The Atex Blog

Infographics in the Digital Age

Infographics add to the story, and in some cases can become the story itself. In the shift to digital, the possibilities for exploring large data sets has greatly expanded. Modern media organizations are making great use of this to expand their coverage of key events.

It began with one of the investigative reporting team asking: "You're good with spreadsheets, aren't you?"

— Guardian

The Guardian processed an Excel spreadsheet 92,201 of rows of data, each one containing a detailed breakdown of a military event in Afghanistan. This was the WikiLeaks war log.

The Guardian team is no stranger to large data sets, previously it built a web interface to aggregate the spending data for the British Government for the last five years. The result of its analysis is here. Not content with just UK data, the Guardian has expanded to World Government Data.

Another news organization breaking news from data is the New York Times. In the US market, it has been ahead of the pack for innovating with information.

Some examples include:

• Volatility in stock indexes – visualising economic data for a century.
• Jobless rate for people like you – dynamic chart on unemployment by demographic over time
• Geography of a recession – interactive map showing the impact of the recession

The NYTimes has also provided a portal to give readers access to its data libraries with visualisation tools.

El Mundo is doing some interesting things with infographics and has won many awards for its work.

Multimedia journalism provides some interesting opportunities. To be successful, a number of factors need to be considered.

Access to data is critical. The leaders in infographics are building data warehouses that can aggregate multiple data sources into simple to use visualisation engines. Data access is becoming easier, thanks to a trend in Open Data.

Governments are providing unprecedented access to their internal data sets, such as the UK, Australian and US governments. Usage data is slowly becoming available, so you can see what is popular.

Data by itself does not make stories. Once you have access to the data, either internally or via remote queries, it needs to be analysed. The Guardian found that Excel helps more than they initially thought. To integrate multiple data sets, developers may need to get involved.

Once you have the right data set, the art of infographics comes into play. Deciding how to display the information in a dense graphical form was difficult in the days of print (although Edward Tufte always made it look simple). In the digital era, the number of options makes the crafting of the information display even trickier.

The best of modern infographics are at the forefront of multimedia presentations. This can involve a range of technologies along with graphic design and management of the underlying data. The benefits are there, engaged readers spend more time on your site, and great infographics can spread virally through social media.

The best approach is to try lots of things, and measure the results. If a particular approach gets lots of traffic, try to determine why. Look at other sites that are successful, try different formats, such as HTML5 and video, as well as different ways of doing interactive Flash presentations.

And remember, not all information needs be serious; consider the quest to plot Dr Who's travels through time.

By Geoff Wilson, Atex CTO for the Asia Pacific Region

Publishers gain subscribers with social coupons

Is it just me or has the attention given to hyperlocal content picked-up in the past two weeks? From TBD to Patch; Gannet to Newsday; I feel like everyone is beefing up their local news coverage. Not totally surprising. Hyperlocal news is a great way to build a loyal following of readers in niche markets and gain a foothold on news that other outlets aren’t or won’t carry.

Now if you’ve been following the Atex Blog for a little while, you’ll know we’ve spent our fair share of time talking about hyperlocal content too. In fact, back in March, Donna Beasley, the Atex Global product manager for the DNA One product suite even wrote a guest blog that explained how to overcome common obstacles that face many hyperlocal initiatives. I think we even have the whitepaper if you’re interested.

Anyway, what I’d like to discuss is not so much why you should go hyperlocal, or how you should do it, but an innovative way to promote locally once you decide to go that route. Really I’m going to paraphrase a great article I just read in NiemanLab by Greg T. Spielberg. The article looks at the growing popularity of social coupon sites, specifically Groupon, and how they are helping city and regional publishers sell more subscriptions.

Just look at these numbers:
5280, a Denver monthly, sold 4,715 subscriptions
D Mag, out of Dallas, sold 3,214 subscriptions
and
New York magazine, in New York City, sold 2,536
 
Though the article concentrates on magazines, I was able to dig up the numbers for a few newspapers that have tasted the Groupon Kool-Aid too. The Chicago Tribune sold 7,494 subscriptions at $13, which was 75% percent off the normal price for a one-year Sunday only subscription. The Washington Post, offering 20 weeks of the Sunday paper for 10 bucks, sold 3,365 subscriptions.

