Secrets of the City

I have just noted that unlike many other sites, MNSpeak/SOTCT does not have the handy little social media widget options to share posts, although they do automatcally go on Twitter, in a couple of different accounts.

Interestingly, I was just Digging an op/ed I wrote at the TC Daily Planet (it’s in today’s MinnPost, too). I don’t try to “game the system,” as Village Voice media seem to be doing, but I like having the option st share on the Interwebs.

Oh, and I like that I can embed stories and video into my Facebook page, too. Jason’s Station is particularly good about the social media links.

I will link back to my film review from imdb (in the “external reviews” section) and share my stories on Facebook and Twitter, but I just don’t see the point — and the value in the time spent — in chasing after national readers for a publication, like City Pages, that mostly relies on local revenue, unless it is to gain a fast but meaningless bump in online readers.

The key is about developing a base of dedicated readers, just as business try to build regular customers or theaters try to develop recurring patrons. And that’s done slowly, over time, with good content, and by targeting the people who are most likely to respond to what you have to offer. If Ed is right and City Pages only have 100 subscribers in Google Reader, they have done an especially poor job of that — that’s less subscribers than I have for my own blog.

I’d be interested in hearing the reasoning behind putting resources into driving one-time, out-of-state readers to the City Pages site, because it eludes me.

My own take on this is here:

http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2009/02/05/6454/ed_kohler_diggs_up_dirt_on_city_pages_web_strategy

As I noted in an earlier piece, Braublog only has 66 Google Reader subs and Glean has 58 though they are the most read things on the site. Despite Kevin Hoffman’s memorable allusion to finishing first at a Special Olympics, it’s a decent chunk of hits.

Fortunately, MinnPost’s main feed has about 1,000 subs, so looking at an individual site item might not be the best way to judge local-only traffic.

Anyway, I Twitter mostly to let locals know what’s up – that brings in 50 to 100 hits to the blog usually. I send links to Romenesko because it’s good for my national profile (should I ever need one) and actually helps with local legitimacy – I’m sure I get some callbacks from local media types who know their orgs are being talked about on a national journalism site.

As for broader national hit-craving, again, I think it makes some sense if you geotarget and get another incremental revenue stream – as long as your true local comparative advantage doesn’t get undermined by national hit-getting tweaks.

Right now, I have a completely viral phenomenon going with a 1.474 gigapixel photo I reblogged two weeks ago. It’s still getting crazy hits – directs, not referrals.

I didn’t blog it to get those hits – it was a fun item that caught my eye – and it’s not really my “core” mission, but it’s fun to see what the world likes when you aren’t gaming it.

Hey, fun addendum – CP Blotter now has 123 Google Reader subs. Big growth since Ed started posting about it!

They now have 10 more readers through Google Reader than I do.

Wait, let me correct that. I have 125 subscribers total. 27 through Google Reader. But, then, I have a blog about the films of William Shatner, weird candy I eat, and naughty songs by a creepy puppet.

Come to think of it, why don’t I have more subscribers?

in chasing after national readers for a publication, like City Pages, that mostly relies on local revenue…

Advertising and revenue issues aside (I reallize that neither CP or this site are nonprofit, and exist to generate ad revenue), it is surprising how many out-of-state people are interested in what we talk about here.

Recently, I saw a piece I wrote nearly two years ago on a European car news website (it had been translated into German). I have also seen my stuff show up in Hong Kong and South Africa.

Oh sure, it’s worth putting out there (all of the SoC stories have a “share” link under their photos, including a link to Digg.) It just doesn’t seem to be worth trying to game.

Lambert talks to Ed: “They’ve had so much success with Digg. It’s like a drug for them, I think. They are so far down that road with this thing, I wonder how they can stop?”

If I were a reporter on this story, here are a couple of questions I would ask:

Of Digg: is this against your conditions of use policy, and if so, what action will you take?

of VV Media: what sort of internal communication do you use among the various papers to be sure that each other’s stories are Dugg? Will you be switching to Reddit any time soon?

of VV advertisers: Will you be asking for make goods for your ads being served to people outside of your trade area?

of VV editors: When you Digg all these Blotter posts–so few of which even represent your own work, but are instead rehashes of original reporting done by other media–can you sleep at night?

If I were a reporter on the story, I would ask the following question:

What the hell am I doing here? I’m an arts critic.

I know that we periodically submit stories to Fark, and when they get there, it gets huge traffic. There’s considerable debate as to whether that traffic is worthwhile. All it does is raise expectations that we’ll come up with something even Farkier the next month to send and juice the traffic even higher. It falsely raises expectations.

In a way, I salute City Pages for coming up with a free way to juice their traffic. But it’s a one-time hit. Those people don’t come back.

Jason, it seems to me that they are paying people to “juice” traffic, which 1) isn’t free; and 2)diverts resources from actually creating original material instead of just linking to other people’s work then “juicing” that.

It just seems so scattershot as well. When I write a theater story, I try to let people in the local theater scene know about it, as well as patrons of theater. It’s going to be a smaller pool of readers, but they are actually going to read the stories and, if they like them, keep coming back.

