Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific
« Web 2.0 Retailing | Main | Disaggregation 2: iTunes and CDs »
December 08, 2006
Disaggregation: Lessons from Wikipedia for Publishers
A post from Tim O'Reilly caught my eye this week, The Economics of Disaggregation which contrasts the benefits of disaggregation from both the consumer and producer point of view. Firstly - disaggregation refers to the unbundling of product for consumption, such as the ability online to purchase single songs rather than CDs, or individual news stories rather than whole publications. Examples from both the music and publishing industries are cited in William Bulkeley's piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Internet Allows Consumers to Trim Wasteful Purchases.
I'll focus on what Hitwise data indicates about news and reference consumption, and what insights publishers can draw from the example of Wikipedia. The below chart shows two things; Wikipedia's market share of visits and search term breadth. To clarify, search term breadth indicates the weekly number of unique search terms represented as a share of all search terms. In other words, the greater the breadth of search terms to a website, the greater the number of unique search terms that delivered traffic to that website.
Here you'll see that Wikipedia, concurrently with its growth-rate in visits, has also increased significantly its share of the search pie - there were more unique search terms resulting in visits to Wikipedia (4.37%) than the combined amount to 4 leading online news sources (1.22%) for the week ending 2 December 2006.
Search Engines play a key role in directing users to news websites; to illustrate, Google Australia, Google and Google News Australia sent 18.89% of visits to the News and Media industry week ending 2 December 2006. The same Google properties accounted for 48.81% of Wikipedia's traffic, more than double the volume to News and Media.
The ability of consumers to bypass high-valued homepages to individual stories from search engines means that news publishers will need to consider how they, as 'producers' can benefit from the phenomenon of disaggregation. The Hitwise Search Term Breadth tool provides a key measure of each publisher's share of the news consumption 'spread'. As strategies are developed to draw more revenue from online, the value of individual news pages will need to be considered alongside search engine optimisation. The success of Wikipedia might provide a useful guide..
Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 12:46 PM
Posted to News and Media
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/395.
Comments
Hi Sandra - great to see a 'Bill Tancer' for APAC!
One strength of Wikipedia is each article is inherently optimized for search engines while online news publishers still tend to use unfriendly sensationalized headlines, which are typically carried over to the title tags and link text that are important for search engine ranking.
Writing a search friendly headline is one of the challenges facing traditional journalists - see This Boring Headline Is Written For Google.
Posted by: Anonymous at December 12, 2006 04:48 PM
That's an interesting article - I've been guilty from time to time of checking HW search data for keywords in post titles :)
Another feature that someone pointed out is that Wikipedia has permanent links, while news links might be temporary - making it more appealing to link to Wikipedia.
Summary/education pages on events of historical importance, such as 'bali bombings', might also improve long-term traction of news websites.
-SH
Posted by: Sandra Hanchard at December 12, 2006 05:19 PM
Oops, somehow left my name off the first post (I blame non-stop Xmas parties)..
Anyhow, a further point is many news sites like to hide their content behind subscriber/archive restrictions. It's a bit hard linking to articles that are almost unaccessible!
PS. Thanks to our HW rep, my work desktop is now the proud owner of a Hitwise I 3 Data sticker!
Posted by: shor at December 12, 2006 05:47 PM
Good point in regards to subscriber content (and xmas parties..!)
HW I love data stickers have been very popular!
Posted by: Sandra Hanchard at December 12, 2006 06:02 PM