I should probably mention that this was the number of subscriptions sold in a single day. That’s how Groupon works. It has subscribers in specific cities and everyday it sends out a single ‘coupon’ for a deal on some product or service. 50% off at a local Chinese restaurant, 75% off skydiving—things like that. But in order to get the deal a certain number of people have to pre-purchase the coupon. So for skydiving, the number could be set at 100, if only 15 people purchase the coupon, no one gets it.

Besides being a good way to attract new subscribers in a short period of time, another part of the attraction for publishers is the people the coupon is offered too. In many cities where Groupon operates, it has a subscriber base that’s hundreds of thousands of people deep, including a significant portion that’s young and employed—individuals a publisher might not reach normally. Groupon subscribers also have a special penchant for things that are local, as demonstrated by several national titles that have tried the service without nearly the same success as their local counterparts. Newsweek, for example, offered itself in Seattle and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and only attracted 31 subscribers.

Now the news isn’t all good (it rarely is). How much revenue this translates into isn’t immediately revealing. Besides having to offer a steep discount, publishers also have to split 50% of the revenue with Groupon, which decreases the return even further. For many publishers the main point isn’t the immediate revenue however, but the potential for renewals. Many see that even if a small portion of the new subscribers renew, it will still be above the normal return for conventional promotions.

Another potential drawback publishers have run into is with subscribers who’ve paid full price for a subscription. Some have canceled with the hope of finding the cheaper Groupon price later on. To counter this some publishers have tried bundling a subscription with products to special events, to differentiate the product for current readers.

Obviously, the true value of Groupon and sites like it (in the U.K. I see there is WOWCHER and DailyDeal in Germany) has yet to be proven. The number of people who renew will probably be the true litmus test. But as publishers try to reestablish local news coverage it might be helpful to consider new approaches to promoting local as well.

Trying to build trust in an untrustworthy world

If you believe the statistics on the percentage of people who trust the Internet, there’s a good chance you’re not going to believe anything this blog has to say.

Assuming you’re a fair representation of an Internet user at large, which for the sake of this post, I’m guessing you are. If that’s the case then only 39 percent of you will think this information is reliable; 14 percent of you will have little to no faith in it; and 9 percent won’t believe a single thing it says. 

Like this for example: “I like asparagus”. That will be hard to believe because it was written on the Internet (and by me). That’s according to a report released by the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. 

But, here’s where it gets interesting. Despite these numbers, in the past month, the US has seen two stories catch fire on the Internet, which later proved to be completely false.  

Story one: A girl emails 30 pictures of herself (clothed) to colleagues, that show her holding a whiteboard explaining the various reasons why she is quitting her job. Funny, but fake. A day later the team that created the hoax comes clean. We all laugh.

Story two: A blogger posts video of a government official that shows her making racists comments. The agency employing the official sees the video and forces her to resign. The video ends up being a snippet of a much larger presentation that proves the exact opposite of what the blogger alleges. Queue massive uproar about racism in the US. We all feel ashamed and then blame the media.  

(I apologize to my friends outside the United States. I don’t wish to imply that everyone is gullible. This might be a uniquely American phenomenon, though if you have some examples of this from your own country, please feel free to leave a comment. Misery loves company.)

So let’s look at this a little closer. We have statistics that point out people don’t trust the Internet. Yet in less than four weeks, we see two erroneous stories capture everyone’s attention because of the Internet. Raise your hand if you enjoy irony.

What gives?

Well, it turns out, people might trust the Internet more than these statistics suggest. They just distrust the source. 64 percent of users trust the information posted by their friends on Facebook according to an article by eMarketer, which references a study by Invoke Solutions. The same goes for blogs written by someone the reader knows. A friend’s Tweets are a little less reliable, at only 55 percent, but still better than information from a source the consumer doesn’t know. 

The idea of a ‘source’ is especially perplexing, because in this context it has less to do with who originally researched and produced the story, than who a user got the story from. A person might not trust a story in the NY Times because she doesn’t know the author or dislikes the publisher, but if a statistic from that story is relayed through a blog or Facebook posting by someone she trusts, it gains automatic legitimacy. 