Also, hits alone don’t tell the story. I’d be curious if the bounce rate is factored in there. A lot of people will click on a link and then click right back out if they don’t like what they see.

So let’s clarify this…

I think there are two very different stories here…

1) VVM writers/editors Digg all their stories, and people associated with the company are involved in small campaigns to get others to Digg them.

OR:

2) VVM pays an external company to rack up Digg counts.

The implications, accusations, and ethics of each:

1) The is what The Deets post refers to. And frankly, it’s a totally fine practice. Companies much bigger and much smaller than VVM do this all the time. Fuck, the New York Times does this. This is a non-story.

2) The is what The Deets post sorta insinuates, but never out-right claims. I think for this to be an actual story, someone would have to prove this point.

The issue is not that they are promoting their stories on Digg, Rex. The issue is whether or not they are then selling ads based around that readership, since their ads are not geotargeted, which means advertisers will get a smaller ROI.

Oh sure… that’s sorta a story too. But I’m not sure it’s any more of a story than it ever has been. DeRusha points to Fark, which combined with Drudge, can cause a local tv website’s traffic to double on some months. That’s sorta always been the case with local sites. (It was the same with The Rake when it had a story that got picked up nationally.)

It’s not just Digg. They’re doing it with Stumbleupon and Reddit too, and tried it in the past with Newsvine, Furl, Mixx, etc. Here’s what I wrote on it:

http://minnesotaindependent.com/25561/village-voice-gaming-digg-and-other-social-media-sites

I do have calls into Digg about the Terms of Use question Tom brings up, and with Nielsen NetRatings to see if they know how common this is. I’m guessing we’ve all tried it, but not to such a systematized extent.

Rex, wouldn’t the fact that VVMers are paid to Digg — i.e. that they do it as part of their job duties within business hours — part of it?

(Aaron sent me the second link earlier today. I didn’t see the first link until just now. I still sorta think this is a non-story — or at least it’s a pervasive phenom.)

Back to Digg… those two Diggers have such a negligible influence on Digg’s overall ranking that it doesn’t matter at all. I mean, like I said, employees at much bigger companies are encouraged to seed their stories on social media sites like this. It’s nothing weird.

However, if they’re either a) paying a company to game it or b) setting up hundreds of fake accounts to game it… then that’s a story!

That’s the story Ed was pointing to, Rex; it’s a follow up to his piece on geotargeting.

And you may be right that it’s not much of a story, although I think advertisers would probably want to know how much of the traffic that sees their ads is local. I suspect part of the interest in this is that Kevin Hoffman and others at City Pages have repeatedly taken some very nasty little potshots at the rest of the local media, while ignoring or being openly hostile to criticism, and so people in the local media might be taking some pleasure in seeing him get a little of that heat back.

I don’t think I would have written the story has it been about using Digg to push poor quality traffic to cheap, remnant advertising.

But, since they’re serving their local advertiser’s ads against crappy international traffic from Digg, there’s a story.

Perhaps they’re only charging advertisers for impressions served to local visitors? If they were, they probably would have said so (and it would make them stupid for not making any money off the majority of their Digg traffic by at least serving up some AdSense ads).

Hey Ed, so here’s a question…

When the StarTribune.com gets a traffic spike because the Vikings make it into the Super Bowl… okay! fantasy!… when the StarTribune.com gets a traffic spike because of the bridge collapse… what do you do with the hundreds of thousands of local ads that get served up?

Sure, it would be great if they were “tossed out,” but very few media companies are doing geotargeting, and I’d be highly doubtful if the Strib is one of them. (I’m looking at it from NYC right now and only see local ads.)

So while you make some good points, I just think these are pervasive industry problems, not VVM problems. Everyone in local media is dealing with it, and has been for a decade.

Sidenote: I don’t know how VVM is selling their inventory, but if it’s CPC (rather than CPM), then this is REALLY a non-issue, because it’s all about whether the user engaged with the advert — and in that case, who cares where they’re from.

On the other hand, I think the Digg story could be a story, and I think it’s suspicious that those stories have gotten so many Diggs… But! But it could also just be completely organic. There’s absolutely nothing unseemly with seeding your stories onto Digg.

Also, I miss seeing Chino Latino ads. But that has nothing to do with anything.

But it seems to me that City Pages is specifically encouraging out of state traffic via Digg, and then discussing their boost in Web traffic without a recognition that that traffic is mostly useless to local advertisers. I don’t see the Star-Tribune doing anything like that, although maybe they are and we don’t know it.

Schmelzer points out that they seem to be doing the same on other social media sites, and it is in violation of Digg’s terms of use.

And I think the biggest issue for me is the following: I have worked in towns that have been burned out on advertising because they have been misled about what they can reasonably expect. I knew of a paper that consistently misrepresented how many issues were being published, and so, of course, advertisers saw much less of a return on their advertising dollar than they expected. And instead of saying, oh, the trouble is we have been lied to, they said the following: Newsweekly advertising doesn’t work.

