The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web

OK, so The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web has been something landing people on my blog lately, several times actually, but the post they were landing on did not really outline the reasons so I thought I would do a quick 5 bullet point list of why. By no means is this the full list but here are several, feel free to add more in the comments section:

• Their customers are using the web, since the mid 90s people have had an option for where to get their news and this shift is happening faster than ever. The Internet is not just for the tech-savvy crowd and as people look to cut costs why pay for news when there are 1000 different options online for free.
• People do not want to wait until tomorrow, there is no need too. Newspapers have to print stories  on physical paper and then deliver them, their deadlines are typically early in the morning that day which means that you are waiting at least a day before you get a news story to the doorstep. People are use to instant gratification these days. Real time news is here , no more need to wait and with Twitter and Facebook it is only getting worse for the legacy news industry.
• Based on the two reasons above it becomes about money, even though the newspapers, almost as a whole, have failed to find a way to be successful online it is where the money is. Online ad revenues, although weak and shrinking in some aspects, have been stronger than offline revenues during the downturn. The money is online, newspapers have to figure out how to work online. Most have not.
• The old model has a much higher cost then the new model, bandwidth and servers are cheap compared to printing newspapers and delivering them. The newspaper industry had to see this but kept holding on hoping it would not catch up with them. It has.
• People have more options now, when the only news sources were TV, Newspapers, and Radio there was not as much competition. You only had a few voices to choose from when it came to opinion or real news. Well with the Internet, love it or hate it, you have thousands, millions even. People want to find someone more like them. Community would be the word.

To my normal readers sorry for the repetitive post, I know I have hit on this before but I wanted to give people coming in from search something.

There are many thoughts on why the newspapers are dying as well. Feel free to give your opinion.

Geo Domains Locked and Loaded – Watch Your Keywords

One thing I have always found interesting is watching what people are searching for that landed them on my site. My minisites are very keyword targeted and usually are pretty predictable but many times I have found that my sites have been "selected" by google to rank high for certain terms I did not necassarily expect and by using this data I can sometimes find solid hand registered domains that I may not of found otherwise.

With the recent launch of this blog I have found a very interesting search that has started to send traffic my way. Recently I posted about Newspapers Closing. I have been a fan of Geo domains for sometime but with the recent fall of old school media I really think the time is now for Geo domain owners to fully develop and take advantage of the opportunity at hand. One thing that really drove this point home has been a term that has been driving many visitors a day to this blog.

That term is Newspapers Closing, at first I did not think much of it but then started thinking, the  public has changed mindset enough that they are searching online frequently enough that it would show up in my keyword results. A quick check of the google keyword tool shows small results for this term but in the past 3 days I have had more visitors for this term than the big G shows for average search volume on this term for a month.

As more and more newspapers close their doors people will be looking for alternatives online. If you own a Geo domain it would be a smart move to be that portal. I will be posting in the near future on content that is freely available to develop your Geo domain to provide the content that people are looking for each morning when they sip their coffee.

So, even though this post is focused on why I think a specific term is valuable for Geo domains, the point is to pay attention for trends in the data that you have in your keyword stats. It could be valuable....

Newspapers Closing While Localization Continues on the Web

If you came here after searching for Why Newspapers Are Closing On The Web you may also want to read the post about Print Media Moving Online.

As has been widely reported lately the old school newspapers continue to lose money and close up shop while online ad spending grows. Today I found an interesting story, ironically, in the paper version of USA Today. How did I find it, well because the paper was sitting outside my hotel room door this morning.

Rather than paging through the cumbersome, too large, flimsy paper copy I went online and read the same story. Hence the problem the newspapers are running headlong into.

Most papers have some online ad component at this point but most were using it to supplement their offline revenue rather than using it as their primary business model. This is catching up with them. As more and more people are going online to check everything from news to classifieds to weather they no longer need 6, 12, 24, 36 hour old info.

As I posted on twitter recently its all about local, local, local, social, social, social....

You can read the story here: USA Today Article

I think for the majority of the newspapers, although their online ad revenue has grown, it is too late to fix their core business models to make it through the era of real time, mashed up, and twitter size news.

I found it extremely disappointing that a group of people laid off from the Denver paper actually were petitioning to get 50,000 subs signed up for a subscription fee to start an online news site. Once again, old school models that just will not work for localized news.

These issues that the newspapers are facing are core to many legacy brick and mortar industries but are also the reason our domain names/web properties will continue to gain value even while the economy fights through this downturn.

Comment away!