March 20th, 2008
How Search Has Transformed News Consumption On The Web
We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere.
Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead of passively accepting the information provided by any single news source, search has taught us to be active news consumers, so seek out news from the wealth of sources on the web.
I had a close encounter with the increasing influence of search on news consumption thanks to a spelling error. My post last Sunday about about how news sites were covering the breaking news about the Bear Stearns bailout originally had the misspelling “Bear Sterns”. (Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows about my travails with spelling.)
Well, it turns out a lot of other people don’t know that Stearns has an “a” in it. Overnight, I started getting an avalanche of traffic because the post was ranking for searches with the keyword “Bear Sterns” — after I corrected the error, it started to rank for searches with with correct spelling.
In most cases, my post appeared in Google blog search result cluster, which Google sometimes adds to a search result the same as it does with Google News results (part of Google Universal Search) — this appeared at the bottom of the search result page.
My post was a meta news story, i.e. it didn’t have any real news about Bear Stearns, it just discussed how the story was being covered.
Despite all these limitations — ranking for misspelling, not appearing as a main search result, and having a less than newsy title — I still got thousands of visits.
Imagine how much traffic the top search results got.
The real significance is what this tells us about news consumption on the web. When a news story is of great interest, news consumers are not content just to read what CNN, Yahoo, or NYT have to offer.
Instead, they go to the one place where they know they can get information from many different sources — they go to search.
It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this shift until you’ve seen it from the inside — so let me invite you to take a look. Here’s a partial list of keywords that brought news searchers to my Bear Stearns post:
bear sterns
bear stearns
bear sterns news
bear stearns news
bearsterns
bear stearns”"
bear stearns story
bear sterns story
bear sterns”"
news bear sterns
bear stearns collapse
bear stearns crisis
bear sterns collapse
bearn stearns
bear sterns, news
bearn sterns
jp morgan buys bear sterns
jpmorgan bearn stern
news about bear sterns
news on bear sterns
analysis on bear stearns collapse
bear & sterns
bear sterns crisis
bear sterns melt down hits insurance segment
bear sterns problems
bear-sterns
bearstearns
jp morgan and bear sterns
jp morgan bear sterns
jp morgan buys bear stearns
jpmorgan and bear sterns
jpmorgan+bearsterns
what is bear stearns
bear sterns”" employees
bear sterns”" j.p. morgan
bear sterns”" jpmorgan
bear sterns”"+news
bear & stearns
bear and stearns
bear n stearn
bear stearn , emc, jp morgan
bear stearn news on march the 17th
bear stearn’s
bear stearnes breaking news
bear stearns and 2008
bear stearns employees
bear stearns in the news
bear stearns jp morgan
bear stearns news 2008
bear stearns the real story
bear stearns’ collapse
bear stern crisis
bear stern investment banking
bear sterns and jp morgan chase
bear sterns bank
bear sterns employee stories
bear sterns employees
bear sterns fire sale
bear sterns green
bear sterns in news
bear sterns is a
bear sterns jp morgan
bear sterns jp morgan recenet news
bear sterns jpmorgan
bear sterns reporting
bear sterns transition
bear sterns”"
bear sterns, news,
bear,sterns
bear-stearns
bearn stearns crisis
bearn stern
bearn stern jp morgan
bearn sterns and jpmorgan
bearns and stearns+jp morgan
bears stearns story
bearsterns story
breaking news, bear stearns
breaking news about bear stearns co
cnn breaking news bear stearns
does jp morgan has to do anything with bear stearns
emc after bear stearns collapse
emc bear sterns
google bear sterns
google news bear sterns
j p morgan bear scream
jp morgan +bear stearns +summary
jp morgan and bear and stearns news
jp morgan and bear deal closing date
jp morgan and bear stearns don’t understand the deal
jp morgan bear stearns
jp morgan bear sterns deal closing date
jp morgan buys bear stearn
jp morgan buys bear sterms
jp morgan buys bearn stern
jp morgan buys bears stearns
jpmorgan bear sterns 16 march 2008
jpmorgan buys bear sterns
news + bear stearns
news + bear sterns
news about bears sterns and jp morgan
news bearn stearns
news emc bear strens
news jp morgan bear stearns
news with bear sterns
news, bear sterns
ny times on bear stearns
ny times story on jpmorgan and bear stearns
read “”bear stearns”" report “”online video”" monetization 2008
stories of bear stears employees
story of bearsterns
the bear stearn story
the bear stearns story
the collapse of bear sterns
usa buys bearn stears 2008
what about bear stearns
what led to bear stearns collapse
what led to the sale of bear stearns
why bear stearns collapse
wsj bear chronology
how did jp morgan buy bear stearns?
