Why Pay-For-News Won't Work: The First Mover Disadvantage

Last time I checked, Al Gore was charging $175,000 for a speech.

I appreciate your tireless work Atul.

Tom - you are right - I shouldn't be so pedantic about it. Gabe seems to online 24x7 so one could also argue he counts for more than one person. And thanks for you flattering comments about me in the article. Cheers.

Personally, I think we're moments away from a paradigm shift in how we rank and filter the web.

Integration of social media annotation data into search algorithms will effectively turn every one of us into an editor of the web. Eliminating the the need for manual tweaks and human editors.

Definitely agree, always good to see these studies and they also seem to be getting more sophisticated/insightful which is positive. Your point about the middle management layer is an interesting one. Could certainly see how that would make sense. Thanks for the post, it inspired a post over on our blog and some conversation here.

Joseph, Text 100

Marshall: Yes, you are right, PageRank is a human-aided system but the harvesting of that knowledge was done by machine, but is this is no loger good enough and requires direct supervision by humans? That seems to be what's happening...

Thanks Atul. Gabe said that he and Omer are engaged in editorial duties so it still adds up to 6 but I take your point about them not doing it full time. But I guess this also means that Techmeme more than doubled their editors...

Tom - A small correction. I believe the # of editors is 4 (or 4.5 depends if you count Gabe is an editor or tweaks the algorithm) and not 6. I believe Megan was the first editor back in Dec 2008 and then Techmeme announced the addition of three more yesterday

In many ways Google is a human-aided algorithm as well.

PageRank leverages human editorial decisions by measuring linking patterns between sites.

Similarly the Hilltop algorithm, developed by Krishna Bharat creator of Google News, uses a list of expert documents to refine search rankings.

Ian: I agree that human editors can make Techmeme better. But it won't neccesarily help list other blogs because Techmeme monitors a core set of blogs/news sites and if you are not in it your chances of being mentioned are slim. You make a good point about what happens when they go home for the night - I guess the machine takes over...

I think human editors can improve quality and help frustrated editors (myself included) complaining about why their blogs aren't making it onto TM, but I am curious to see how Techmeme's new setup can be optimized for speedy updates when humans take a lunch break or sign off for the night. That was one area in which the old Techmeme setup and the current Google News setup have excelled.

I'm not surprised the results of this study reflect the growing influence of social media. What's more interesting, in my opinion, is what seems to be a more fundamental shift toward collaborative decision-making in professional environments. Certainly social media facilitates that but it strikes me as a deeper shift than technology and communication tools.

Yeah. And, too bad for everyone, because there is enough room to increase the pie, we call www, and thus earn more money, instead of trying to carve out as big a piece of it as possible, often at the expense of others.

The latter strategy also brings money, but it is so shortsighted.

I cannot say what Mr Murdoch is planning to do, but I agree that he has a lot stronger hand now than the search engines ever will. Unless, of course, they start creating their own and/or buy 3rd party content, which is unlikely -- that would be against their current business model.

Thanks Lisa, it's good to know that there are alternative choices.

I agree that where value is destroyed new value is created. But the creation doesn't equal the destruction, it is not a law of physics where matter and energy are always conserved. I make no ethical or moral judgements I am bringing attention to what the Internet enables, to what is already happening.

I definitely would not invest a lot of money at any one time. Cost per hour should be analyzed before committing to be part of a virtual world.

It would be interesting if virtual worlds were required to reveal what the average cost per hour is for the "average user".

One thing that concerns me in all of this is how in depth reporting will suffer if everyone simply takes their news in sound bites and snippets. But as Jonathan says, Google is only an enabler. People are demanding the services they want in this digital age.

"that's not a model that helps publishers fund their content no matter how much optimization they do and landing pages they create."

Tell that to the numerous B2B publishers that have built their digital business models this way and are doing quite well compared to their consumer counterparts. I'm sure they'll find your and Mr. Murdoch's point of view quite amusing.