That might not seem as important as you think, but when you consider the expanse of certain social media platforms you can understand how almost everyone is connected to everyone else via the Internet. Now think of the implications if people begin to rely more and more on recommendations from their friends because they’re felt to be more trustworthy.

(Luckily someone has already thought about this for you and he calls it the Gutenberg Parenthesis. A theory that the Internet, with its growing dependence on social interaction, is returning humans to a state similar to what we saw before the printed word was invented—where oral exchanges defined the media culture. People didn’t have the Wall Street Journal or Encyclopedia Britannica as paradigms of trustworthiness so they had to decide which rumors to believe.Crazy, I know.) 

The impact for publishers is worth considering, especially since they depend on people trusting their content to build interest in the ads that are served with it. If users don’t trust the content, they probably won’t trust the ads either. It might also reduce the number of visitors who access the site directly and instead enter via links to specific articles. 

What’s the best solution? Unfortunately I don’t have statistics for that. Not that I’d expect you to believe them anyway. 

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Will the iPad save newspapers?

So apparently Rupert Murdoch likes tablets. That was the big piece of news I read this week in The Guardian. “Rupert Murdoch says Apple’s iPad is a ‘game changer’ for news media” the headline said. Apparently this was very important; it made The Guardian after all.  

After reading the article, I had to agree. Murdoch did drop some nuggets that were certainly worth mentioning. According to The Guardian, Murdoch said that “the iPad’s convenient style would reinvigorate journalism.” That it would get “young people reading newspapers” and even better, Murdoch saw the “iPad as the ideal device to encourage consumers to pay for digital journalism.”

I don’t think Steve Jobs could have said it better himself. 

But the reason I enjoyed this article was because I thought it was a great follow-up to my post last week on paywalls. In case you missed it, I tried to argue that newspapers needed online paywalls to protect their print products. To which I received a deluge of feedback in the form of a single comment from a reader who felt paywalls really weren’t the problem to success online at all. The problem, the reader thought, was content. “A paywall is viable when content merits a paywall” he said.  

Interesting. Certainly an argument I’d heard before, but never pondered seriously until eloquently described in the comment. But if I follow this argument further we could say that if content trumps all else, then no technology—no matter how sophisticated or how nice the Apple logo looks—should matter, right?

Wrong, it seems, according to Murdoch. Look at those quotes again. iPads will “reinvigorate journalism”, “get young people reading”, and “encourage consumers to pay”. There’s nothing there about improving content—making it more relevant—impactful—or stimulating to the mind and senses. It’s all about technology and how technology will lift up the publishing industry.

Now this raises some interesting questions: Does technology possess the ability to make up for shoddy content? Can a device like the iPad, with its ability to deliver content like never before, entice people to pay for content they normally wouldn’t under similar circumstances? 

Allow me to take a shot at this first—mainly because I’m already here and I feel like I do a good job of presenting things so others can shoot them down. And let me preface this with saying that I don’t own an iPad and really can’t appreciate what content consumption is like on the device. So you can read these opinions much like my mother, while watching NCIS. 

Here are three reasons why I don’t think in the long run, the iPad will make up for a bad content. 

1. Eventually the novelty of the device will wear off. People will no longer be impressed at the thought of simply being able to consume content and start thinking about the content they’re actually consuming.

2. Apps will always have to compete against actual websites, which with the introduction of HTML5 will come closer than ever to duplicating the types of experiences you receive in an app. Only the websites will go further, they’ll allow comments, links, bookmarks etc. And unless something changes soon, the website will still be free.

3. The device hasn’t mattered before. At one point computers were new and consuming content on the Internet was a grand new adventure for lots of people. Publishers could add all sorts of elements to their sites that made content more interactive, more personalized and in some ways more entertaining. As of yet, that model hasn’t panned out either. 

You might believe that as an employee of a respected, powerful, successful technology company voicing this opinion might put me in some hot water with my colleagues. But I don’t think that’s the case. As a company you don’t survive for 37 years in the software business without learning a thing or two. And if anything, Atex certainly understands that the products and services only go so far. We can help companies produce content, deliver content, and monetize content. But we can’t necessarily help a company that produces crappy content succeed. At some point the customer has to do something. 

