In the same week that a leading journalism school predicted the death of most print newspapers within five years, the sale of a blog pointed the way to the likely future of popular media.
ReadWriteWeb, a blog focused on technology issues, was sold for $5 million to a company called SAY Media. A $5 million deal doesn’t sound like much, but this one is significant — because ReadWriteWeb is another piece in a network that SAY Media has been assembling for several years now.
SAY Media owns several dozen niche blogs and websites. Among them are very popular titles like Remodelista, Serious Eats, Dogster, Catster and Fashionista. These sites all mix “real” content, written by web journalists, with sponsored content produced by advertisers that pay to have it run on the site.
There’s nothing shady about it; the sponsored content is clearly labeled as such. But it’s mixed in with the rest of the articles on the site, so it becomes just another choice for the reader.
Readers won‘t care
The theory is that if an item is interesting and on topic for the blog, then the readers won’t care whether it was written by an independent journalist or by a marketing person. If you’re moved to click on “8 Things Your Dog Shouldn’t Eat,” you probably don’t care that the author might be an ex-journalist now working for Purina’s PR firm.
My marketing agency has placed sponsored content on several blogs for our clients. I’ve written some of the items. And they’ve been very successful at drawing traffic for our clients, providing a good return on investment.
In the era now passing, advertisers paid big bucks to promote their products in print and broadcast ads. The newspapers and TV stations, in turn, used those advertising dollars to hire professional journalists to create the content that filled the news pages and airwaves.
In the coming years, you’ll see much more of the hybrid model, with sponsored content mixed in with the independently produced items. Here’s how SAY Media promotes their sites to advertisers: “Our custom marketing programs provide simple and accountable ways for brands to engage passionate audiences at scale.”
Translation: “We’ve created a website that fans of cats — or dogs, or fashion, or computers, or interior design — will enjoy visiting. For a price, we’ll put your content in front of that audience.”
Journalism purists will be aghast. But as long as sponsored content is identified — and, more importantly, as long as it’s something people are actually interested in — I don’t see anything wrong with it.
What’s more, this change is already rapidly taking place. And it’s going to continue, no matter what you or I think of it.
One of the saddest tings to watch happening is the failure of a young generation to distinguish between reporting and opinion, especially on-line.
I see our hometown newspaper using its Housing section as a paid-content-placement location for high-end real estate offerings. I can see that the content is pre-paid and that there is nothing remotely like news in the piece (they want to sell this house). I wonder how many others do.
For another example, I’m hoping that readers of this blog will recognize how self-serving it is: “my marketing firm [placed]. . . ” etc. The advocacy of some future pretends to be assessing a trend that may exist today, but maybe not.
We can dumb down everything to what’s entertaining, or we can insist that somewhere, in some medium, somehow, there be hard news, briskly and objectively presented.