Reading this presentation by Matt Kelly from Trinity Mirror given at the World Editors Forum I found some interesting arguments.
Certainly as people (hopefully) become less reliant on algorithmic search and more focused on recommendations from friends through social networks, or a new social search platform, brands having this sort of approach to an extent does make sense and cant be discarded out of hand.
We followed the brochure word for word, and we employed the same merry-go-round of SEO consultants to help us build sites that would ping to the top of search engines for a world hungry for our content.
If little things like character, brand…the ingrained values that made the print product a success, got in the way, well … the ends justified the means. Content wasn’t king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn’t matter as long as the audience grew.“
Crucially, traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am.
That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source. We get a lot of traffic to both sites from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.”
In part it does sound like a sales pitch based on having an alternative product, going against the flow, ooooooh exciting, what rebels! However with an ambition to grow traffic I often fear it is easy to forget how important engagement is and the value content has to hold for the audience it purports to represent.
In my opinion the way in which commercial revenue is generated by ‘big media brands’ online will completely change in the coming years so we are more focused on delivering integrated engaging partnerships, which will not be measured by eyeballs but by how many people make a meaningful engagement. You cant really do that with a transient audience that are not dedicated lovers of a brand, I think this is what Trinity Mirror recognise, it isn’t just about being rebellious.
We can already see this with companies like videoegg getting more clients who want to base their ad spend not on how many browse past an advert or how many it is forced on, through preroll, but how many actually love the website they are on so much that they would willingly accept and advert from them because it may actually be on benefit to view it.
Of course this isn’t just a debate about SEO, and I certainly do not write this with the intension of starting a war against it! It is about the core proposition of content based sites and what they actually offer an audience that they cant get on a million other sites. It is about making deep emotional connections with our audience, loving them and in turn allowing them to love us so they have a “Loyalty Beyond Reason*”, which can be exploit ed to commercial gain.
*Lovemarks worth reading the book if you haven’t already.