how did the government help sell of bear stearns?
news emc bear sterns
Still not convinced that search is driving a fundamental shift in how people consume news? Still believe that most people are content with their favorite news site’s homepage?
Well, don’t take my word for it — ask news sites about their faith in maintaining and growing direct traffic to their brands.
How about the New York Times? Or Reuters? Here’s the most interesting item I found on the Google search result for “Bear Stearns news“:
Yes, that’s right — those are ADS for news about Bear Stearns on Reuters.com and NYTimes.com.
If you search for news on Google, you’ll find these ads everywhere, e.g.
The Financial Times is advertising its news. Even Yale is advertising its global news blog.
And why? Because these news brands are savvy enough to realize that they have been disintermediated, and that news consumers may turn first to a site like Google that can give them coverage of a news story from EVERY source on the web, not just one.
New York Times killed TimesSelect because they realized more people would discover that content through search than would coming in through the NYT brand front door — and all of those news consumers coming in through search are casting a net as wide as the web.
News brands that only publish their own version of the news will increasingly disappoint news consumers whose expectations have been fundamentally changed by search. Publishing only your own content is increasingly a great way to accelerate the disintermediation of your news brand by other brands that give news consumers more of the wealth of the web.
Increasingly, news consumers will read a news brand’s reporting on a story of interest and say, OK, what else have you got?
If they don’t find anything else, they will go elsewhere — to Google and other aggregators that aren’t biased in favor of one source of content. (There’s a reason why Digg is so popular with its niche — and it has nothing to do with democracy.)
NYTimes.com may have embraced search engine optimization — and search engine marketing — but that doesn’t meant they have capitulated to disintermediation. Here’s what you’ll find on the NYTimes.com Technology section:
So rather than just publish their own technology content, NYTimes.com is aiming to provide news consumers interested in technology with more of what the web has to offer, by publishing links to the best technology news on the web.
Of course, these are links off of the NTY site, but they are simply applying the Google rule of linking on the web — the better job you do sending people away, the more they will come back.
Topics: Google | New York Times | Online Publishing | Search
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Linking out is one of the most important things any site can do.
In the old world, where people subscribed to newspapers, if you convinced one of your customers to pick up a competitor’s story, then you are essentially encouraging them to cancel their sub with YOU and pick up one with THEM.
In the new (Google) world, linking out is one of the most valuable services you can provide: you are pre-screening content for readers. If you link to content they like, THEY’LL COME BACK TO YOU, because they know you’re good at picking what they want to read.
The new value is in attention. Save people the effort of slogging through mountains of crap, and they’ll love you for it.
The situation you’re describing isn’t really a “News Reader.” The people that came to your site were really “Researchers” focused on a current event. News consumption, i.e. “Tell me what’s happening in the world today,” is still very much a browse-to-discover process rather than a search-driven process. The example above took place only because people had already had the acquisition story pushed to them either in the papers or on TV.
The phenomenon you’ve described of wanting more information is certainly relevant at that second stage, but the primary situational awareness role isn’t impacted by the search engines. People’s first activity is still browsing.
It makes sense - NYT is performing the role of a vertical news aggregator.
If you are mildly to moderately into technology, why go to the trouble of finding and collating specialist news feeds into Newsgator or Google Reader etc?
Sure, the real techos are going to set up their own customised reader service, but not the majority.
There was a period where webmasters were frightened of bleeding pagerank by including too many external links off their main pages. My SEO friends now tell me that it is no longer such a problem and that Google may even be rewarding sites that link out to relevant sites.
@Aaric - that’s a good point, although actually I’d say that for the average consumer of news, “browsing” is on its way out the door.
What people want is for others to do the browsing for them. I get a lot of my news from Twitter, or from my friends recommended items in Facebook.
