Newsless.org

I’ve been parroting Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” model so much recently that I forget how many people still haven’t heard it. If you haven’t, take a moment and read the concept. Here’s a taste:

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

I’m convinced this is one of the best ways to approach the question of business models on the Web. News industry conversations about “the business model” tend to settle somewhere near here: “News-oriented websites have a future … but traffic needs to be above 200 million pageviews per month.”

When you eye the Web through the lens of pageviews and uniques and CPMs, 1,000 of anything seems ridiculously paltry. But if your 1,000 “unique visitors” derive value from the work you create, or if you can find advertisers who value the attention of that community, that might be enough for you to make a living. And if your company comprises a number of individuals, each attending to her 1,000 True Fans, this even starts to look like a business.

And if your 1,000 True Fans are motivated enough by your work to effect change in their communities, this even begins to resemble Journalism.

BTW: This principle dovetails nicely with Caterina Fake’s philosophy that you build a real community by greeting each early user at the door. Among the most essential skills that I believe must be taught to tomorrow’s journalists is community management — a skill entirely lost in today’s discussions about newsroom training. Technical training will be obsolete in a year. But the best community managers on the Web today employ principles refined over a long history of community leadership.

BTW 2: Make sure to read Kelly’s follow-up essay, “The case against 1,000 True Fans,” in which he addresses the practical realities of approaching a business this way. But consider that all of his case studies involve artists, whose work is valued even more abstractly than the work of journalists.

To pick up one of the threads from yesterday’s post, let’s talk about that first question for a minute: “How do we increase the amount or intensity of attention we draw?”

I would argue that right now, news websites are making a play for a very thin slice of our audience’s attention pie. Our primary focus is throwing a ton of headlines against the wall and hoping something sticks. The front page of most news websites is tuned to the world’s shortest attention span; every time someone visits that page, we want them to see something different. Many of us set our home pages to auto-refresh, so if you leave the page open in one of your browser tabs, you’ll see fresh headlines when you click back to it. Once we hook you with one of those headlines, our goal is to keep you clicking as many times as possible before you click away. We try to entice you with links to “similar stories,” “related stories,” “other stories from this section.”

In short, again, we’re focused on capturing merely that fraction of our audience’s attention that seeks to know what’s just happened. In so doing, we mostly ignore the fraction of that attention interested in what led to what just happened, or the fraction that just wants to know what new businesses have opened recently in their neighborhood, etc.

In recent years, we’ve begun to lend some thought to creating what the folks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution call “durable content” — “information like calendars, guides, sports stats and databases that, with some updating, can be posted and used over long periods.” But I’m proposing that we treat the vast bulk of what we do as “durable content,” and focus our attention on adding to that, not creating ephemera.

Why? Let me draw an analogy:

Sociologists will tell you that the best way to lift all boats in a society is to focus not on income inequality, but on wealth inequality. Income is tenuous; wealth is durable. Wealth (i.e. possessing assets, owning a savings account, etc.) encourages long-term planning, increases the investment of individuals in their society, serves as a hedge against hardship and can be passed on to future generations. Best of all, wealth compounds on itself; it creates more wealth over time. When we encourage people to invest their money, we’re trying to get them to convert their income into wealth.

The news sites of today are obsessed with information income, but they’ve amassed little information wealth. We’re living from information paycheck to information paycheck.¹ I want us to start investing all our information in an archive that  acquires compound value over time.

Wikipedia is an example of an information asset. I’d say Frontline has done a good job of creating an information asset. DavisWiki, a site I’ve mentioned before, is another.

Davis, CA, has two daily newspapers — the Davis Enterprise (since 1897) and UC-Davis’ California Aggie (since 1915). Both newspapers have devoted reporting and production staffs. That is, plenty of information income every single day. DavisWiki is built entirely by volunteer contributors, so it likely has a volatile, mostly undirected stream of information income, but virtually all of that information is invested into the growing archive of the site.

Compete traffic patterns for three sites in Davis, CA

Look at the Compete.com traffic patterns for the three sites.² That blue line is DavisWiki, the Aggie’s in green, and the Enterprise is red. The Enterprise is subscriber-only, and the Aggie makes it difficult to find stories more than a week-old, so neither is quite representative of your typical daily news site. But I think this offers an instructive look at the value of the wiki vs. the value of the two news sites. On the wiki, traffic builds as the site grows over time. The ephemeral news sites are only “worth” what they posted recently.

Also fascinating: Compete points out the two top keywords driving folks to each site. For both newspapers, the keywords are all variants on the newspaper’s name (”davis enterprise, davis enterprise newspaper, california aggie, the california aggie”).³ One of the top queries driving folks to DavisWiki is “cheap movie theaters in Sacramento.”

By making our sites into information assets, we will be going after a much broader slice of attention than we do today. To do this, we have to invest our information properly, not into static articles, which depreciate over time, but into living stories, which increase in value as more information is added or linked. Over time, we’ll grow a long tail of content that accrues attention and (by extension) revenue⁴ even while it’s mostly untouched and unpromoted.

1. I may have carried this analogy too far, and for that, I’m truly sorry. [↩]
2. Yes, Compete’s traffic metrics are totally off, but the relative figures are informative. [↩]
3. Search as navigation. News site publishers recognize that. [↩]
4. That’s how this relates to the business model. [↩]