Tom McGeveran asks an important question, in his analysis of the AOL-HuffPo deal:

What is it about the environment of traditional journalism that makes it so that readers are more likely to interact with the Huffington Post reblog of a New York Times article than they are with the article itself?

The answer to this question, I think, is also a key part of the reason why the New York Times paywall is a bad idea.

It’s worth using a specific example here, so let’s take Dave Pell’s suggestion and look at the NYT’s Olbermann scoop last night, and HuffPo’s reblog of it. When Pell first tweeted the comparison, the Times blog had no comments, while the HuffPo blog had “hundreds of comments/likes.” Now, the Times post is up to 93 comments, but the HuffPo post is still miles ahead: 2,088 comments, 1,392 likes on Facebook, 340 Facebook shares, 89 tweets, and 52 emails. All of which figures are easily visible in a colorful box at the top of the story.

The Times, by contrast, keeps such numbers to itself: you can see the number of posted comments, but you can’t see the number of comments which have been submitted and have yet to make it through moderation. (Which is why Pell saw zero comments when he tweeted last night.)

Both the Times and HufPo stories are blog posts, but there the similarities end. It’s worth just looking at the two, side by side:

McGeveran says the Times doesn’t look more like HuffPo because “their very existence is justified by their obligation to readers to vouch for the content they produce,” including widgets from Twitter and Facebook and the like, if the content from those widgets appears on the Times website. And I daresay that the Times sells that Killington ad at a much higher rate, per thousand pageviews, than HuffPo is getting for its ProFlowers and Lufthansa ads and its Bing tie-in.

But the HuffPo page is clearly generating lots of pageviews, and has more ads on the page. (The second ad unit on the Times page is a house ad for its own iPad app; HuffPo also has a house ad, for its Blackberry app, but runs it separately in a blue bar along the top of the page.) And of course HuffPo doesn’t need to pay for the expensive original reporting of Bill Carter and Brian Stelter.

Continue reading …

Pages:12 View All