But that’s just my own little disclaimer to make sure I don’t get an email from my manager later. 

What I really want to know is what you think? I’ve given you my thoughts, now go ahead and weigh in on Mr. Murdoch’s argument. 

Forget all the bad news, publishers still need pay walls

I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines by now. How newspaper after newspaper has put up a pay wall only to lose a substantial amount of its online readership. That in some instances its share of online traffic has fallen to a percentage of what it was before the newspaper put the pay wall up. 

For a lot of publishers this was exactly the news they didn’t want to hear—that another attempt at implementing a pay wall was going down in flames. Though some newspapers are saying the poor statistics are exactly what they expected, that probably doesn’t make the results sit any better with publishers contemplating the same move. 

I’ll be honest that up until a few days ago I didn’t completely appreciate the nature of the pay wall dilemma. I understood the facts behind the debate—how publishers need to develop additional revenue sources to offset non-existent online advertising revenue and a dwindling print subscriber base—but I wasn’t completely sure that a pay wall was the answer. There just seemed to be too much evidence that demonstrated a pay wall wouldn’t work. 

Of course, I also know proponents point to publications like The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times to demonstrate pay wall success, but I don’t think these are proper comparisons. How something like the Journal succeeds online is much different than how a breaking news-type publication might do it. For better or for worse, The Wall Street Journal is a necessity for most businesses—a publication employees can’t live without—meaning a great deal of its subscribers can expense their subscriptions. Unfortunately, the same rules don’t apply to all publications. 

But if pay walls don’t work, does that mean the only alternative is to leave things free online and try to find other revenue sources; possibly on the iPad or with mobile apps? I know for a lot of analysts, free online content is the best approach because charging in most instances turns into a losing proposition as people will inevitably find the same content somewhere else.

Though I agree that a pay wall may push away online visitors, I’d say, conversely, that keeping all website content free, will cause a newspaper to lose print subscribers too. This creates then, quite a Catch-22 for publishers—where they have to decide on the survival of one product in spite of the other—web or print (Sophie’s Choice anyone?). If we were to take this seriously though, the decision might not be as difficult as you think. Considering that one channel is generating advertising and subscribers and while the other is losing both, the decision seems pretty straight forward.

Regardless, the point is not to keep one product, but two or three or more if possible, and a publisher who wants to do this, must do something. Some sort of boundary has to be built, if for any other reason, to let print subscribers know they’re not suckers for buying something others are getting for free. 

What that will look like is anybody’s guess. My gut feeling is that it will be some sort of hybrid. Not a complete pay wall, but a pay wall that protects enough of the print product so that subscribers won’t feel ripped off.  

But that’s just me. What does everyone else thing? Are pay walls feasible? Or should publishers scrap them altogether and try to find revenue somewhere else?

Six reasons to choose a standard system, and a case study to prove it

Alright, so your company is looking to purchase a new content management or advertising system. You’re sitting through the demos; partaking in a WebEx or two; getting chummy with the sales people; and eventually you start breaking down which system is best for you. Great.

Now inevitably part of your decision comes down to what functionality the system offers already and what functionality or enhancements your company will need to add. This is always an interesting debate. Obviously there are pieces you’d like to have, but are they the same pieces that you have to have?

The reason I ask, is that companies sometimes assume that there is no added benefit of implementing a standard out-of-the box system. They concentrate instead on the functionality it doesn’t have and assume it won’t be able to meet their needs in the long run. This is far from the case. I don’t want to imply that a standard system can replace a customized one. That has a lot to do with the specific customization and enhancements a company wants. But there are benefits a standard system offers that a company should consider.

For example:

1. Standard systems require less time to implement. Seems like an obvious one. Without the need to build or customize new pieces of a system, the installation timeframe is greatly reduced. But what people may not realize is that the quicker a system goes in, the quicker you can begin to use it and the quicker you can start working on achieving that all important ROI.

2. They cost less. If a vendor has to build it, someone has to pay for it. And unless an enhancement is already in the product roadmap or is something the vendor sees use further use for, the cost of building the enhancement is going to fall on the customer.

