The Long Tail is the Firm Footing of the Internet

In case we ever forget, articles like the one spotted by Media Post in Newsweek (“Crowd Sourcing Loses Steam”, by Tony Dokoupil and Angela Wu) put us back in awe of the sustained level of performance of long tail web publishers in the Burst Network, many of which have been furnishing content to their loyal audiences for as long, or longer, than Burst has been selling advertising to support them, which is nearly 15 years.

As the Newsweek article suggests, legions of internet gadflies turned loose on the world by the power of the web may be losing steam. A sustained level of content production, it turns out, is hard, and eventually it turns boring if there is no particular passion to support it coming from the inside, or compensation from the outside. Per writers, Dokoupil and Wu:

“Many other elements of the user-generated revolution…are beginning to look sluggish. The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.”

Thus, after many years the wheat begins to separate from the chaff. It should make it easier to recognize the commitment and contribution of long tail publishers that have been here and will continue to be here for interested users. They are the firm footing of the internet.

Milling Around Content: Demand Media Makes A Deal With SFGate and Forbes Launches New Blogging Platform

We are long tail web publishing advocates here at Burst, happy in the trenches of the internet. The right set of words might be staunch advocates. We reject the hubris of the short tail and rather think McGeorge Bundy’s admonition to technology, prominently featured as part of Answers.com’s definition of the word hubris, applies equally well to journalism: “There is no safety in unlimited journalistic hubris,” a notion that should land like a blow to the head today.

In that regard, we are watching the evolution of the content mills such as Demand Media with mixed reaction. On the one hand, it is all good that companies like Demand (and Aol.) are investing in thousands of free-lance writers to cover issues and neighborhoods in the spirit of a new media economy that is people-driven. We recognize the model. On the other, it is bad that the market needs to mimic the people-driven model that exists in the first place: the one represented by countless writers, bloggers and web publishers that built and now sustain the internet, and make it – frankly – interesting.

One model is authentic, and one is contrived – not the content, we’d assume, but the initiative, which is driven by a lack of trust in things bottom-up. It is a control(ling) thing. It is parental. It is journalistic hubris lurking in the decision tree.

And in reality it is hard to distinguish between Demand and, say, the AP with deals such as they’ve struck with SFGate and Chron.com as reported in MediaPost and Ad Age. It’s harmless, but is it earnest? Is it new media?

Burst works for Dwell Magazine and its Dwell Partner Network made up of numerous design blogs, such as Design Crack, ColourLovers, DesignMom and Better Living Through Design. These publishers are devoted to design. (The CEO of Colourlovers, Darius Monsef, wants the “whole world to find colour enlightment.” And, I think he’s serious.) SFGate enjoys connections with bloggers in the San Francisco community. Why not more? Why not for its new Homes Guide that it has turned to Demand for instead? Why not resort to what already occurs in nature, which is driven by desire not “Demand”?

By coincidence, pick-up in Morning Briefing from Media Bistro points to the announcement by Lewis DVorkin about Forbes’ intention to launch a blogging platform for “content creators, consumers and marketers alike” derived from the True/Slant start-up that Forbes purchased recently. This sounds different. Writes Mr. DVorkin:

“We recognize and embrace the need for an all-inclusive conversation. Consumers want their voices to heard on an equal playing field with content creators. Marketers want to get their message across in new ways that enable them to form relationships with both the audience and journalists.”

This platform somewhere will include editorial control that protects the Forbes brand. Fine. Provided that consumer bloggers get a chance to participate in the capitalist conversation, however, driven by their desire and knowledge to do so, advertisers will indeed benefit from the intimacy and rapport that is possible online. As we argue, there’s nothing like relationships that get formed in the trenches.

Seven People With the Keys to the Internet

As it turns out there are seven people with the keys to the internet, according to coverage at CNBC.com by Cindy Perman.

Who knew? It has to create some opportunities for problem-solving at the present time.

Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Internet?

Reading the Wall Street Journal’s sensationalist account of online consumer “privacy” the past few days it is hard not to feel that as traditional media lies sick in bed its wrath against the internet smolders with intensity. Everything about the internet is hateful to it: the abuse of language, the contempt for news-making authority, the fact that it is free and popular; the fact that it is commercial and rich and reeks of new money; the fact that it is young; the fact that it delights more in science than art and ascribes a value to an audience apart from content. It is a hateful thing, and as Henry II wailed about St. Thomas Beckett 1000 years ago, one senses the voice of traditional media wailing also, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome internet?!”

Apparently, they’re working on it. Conjuring Cold War images with words such as “intensive surveillance”, “spying”, and “secrets”, the Journal paints a picture of an industry that “has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.” Suddenly, per the Journal, the Internet is a shadowy agency…secretive…with a Politburo.

Except that shadows and secrets are not especially useful to the business of advertising, which is pretty much dedicated to making things less secret and more obvious, especially things such as price and product attributes. A good case in point appears in Ad Age thanks to Michael Learmonth who writes an engaging piece about the pair of pants (short pants) that followed him around the internet until he couldn’t take it anymore. In need of shorts, he says, he went online to Zappos, rummaged around, found nothing he liked, and exited. The pants, however, were not easily spurned. Writes Michael,

 “In the five days since, those [short pant] recommendations have been appearing just about everywhere I’ve been on the web, including MSNBC, Salon, CNN.com and The Guardian. The ad scrolls through my Zappos recommendations: Hurley, Converse by John Varvatos, Quicksilver, Rip Curl, Volcom. Whatever. At this point I’ve started to actually think I never really have to go back to Zappos to buy the shorts — no need, they’re following me.”

The moral of the story is that Michael lost his taste for Zappos, which is called brand destruction, which is the result of advertising overkill. Hardly secret and hardly new, I feel the same about half the advertisers on television, especially the local ones that drench commercial breaks in between Red Sox baseball innings. Advertising is about amplification. It lives in the open. Indeed, it forces its way into the open and what it does it frequently overdoes, as did Zappos.

Which means advertising is not in the clandestine business and it does not think clandestine thoughts when it comes to reaching prospects. To the contrary, it is a relentless over-communicator, and for years media outlets – newspapers, magazines, cable television and, of course, the internet – have sought to channel the din of messaging in ways that reduce the waste and lessen the noise. Online – and soon, perhaps, on television – that means using the observed media and shopping preferences of users to target advertising messages that would otherwise be out of context (i.e., right place). At the same time, it means using those same techniques to curb the number of irrelevant messages going to the uninterested, which would be spam.

The sub-text of the “privacy” question always sounds like a game of cat and mouse, advertiser against consumer. It is a pointless question. After all, who is for advertising? But if it is impossible to live without it – as it is – who is against great advertising?

This is the commercial opportunity online: great advertising. Relevant and timely and – we always hope - creative. The consumer opportunity online is largely the same: relevant and timely and, we surely know, abundant. Who could be against that?  

The King, perhaps?