Charles Apple

The next big step in the RevenueTwoPointZero project has been taken. Today, the group’s Matt Mansfield posted prototypes and detailed explanations of the work the group performed Saturday in its efforts to find a new advertising business model that will sustain journalism in the electronic age.

Left to right: Ernie Smith, Patrick Thornton and Chris Amico at the R2.0 thinktank event Saturday. Photo by Steve Dorsey.
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We covered this meeting in detail over the weekend:

• Our pregame look at the event is here.
• Here’s our story about the opening remarks and first discussions — and a list of participants.
• Here’s a mid-afternoon recap of discussion.
• And here’s a final wrap-up of the four committee reports.

You can find the prototypes at the R2.0 web site. You can find additional information by Mansfield and Steve Dorsey at the SND/Update web site.

The group’s work was performed by four teams:

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1. HOMEPAGE TEAM

This team’s task was to:

Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.

The team bought — wisely, we think — into Alan Jacobson’s theories that the role of the homepage is to pull a reader into the site; it’s the role of the story pages to sell the ad.

Alan Jacobson Saturday at R2.0. Photo by Steve Dorsey.
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The team reports:

Story pages, rather than homepages, are the key to monetizing a news site. These inside pages have fewer elements than homepages, so they can provide a more effective environment for advertising by allowing for larger ads and fewer distracting elements.

The prototype home page, therefore, gives mere headlines for each story and very few visuals:

The team reports:

We’ve eliminated ineffective leaderboards and skyscrapers, and replaced them “Deals of the day” at the bottom of the page which are part of our solutions for small businesses. Unlike leaderboards and skyscrapers which often annoy and distract users while rarely provide meaningful information, these deals offer a true benefit to users. This is an example of “advertising as information.”

Once a reader clicks on a story, she’ll see a page like this:

The primary features:

1. Only one ad
2. One one large ad — 480 pixels square
3. Dramatically reduced visuals, which will make that big-ass ad pop even more.

The team reports:

This solution looks more like the The New Yorker in print than any news site online, but we think that’s a good thing. And while most online execs might blanch at the notion of one ad per page, the fact is that most sites can’t sell all the ad positions currently available, so why not run the paid ads bigger? As long as the table-of-contents-style homepage creates more pageviews, more advertising opportunities will be created to offset any losses.

The only downside, as we see it: We’re wondering where secondary photos and graphics will go. Or will there even be a place for them in the online newspaper of the future? We’d hate to think that news visuals will have to be ghettoized into their own little section of a site.

On the other hand, some newspapers report that photo galleries are among the most often-viewed pages at their sites. So feel free to argue that “ghetto” thing with us.

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2. CLASSIFIED TEAM

The goal for this team was to:

Create a better CraigsList.

The team writes:

In one respect, CraigsList is better than newspaper classifieds because it’s free. But more important, CraigsList is easier to use than any other newspaper classified site and that may be the bigger competitive advantage. Ironically, CraigsList isn’t particularly easy to use, but it’s easier than every other system. That’s why we made our solution easier still.

The team proposes making a new newspaper classified site easy to use, clean from distractions. Either you’re a buyer or a seller, right? The basic classified home page would have two channels:

Like Craigslist, basic listings would be free. Display ads could be sold to match the context of various searches users would run — like you see here, down the right side. Also, customers could buy “premium” ads for higher placement on search returns, like you see near the top here:

One of the genius ideas by the team: Include not only listings customers place at your newspaper, but any listings you can find. Including those at Craigslist.

In other words: Out aggregate the aggregators. Ya gotta love it.

Once a user clicks on a specific ad, he’d see a page like this

Again, a basic ad would be free. For a little money, though, a customer can buy more photos, better position in search results, a custom theme to the description page and can block links to competing ads from appearing on this page. One can see the appeal this would have to auto dealers as well as average Joes looking to sell their whatever.

The team wants to add a place where users can rate a seller. Because Craigslist is so iffy with things like this, the team feels this would give users more confidence in the ads they find on the newspaper’s site.

We wonder, though, if the team is leaving itself open to the enormous problems eBay experiences with its own user ratings. This is something that will require a great deal of finesse.

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3. SMALL BUSINESS TEAM

This team’s job was to:

Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.

Much of today’s report of this team’s effort is based around two main ideas. The first, is the concept of the deal. The team reports:

What’s the deal? What’s the special offer, incentive, promotion or value proposition that brings customers in the door this day, this week, this month?

The deal should be the next thing beyond the click for small/medium businesses, and that’s what we created — a way to aggregate, browse, search and promote the best deals from the businesses in a newspaper.com’s community.

Secondly, the team feels that advertising content will need to be treated as content. Again, from the report:

A typical newspaper.com — pretty much all of them, honestly — places banner ads in a way that makes them blind spots for Google, Yahoo! and the other search spiders. We don’t treat the advertising messages — the deals — as content. We should. We should put them in databases that are at least as well optimized for search as news articles. Then we should promote the best of them as chosen by users (via printing/redemption of coupons), the most urgent of them by creating limited-time or limited-number coupon offers, and the latest offers placed by advertisers.

Here’s the team’s prototype page:

R2.0 also offers some additional wireframe prototypes. More info on this concept is to come, the team says.

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4. MOBILE TEAM

This team’s job was to:

Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone.

While the R2.0 team shies away from paid content online — we believe, too, that neither micropayments nor paid sites will work — the team feels differently about mobile internet users:

Mobile users may not be willing to pay for content either, but they are buying iPhone apps that provide features to customize content on iPhones. So we propose to offer a suite of low-cost features to enhance the experience of content consumption — rather than charging for the content itself.

Here’s a proposed iPhone screen:

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See the five little icons across the bottom? Those would be applications — basically, plug-ins that users might buy in order to receive special functions.

Left to right:

1. Offline reading, which would allow you to pull in a story or other content that she could then read when no signal is available, like on an airplane or subway.
2. Geo tagging, which monitors you via GPS and can connect you with news or advertisers as your location changes, as weather or traffic change or as special deals become available.
3. Archive and export, with which you could download data to your laptop or send ot a friend.
4. Customization, which would allow you to filter the news any way you wanted.
5. Text-to-speech, which would allow you to convert text into spoken word.

The team concludes:

If we’ve learned anything about online, it’s that if we don’t charge now, we can never charge in the future.

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Matt Mansfield of the Medill School
of Journalism at R2.0 Saturday.
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And believe it or not, that’s the short version of all this. For more info:

• Check out several more prototypes and much more background information at the R2.0 web site.
• You can find additional information by Mansfield and Steve Dorsey at the SND/Update web site.
• See Dorsey’s photos from Saturday in his Flickr feed.
• Patrick Cooper of USA Today wrote about his experiences at R2.0 Saturday in his blog. Find that here.
• Follow the RevenueTwoPointZero Twitter feed here.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 10:44 am and is filed under Innovative ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.