Challenge #2: Findability
by Robbie, March 22, 2006
(* This is article 2 in a series on “Challenges with internet publishing”)
My last post on getting a blog noticed touches on a big issue with internet publishing, namely the findability of content. Let’s assume for a second that we’ve worked out a great business model and have created content customers would be willing to pay for. The next challenge is making sure the target audience can actually find the content in the maze of information we know as the internet.
An important player in this is obviously search. However, if you have “premium content” that requires authentication, search engines won’t be able to index the content. As I discussed previously, cloaking your content can get you in deep water and is generally not looked upon kindly by search engines. Not indexing premium content is a huge hole with search today. Rumors last summer suggested that Yahoo and Google were working on this, but I haven’t heard any updates recently. A new startup, Congoo, is trying to address the problem, but requiring a separate browser plug-in will not work on a large scale.
If cloaking isn’t an option, what else is a publisher to do? For one, you can provide good descriptions of the content on the free/unrestricted version of the premium pages so that most of the important keywords are captured by search engines. All the standard SEO techniques apply. Advertising through search engines can also increase visiblity on certain keyword searches.
An even more important approach is to use free content (i.e., blogs) to drive traffic to paid content. This is a pretty common tactic today, although I don’t think most publishers fully leverage blogs the way they could. If they did, there would be no reason for Amazon Connect, which I view as a failure on the part of publishers. Creating a book blog worked really well for one of my books. I haven’t updated the AD Cookbook blog in over 8 months, but it still gets over 150 visitors per day (almost all from Google) because it has so many keywords indexed that people look for. This has been a great marketing tool for the book.
It will be a balancing act to find the right mix of paid and free content while not losing too much money producing the free stuff (assuming you can’t get all authors to contribute for free).
How about making older content available for free? That is what we’ve done with StockTickr. Anonymous users (which you have to give some access to for search bots) get access to data that is at least 2 trading days old. Logged in users get up to date content.
Could a similar approach be taken for the publishing industry?
BTW, nice blog you’ve got here.
Dave March 22nd, 2006
As a group, the big analyst companies (Gartner, Forrester, etc.) do an excellent job of making searachable snippets of their reports available, and they rank highly on search results for the relevant keywords. Then you gotta pay for the full report…
Yoav Shapira March 22nd, 2006
A content management approach could avoid work producing “extra” free content. See what Safari has done, with partial content and “this is only a preview” on each page of the public/preview site. Whether or not a preview is available must, I’m guessing, be governed by a DRM attribute in the content source–”free” previews are available if the author/publisher has granted rights. This is very common. The preview is not really all that “free” because its only so useful (actually annoying, but that’s the point–you read just enough to whet your appetite, realize this meets your need, then have to buy to get the full content, but there’s no authentication to search it). At least this beats what a competing online tech book site used to do: their previews showed the page with XXX substituted for every few characters–not very helpful to determine if it is what you want, but they had a closed subscription community that’s only so “findable” to outsiders.
Brian Miller March 22nd, 2006