3. Standard systems are developed based on collective best practices—depending on the size of the vendor this could mean input from hundreds if not thousands of customers. So if the standard system does something a little bit differently, there’s probably a good reason for it.

4.They are easier to support and manage. Generally speaking standard systems have less complexity than one that’s highly customized, making it easier to fix should a problem arise.

5. A standard system can be ‘semi-customized’ without necessarily starting from scratch. Many enterprise systems are developed with the idea that a customer will want to tweak or adjust certain parts of it.  

6. A standard system empowers users. Just like enhancements can add complexity that’s harder to support, it can also make a system more difficult to learn. A standard installation and workflow approach however, enhances the capability for cross-utilization and cross-training of staff.

Okay so this is good news, but is there any proof? Actually there is. Several Atex customers have implemented standard systems.

First there’s the San Diego Union-Tribune. It chose to implement an Atex editorial CMS with little to no customization and achieved some impressive results. Besides, streamlining its workflow (the publisher dropped nearly an hour off its post times), the company also installed the system in less than 100 days and is on pace to achieve a full return on their investment in less than a year. Not bad. (For more information on the San Diego Union-Tribune, download our case study)

Then there’s Johnston Press one of the largest publishers in the UK. It took 60 days to roll out 350 users and is currently adding 75 users a week, which will eventually bring its total seat count to 2,500 for 12 months.

Finally, The Dallas Morning News, the 15^th largest newspaper in the US. The News went live on a 463-seat Atex advertising system in less than one year. A system that has been able to reduce its operating expenses by 50%.

So next time your company is purchasing and new CMS or advertising system, consider seriously the benefits of using a standard product. Try not to focus on the one or two pieces of functionality it doesn’t offer, but wonder instead about how much your company would benefit from a faster implementation and a system that’s easier to manage. It might be worth more than any enhancement can offer.

If you’re interested in learning more about the San Diego Union-Tribune and how they benefited from the Atex Editorial CMS, please download our free case study.

Ad Networks, Who Needs 'Em?

Raise your hand if your company uses an ad network. Anyone? Do you like them? Do you feel like they raise the value of your online content?

You can put your hand down now (I couldn’t see it anyway). I was just curious. You see, in the past few weeks I’ve run across blog after blog that’s raised some issue with using ad networks. Either they’re a waste of money, don’t correctly target ads, or do something that ruins the reputation of advertising online.  

One blog in particular entitled "Ad Networks Are For Idiots---And Here’s The Math To Prove It", denounces ad networks with numbers—pointing out the various ways publishers could prosper more without them. Among other things, the author points out that: 

- The average ad network generates a 27-cent average CPM while a premium publisher gets $20.17 average CPM for an ad sold directly.

- Publishers earn 74.7 times more money per page when they sell ads directly

- Publishers are collectively paying $2 billion a year to ad networks to create a competitor to their own sales force

- To equal the value of an ad network a publisher would only have to sell .91% more of its inventory directly.

The author doesn’t stipulate where these numbers come from of course. But nothing I found, other than the material I read from ad network sites directly had anything good to say. I mean, if publishers know ad networks stink; can see why they stink; and have proof of their stinkiness; than why do they keep on using them? 

That’s a good question I thought. Of course I didn’t have an answer (I rarely do), but I knew someone who might. Enter Lars Jiborn, Atex Global Product Manager for Advertising. 

I gave old Lars a call and presented my dilemma: “What’s the deal here?” I asked. 

“Well,” he said in his light Swedish accent. “What usually directs publishers towards an ad network is their inventory. They have too much of it and need ad networks to help fill the space even though the ads booked come at a fraction of the cost. The thinking goes that even a little money is better than no money at all.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Do we have anything that can help them?”

Without even hesitating, Lars replied: “As a matter of fact we do. Lots of people assume that inventory has to do with poor selling, but that’s not always the case. In many instances inventory results from an ad department not realizing how much space is available, how many impressions have been served, etc—basically a lack of information. The Atex solution aims to give as much control and insight to the ad departments and their sales staff as possible. We figure if they always have the best numbers in front of them, there will be less confusion about the space available and publisher can work to make sure more of their inventory gets sold directly.”

