Tasha Harrison

Yesterday The Guardian released it’s new app for the iPhone. It costs £2.39, is highly personalised and allows you to listen to podcasts and browse images. The Guardian does have a very good mobile site, but I downloaded the app as I wanted to see whether it would be worth £2.39, which is quite a lot for an app. First impressions are that it makes browsing a lot easier and I can organise it into the sections I read the most. It is a definite improvement, but not completely life changing.

The Guardian are leading the way in monetising the news. I don’t have to download the app to read the paper, I could go on reading it from the web browser, but the app makes it a lot easier and the customisation is great. They have added value to their service and I am willing to pay. It’s a lot like upgrading your Spotify so you don’t receive adverts.

The Guardian recognise, more than any other British newspaper, the need to work with their readers to turn around their declining profits. Instead of rushing backwards to an old model of charging people to read the news (ie what Murdoch is proposing) they have accepted that information on the internet is free. The amount of content that is published everyday has reduced the value of news. Before the internet, everyone had to buy a paper or magazine to gather information and opinions. Now it’s free.

I’ve spoken before about the fact that this is a huge problem for newspapers. The Guardian have reacted by adding value to the experience of reading news on their website. They have subscription services, but they don’t charge for the basic news. They also don’t make a big song and dance of it (like Murdoch), they simply offer these services as a way to add value.

It is too soon to know which model will work, a paywall system, where you must subscribe to read beyond a certain point, or an added value service, where you pay for a better experience. I suspect that the latter will be the more successful.

There’s big changes on Google today. The search engine is going to include results from sites such as Twitter and from blogs. This is important, because it means that the search results we receive will be up to date news, as it happens. The explosion of  Twitter, in particular, has been the main catalyst for this change. It gives people the ability to publish news as it is happening. It is important that Google reflects this new real-time news source (Rupert Murdoch should take notice).

The other big change is the increased personalisation of your search. Google records your web history and bases its search results on the sites that you visit. So if you regularly visit a particular news site, it will place that site higher up the search rankings if it is relevant to your search. This is a big game changer for SEO, since it favours more established sites. It also means that when you view your own site on Google you will generally see it ranking differently than most of your potential customers, meaning that you have no idea how well your site is actually ranking.

Most good SEOs will have seen this trend already and will have been aware that personalisation has been increasing over the last couple of years. It provides us with a new challenge and increases the need for different forms of online marketing, like social media and online PR. It also creates a problem for SEO companies who still guarantee positions on Google, as they will find it hard to prove.

From a users point of view I actually think these changes are rather limiting. Surely the point of search engines is that we can find something new. Before the days of social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, we relied on search engines to bring us new sites and information. Now we will increasingly receive the same sites, having to look further through the results to find something new.

Rupert Murdoch has declared war on Google. He has long accused the search giant of being responsible for the decline in the newspaper industry. Murdoch now wants to remove his sites from the Google index. He will start charging for content next year and is looking to do a deal with Microsoft for content to appear on Bing.

Murdoch has a massive problem. Less people are buying his newspapers, because the content is free online, and if he starts charging for content people can simply get their news from another source. If he removes his sites from Google he will reduce the number of visitors, which in turn will effect the advertising revenue on the sites. His competitors will still offer news for free – unless he can pursuade them to join him on Bing, behind a pay wall. And then, of course, there’s the BBC, who will not only continue to offer free content, but keep creating better and better online services.

I think that there is a chance that Murdoch’s plan could work, in the end something has to change.  He does have a knack of not only making a great deal of money, but also of forcing consumers to buy his products – how many sports fans have given up being angry about having to pay for Sky Sports and view it as an essential, a little bit like paying your gas bill?

Last week saw two great victories for social media.  The first was the Guardian/Trafigura/Super-injunction debacle, that highlighted the growing trend of preventing the press from reporting certain stories that would be particularly harmful to the reputation of organisations.  After much uproar on Twitter the injunction was lifted and the Guardian was able to publish the details of Trafigura’s toxic waste dumping antics.

The second victory was against the Daily Mail.  Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death caused outrage and upset for suggesting that Gately’s death was not ‘natural’, as the corroners report had said, but was in some way connected to his sexuality.  So once again Twitter mobilised to share their outrage, forcing Moir to apologise and causing major advertisers, such as Marks and Spencers, to request that their advert be removed from the page.  See Charlie Booker’s article here.

What these two events highlight is the shift in power from the news being controlled by a few, to it being shared and discussed by millions.  We now have the ability to share information at staggering speed and for the first time in history everyone is a publisher, writer and distributor of information.  What this means for businesses is that they too have an opportunity to join in the discussion, not to control it, but to play an active role.  Trafigura were attempting the old school approach of shut the press up and no one will ever know, but this is no longer possible in the world of social media.

Saturday’s historic occasion of an England match only been shown online has been hailed as a success by Kentaro and Preform, the two companies responsible for streaming the match.  It’s fantastic that they think so as I fear many fans and pubs will have spent Saturday night thinking about what could have been.  Watching anything on your computer, whether laptop or desktop, is a pretty solitary undertaking and until we’re all watching the internet on our televisions, streaming major sporting events online is not going to be a success.  Sport is something we share with our friends, whether in our living rooms or in a pub.

So less than half a million people watching a football match on a PC is not a success, considering how many viewers there are for other football matches.  Official figures are usually in the several millions, not including people in pubs and clubs.  A PR story trying to show off the venture as a success is not going to fool anyone.