It meant that, even when the newspaper got some ethical salespeople, they had a very hard time making a sale, even when they were accurately reporting the distribution amounts. And when somebody else would try to break into the field, they just couldn’t sell ads.

Web advertising is still developing. If City Pages is misrepresenting the value of their ads, even by accident, that could be a problem for anybody else down the line who works online and relies on Web advertising for income.

Rex, I see this as a way to explain to local advertisers that advertising with a local media website doesn’t guarantee that the site’s traffic is local. Especially if they’re actively working to drive traffic to the site from outside the site’s community.

Geotargeting ads is now free, so there is no excuse for media sites to not do it. Heck, I do it on my blog.

In the case of something like national interest in the Vikings, sell local ads to businesses who want to target local Vikings fans and other ads to people who are football fans.

As a post it’s a nice lesson for local advertisers dipping their toes in online media.

I agree with Rex that it has little legs as a story about mainstream media gaming Digg.

It could be, but short of having the server logs from Digg its a tough row to hoe.

Just for fun, here’s a long piece from the New Yorker about what the Voice used to be.

Max and Ed have the angle: If CP sells its online inventory based on page-views and CPM, then a local advertiser would be paying an inflated rate if only, say, 25% of those page-views would be of any local value to them.

yeah but its not up to CP/VVM to sell their customers the short comings of their products, thats up to the customers to figure out.

yeah but its not up to CP/VVM to sell their customers the short comings of their products, thats up to the customers to figure out.

yeah but its not up to CP/VVM to sell their customers the short comings of their products, thats up to the customers to figure out.

This. This. This.

It’s the obligation of the advertiser determine if the place they advertise is a suitable fit for their advertising needs. If they ask CP/VMM the geographic breakdown for their page views, CP has an obligation to disclose this information. Do you think the New Yorker discloses how many of it’s subscriptions are outside the tri-state area without asking? Nope, it’s not in their circulation numbers, you have to ask.

No story.

But if a site sells online inventory to a local advertiser by saying “we get 2MM page-views per day” when, in fact, only 1/4 of those page-views are generated locally, isn’t that fraud, Bixby? Based on a $5 CPM rate, the local advertiser would be overpaying by $3750 ($5000 vs. $1250) because 1.5MM of those page-views are absolutely worthless to them.

But here’s the quandry: Many people still access the web locally via national portals (e.g. AOL). The IP address points to the provider who may, or may not, be locally-based. How many of the alleged “national” page-views then are, in fact, viewed locally?

Bixby, I may be wrong, but I think it’s news to many small businesses to hear that their ads are displayed to such marginal traffic.

Shouldn’t the story then be that local advertisers on the internet don’t understand advertising on the internet? I think the flaw in this argument is that you’re blaming City Pages for uninformed/educated clientele who don’t know what to asking before dropping cash for a ad space.

*ask and look for.

@Bixby: LOL. Now you know why used salesmen have such a stellar reputation. Caveat emptor!

But what if an advertiser did ask questions? Would they be given honest answers … or just a bunch of mumbo jumbo? I’m betting the latter, because most of the people selling don’t understand any of this, either.

c/used CAR salesmen

Do you think the New Yorker discloses how many of it’s subscriptions are outside the tri-state area without asking? Nope, it’s not in their circulation numbers, you have to ask.

Bixby: two things. In an ABC audit report, all circulation is automatically broken down into geo areas. It would be surprising to me if the sophisticated ad buyers who are buying NY area only ads don’t look at that. Second, the New Yorker is, for all practical purposes, a national magazine. The great majority of their advertisers market outside the New York area.

And, can I reasonably infer that you think it’s ok to strongly imply that you are a local paper, as City Pages surely does, then feed the predominantly local advertisers impressions from outside the market based on the fact that they mistakenly trust you?

I don’t know if the New Yorker does it (I do know that Newsweek and Time do it) but many national mags offer geographically targeted ads.

I think the flaw in this argument is that you’re blaming City Pages for uninformed/educated clientele who don’t know what to asking before dropping cash for a ad space.

That’s a great way to make a sale once and an enemy forever.

mnblrmkr, true. Many national mags do offer geo targeted ads, but they are sold as exactly that, and take the form of a section that is specifically printed in the mags that are sent to that area.

As some one who has sold display advertising for a newspaper…I’ll go on the record as saying that ABC numbers were suspect at best. Maybe they have improved

Back 7-8 years ago you could count 1 paid circulation for every two papers you gave away free? Guess where the free ones end up, in the circular file cabinet.

Also the daily that I sold at was certainly a pump and dump sales cycle. I don’t know about other papers but salespeople churn rate was very high.

I am with Tom on the fact that NY Times and People Mag have national advertisers for the most part so their gaming digg isn’t a detriment to advertisers. But I am also strongly aligned with Bixby on the fact that although as a sales tactic partnering is a better strategy, it is not VVM reps responsibility to sell their mediums shortcomings.

Digg the Deets story. On the homepage of Digg right now.

http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Village_Voice_has_balls_gaming_Digg_for_huge_hit_increases

Looks like you need some page caching, Ed. DIGG BOMB!

matt, it turns out that wp-cache isn’t all that.