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Think it: Failure is an option
Published on 06/04/08
by Zac Echola
As those of us that work in the online industry know, one thing that distinguishes our media environment from all others is that because of the low costs and barriers to enter the Web world, we can afford to fail often. If we mess up, we can quickly and cheaply adjust until we get it right.
When working on a film, for example, you have to gauge not what audiences will want to watch today, but what they will want to watch one, two years from now. When dumping millions into a risky project, that level of uncertainty could terrify even the most hardened entertainment executive.
It goes without saying that’s the reason Jerry Bruckheimer exists, why the majority of film tends to be safe for wide audiences, grounded deeply in the history of the genre at the box office.
But online, wide audiences can’t easily be captured. People want what they want. They find what they want and they may never come back to your site. Content is more important than your brand. The system is designed for searching. We are hunter/gatherers in the digital world, scratching and pecking for information that nourishes our immediate needs.
By and large, we are first at the whims of the search engines, and second at the whims of those that find (and like) our content enough to link to us. In an online ecosystem, neither are separate. The stronger your connections (via links to and from other sites), the higher your search placement for your content, a symbiotic relationship, when done right, that feeds on itself.
Why do newspaper.coms exit around the brand? When New York Times (or any other paper) publishes new information, I have to dig for information I want (especially if all the content is released at once at midnight, a topic I plan to cover in another post soon). Wouldn’t it make more sense to break out your content types into several brands, each revolving around a specific type of content? Many smaller streams of information, targeted to specific topics seems to be more search-engine friendly (and by proxy, more user friendly).
When one of those products flounders, adjust the strategy for that site or cut it off and reallocate resources towards a different product. More to manage up front, but creating a network may be more beneficial to the entire ecosystem of sites when content can cross pollinate. But when it comes to failure, it’s much, much easier to manage the failure of one small web site than a portion of a large Web site. There’s no reason to put your eggs into one basket.
Find communities you can manage and repeat the process with another community. Magazines and cable television operates like this. Gawker and many other blog networks operate like this–for better or worse.
Why can’t newspaper companies work the same way?
The end. Or is it?
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