounds”.

“Internet ad spend is growing faster than any other media,” she said “but none of the big research houses can agree on the expected impact of the internet on traditional print media.”

Mobile

WAN's research revealed that as more people access news on their mobile phones, more of them visit Internet news sites, including those of their local newspapers.

“And while there is some indication that print circulation is dropping in some areas, the percentage of people who look for their news on both the net and in their newspapers is increasing rapidly, and more than makes up for the loss of circulation in print media,” Stone said.

If the future for newspapers lies in providing quality content for digital media, then it is important that they are they get the revenue they deserve. One of the problems for newspapers has been that web crawlers (the search engines' content robots) and other web pages can grab content in an uncontrolled way, which threatens the sustainability of the content providers.

Media 24's Southern GM, Daniel Neethling, explained how his company had joined with other publishers worldwide in an attempt to address the threat.

“It is important to have a protocol in place that is understandable by man and machine,” he said. “The Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP) aims to standardise a framework for machine readable permissions.”

The ACAP pilot project is running for the whole of 2007. It is in the process of developing agreed symantics and syntax for web crawlers as well as print publications so that publishers can make it clear which of their content is available for indexing and which is not.

“The search engines are involved in the project at this stage,” he said, “but are not necessarily committed.”

Media 24, like many publishers, wants to pursue a commercial arrangement with search engines.

“But we also value our content and need to honour our arrangements with third party content providers as well,” Neethling said.

“We need to find a workable solution that will benefit us all.”