Without money the site can’t function. Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don’t you get that? I am not going back to the Caribbean Night at AEPi!

I think social is digital.  To me social is the core of communicating with technology to build relationships. It’s online. Through a computer. Actually through a smart phone (not mobile because they are more often not mobile). Through analytics, insights.

The most valuable part of being digital is being personal and social builds personal into digital.

In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory. These new metrics stand out:

• Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

So what does this mean for news and information sites over the next year? How will they change or adapt to meet the needs of the new news consumer?



The commission also examined issued the media is facing recommending:

• Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.
• Increase the role of higher education,community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.

• Paid Subscribers both online and in print – To justify paid content model you must show an increase in print newspaper subscriptions because the reason you switched to a paid model was to stop the cannibalization of your print subscribers by your free online site. Of course most studies show that the revenue generated from paid online subscribers will barely cover the cost of running the website.
• Web Site Visitors – Nope. You can keep measuring your web site visitors if you want to, but the dropoff from when it was free will be so discouraging you might change your mind and open it up again.
• Web Display Ad Revenue – Strike Two. Won’t work. You just killed your audience with the paid wall. Any advertiser who runs on your site behind the pay wall doesn’t know what they’re doing.
• Online Classified Revenue – Strike Three. This isn’t working for many newspapers anymore, but if you’ve killed your audience then who will pay to get their classifieds seen online by nobody.

So, the only real workable metric is an increase in paid print subscribers. That’s right a continual increase. If you only slow your decrease, then you’ve just slowed the print newspaper death spiral and given yourself another year or two until the presses stop running.