Facebook is giving political candidates a chance to buy exclusive access to its audience of teens and college students. It’s a great idea and one that I think will become more common as social media sites become established.
Sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook have struggled with revenue models because their audiences, while vast, lack buying power. One path to building established businesses is to limit access to the sites and then charge advertisers a premium to reach those users. MediaPost’s Cory Treffiletti has an interesting analysis of the Facebook initiative that basically endorses this gated community concept (you have to register to read it).
The bottom line is that the days of open access and rapid growth may be numbered for new online communities. These services have experienced amazing growth rates over the last two years but they’ve done so using a very Web 1.0 approach, which is to throw everything open and try to build audience as quickly as possible. It’s very expensive to build infrastructure to handle that kind of growth and the logical next step may be to tighten up on qualification criteria and begin excluding users in the name of improving demographics. Facebook is gambling on that approach and it’ll be interesting to see if the business materializes to prove it right. One area of the economy that is still seeing robust growth is political contributions, so Facebook is certainly targeting the right market.
Speaking of gated communities, note that the Wall Street Journal is going to start selling ads on its front page. I guarantee you there was blood on the walls at the Journal’s offices over this decision. Journalists are very protective of prime editorial space and this concession to business realities must have been hard for a lot of editors to swallow. It’s another indication that all is not well in the print newspaper world. The New York Times will reduce its page size and lay off another 250 employees. The Times says about half the losses in editorial space will be made up by printing more pages but you know that isn’t so. Issue sizes are determined by ad sales and those are headed in the wrong direction. With less editorial space, there will be less space for the in-depth coverage that the Times provides. That coverage should move online, but knowing how the accountants at print publishers work, I suspect it’ll just lead to more layoffs.
Categories: Journalism, Social Media
The newspapers, they are a-changin’. Didn’t the Times recently announce they were cutting their pages by 1 1/2″? Oh, right, they did. Interesting they felt the need to make the announcment almost 2 years before the change is slated to take place. Why so early?
Also, it seems other papers have done this, too, although I have to admit I didn’t hear their pins drop when they cut 5% of their news real estate.