When I first got started building [web] sites, the fundamental process of planning and designing felt very similar to the planning that goes into physical structures. It’s probably safe to assume that at least some of that correlation was me rationalizing the cost / time of my formal training as an architect. Either way, I paid far more attention to usability than I did to content.
It didn’t take long for that attention to balance out, though. My first gig for the man was with a largish publishing outfit (a Gannett newspaper) that had absolutely no web presence beyond a domain name when I signed on. My role swung from developer to department head, but my responsibility was pretty consistent throughout: introduce content to the internets, but do it strategically (i.e.: defensively.)
That meant starting with aggregated content. Classified verticals, weather, stock info, AP news, basically anything you could already find online. Original content was seen as too valuable. So, the newspaper actually launched its site without any editorial, obits or other hyper-local content.
Without getting too deep into [my guesses at] Gannett’s motivations, it was clear they were concerned that making content freely available over the internets would have a significant, negative impact on monetized distribution. The result would be a slide in subscription revenue, retail ad revenue, and most importantly, classified ad revenue.
They had it backwards. They could have seen significant growth in distribution and taken advantage of the same forces that launched ebay, realtor.com, monster, etc.
I jumped out of the digital publishing biz in 2000 to do the pulp thing, so I got to watch most of the slide as a bystander. If there’s an easily transferrable lesson from my time on the inside, though, it’s this: give your audience what they’re looking for, or they’ll find it somewhere else.
You have to be open to finding new ways to maintain and monetize your value statement. Or just be patient enough for Google to figure it out for you.
