A MAJOR SHIFT IN MEDIA CONSUMPTION

News from the OMMA and Search Engine Strategies Conferences give direction for web content strategy

Speaking at OMMA West, leading and critic and host of On The Media, Bob Garfield, said that major marketers may be looking for online alternatives as the effectiveness of print and broadcast wane, but suggested that the online media infrastructure may not be ready for this potential influx of dollars.

The reason? Not enough good content worth sponsoring, says Garfield.

So once again, it’s all about the content. Back in 2002 Forrester Research found that the number one reason people go to a website is for the content.  Seems it still applies.

Yet the figures for online ad spend have been up for the last eight weeks in a row. “We’re in the middle of a content explosion, particularly online,” says Tom Hespos in Online Spin. “This is driven by a number of things, but most significantly by a change in the news media model.” 

What is this change in the news media he refers to?  The shift in news consumption from print and broadcast to the Internet was one of the top stories at the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in London. Greg Jarboe reports about this new research data on media consumption patterns in his SEO newsblog.

Here are the top 10 US news and media websites ranked by the percentage of total visits to 4,217 sites in the News & Media category:

 Source: Hitwise, April 2005

Here are the top 10 UK news and media websites ranked by the percentage of total visits to the 4,054 sites in the News & Media category:

 Source: Hitwise, April 2005

The shift in the news media model is driven to a large degree by the growing realization that ‘hard news’ reporting in the mainstream media is not unbiased. (Why am I not shocked?) News reporting has become more opinion-driven than ever before. Just read reports on the same event or incident in several different papers and this will be very apparent to you. 

Consumers are turning to Internet news sites to find a more balanced view. On Yahoo News – which now has the largest online news audience in the world – they can find a variety of reports and make their own decisions.  In blogs they get news they can’t get elsewhere. They know the data in a blog is opinion based, but many readers have faith in the bloggers they follow.

Both lists include the local versions of Google News and Yahoo! News. So when the public or the media go online and use a news search engine on either side of the Atlantic, they can find reports on the same story from many different newspapers. 

Savvy PR practitioners and marketers are adding online press releases and articles to their web content strategy. People are finding and reading these relevant optimized press releases and by-lined articles mixed in with the stories from thousands of online news sources.