This was great, but I’d also read that this was exactly the type of thing that ad networks were preparing to offer as well. Specifically ‘technologies that let publishers flexibly manage ad inventory in real time, automatically pulling ad spots from a page when there’s not an ad of high enough value to go in,” said one article from PoynterOnline. But here again publishers would be at the mercy of ad networks instead of controlling the process themselves.

I asked Lars for his thoughts.

“It’s definitely a problem," he said. "Whether it’s inventory management, targeted placement or just serving an ad—publishers, especially small publishers, don’t know how to replace an ad network and all the features it offers, once it’s gone. Add to that the piece about needing to sell off inventory and the problem gets even worse. 

“This really is the goal of our advertising system. Give publishers all the tools they need to book ads; target ads; track ads, from the same system and they’ll depend less and less on ad networks. It’s my belief the ad inventory part will take care of itself, once they have all the tools at their disposal to give advertising customers the best possible offering.”

What a complicated issue. From the articles I’d read, you would think giving up ad networks would be simple, but after my chat with Lars, I realized that wasn’t the case at all. In many ways giving them up was a giant leap of faith.  

But I’d be interested to hear what the Blog readers think (all seven of you). Do you see/believe publishers should give up ad networks? Or are they a necessary evil? Or are they not evil at all? Let me know.

And if you’d like more information on anything I've outlined here feel free to contact me or Lars at blog@atex.com.   

Want more advertisers? Ask an Expert

Meet Perry Broyles.

He's the branch manager of a Bath Fitter outlet in Knoxville, Tennessee. He’s a licensed Master Plumber—certified both in Tennessee and Alabama. He's the guy you’d call if your bathtub couldn’t hold an Oompa Loompa or your shower looked like something from the show “Dirty Jobs.” Say you needed to ‘tap-in’ to existing sewage lines from a first floor bathroom, Mr. Broyles knows something about that too. That’s because Perry Broyles is an expert—an expert in bath remodeling.

Now if you sell website advertising and have no particular interest in remodeling your Oompa-Loompa bathtub, than you probably don’t care too much about Perry Broyles. For all intents and purposes he’s just another advertiser—someone you or a member of your staff would approach about putting an ad on your website. But that’s it. You wouldn’t see him as representing some grand new advertising model that could help media companies boost their revenue by offering advertisers innovative ways to reach new customers. That would be ridiculous.

If that’s the case, then maybe you should take another look at Perry Broyles.

Though calling it a ‘grand new advertising model’ might be a stretch (I apologize), Broyles does participate in a service that is certainly innovative. Offered by the Knoxville News Sentinel, through its website www.knoxnews.com, Broyles participates in an online advice portal called Ask the Expert, which allows site visitors to him questions about bath remodeling. 

 

The service, which was developed by Kaango, is fairly straight forward. Basically someone just visits to the Ask the Expert page, picks the topic they’re interested in, sees the expert and enters a question. Pages are branded to match the publications website and media companies can easily moderate questions when they're entered.In most instances a publisher can have the whole thing up and running in less than a week.

For publishers, Ask the Expert represents an entire new revenue stream to supplement their advertising business. As a service it reduces their dependence on selling ads and ad space. It also gives sales staffs a larger and more diverse product portfolio--increasing the likelihood that one of the publishers products will satisfy the needs of the customer.

Of course having a product and convincing a potential advertiser to buy it, are two separate things.But that might not be as hard as you think. A little education on the benefits the service offers when compared to conventional advertising, might be enough.The critical part is explaining how customer interaction creates relationships and how those relationships can lead to more sales. This can happen if a visitor asks a question or not. Just reading through an advertisers’ answers helps enhance their reputation as a thought leader in their industry. Being Web based also gives experts the potential to reach customers well-outside their normal markets, something that’s difficult to do with ads placed in print.

Perry Broyles didn’t need anyone to tell him the benefits of Ask the Expert. He simply thought it was a good idea; and as far as he can tell, he wasn’t wrong. Since joining the service he’s answered about 25 questions, from which he’s generated more than $20,000 in new business. It’s those kinds of results that make it pretty painless explaining to people about the best bathroom caulk or how to complete a tub to shower conversion.

If you think your company could benefit from Ask the Expert, feel free to contact Kaango and ask about scheduling a demo.

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