More and more, I let other people do the “hard work” of determining what is worth my attention, and I think this is indicative of the change that is occurring in most places.
Whether or not that is a good thing? That is a separate discussion.
Aaric,
I think you’re making a distinction without a difference. A news reader is someone who seeks news, whether browser or searching — and the searching aspect of news consumption is becoming increasingly common, as the web and search have opened up a wealth of content, where offline you are limited to the source you have chosen.
Also, someone searching for “bear stearns news” is hardly “researching” — that’s a pretty general interest in the story.
News readers go to Google to search because most news brands don’t satisfy their need for more information and more perspectives. If more news sites linked to a wide range of sources, they wouldn’t be losing the attention of news readers to Google.
Too many news organizations still don’t understand that searching is not a secondary behavior on the web — it’s primary. And that’s why Google owns the web.
It seems this is a good example of what I call the legacy flypaper effect.
[…] just the conversation but even the search is getting fragmented. Scott Karp explains how search has transformed news consumption on the web. The search is getting so much dynamic that the major portion of the web search is now the […]
Great observations Scott. I’m a big supporter of link journalism and what the NYT is doing by linking to related tech stories around the web within their own tech stories. News websites need to produce news sure, but it’s almost equally as important for news orgs to be guides for readers on the web, and that includes linking to other related content on the web. Otherwise, like you said, people will leave you for Google.
Oh, and another resource that may help people who are follow how news is searched in search engines - subscribe to this RSS feed: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly - it’s lists of Google’s top 100 terms searched on an hourly basis. This is very useful to see how news immediately impacts searches
[…] How Search Has Transformed News Consumption On The Web - Publishing 2.0 (tags: article newmedia blog editorial publishing) […]
Disclaimer: My comments aren’t entirely relevant to this post, but relevant to 2.0 nonetheless.
I don’t have much time to dedicate to reading, which is why I usually print your posts to supplement my ‘down time’ in the john.
For this reason, I became devoutly loyal to “The Week’s” (www.theweekdaily.com) print magazine. The Week aggregates snippets of perspectives — NYT, Wash Post, Salon, etc. — around the week’s hottest issues. By doing so, it offers a relatively balanced account of hot-button issues. Better still, you can rip through it in 30 minutes (it’s thin) and get your weekly diet of news/commentary.
While reading it this morning I realized that it’s as close to a blog as print can possibly (and ever will) be — which is why I prefer it to most print media — but inherently static/inflexible/limited.
By the time it arrives at my door on Friday, I’ve already come up to speed on most of the issues through my feed burner. It’s also frustratingly limiting as I can’t read in full the commentaries I find most interesting (unless I go to my computer).
Perhaps The Week is attempting to train loyal print consumers (1.0′ers) into absorbing content like 2.0′ers. As it beefs up its web presence, it’ll need that audience to compete with the entrenched incumbents.
[…] How search has changed out appetite for news and late of reliance one news source. Link. […]
[…] How Search Has Transformed News Consumption On The Web - Publishing 2.0 “Instead of passively accepting the information provided by any single news source, search has taught us to be active news consumers, so seek out news from the wealth of sources on the web.” (tags: internet newspapersites news journalism marketing consumption aggregators search seo) […]
So interesting. I don’t use Google or “search” to look up news. Ever. I use it to find things I can’t find easily with top of mind, “go to” urls.
If I want news I will almost always go to CNN.com or MSNBC.com (sports is ESPN.com). Now, I have all of these sites in my feed reader, along with Huff Post and some other political blogs. There is just something about going to a trusted news source (for me) that trumps searching or even checking Google News.
I am truly surprised about MSM bidding keywords to promote their stories on Bear Stearns though. That is something I never noticed, despite being a SEM myself
Whoops!
Why put in all the hard work searching for news yourself? Why not get someone else to do it? In fact someone else already is. It’s called Google News.
This proves and disproves your theory. Google News is both news search made easy and a news destination.
It does have a profound effect on the volume of traffic to the originating news sites. Witness this quote: “The most important driver of all readers [to our site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly” Edward Roussel, Online Editorial Director, Telegraph Group, UK, (Wall Street Journal report).
Our site http://www.newsknife.com rates news sites based on their appearances at Google News. Our ratings show that though news stories are told by many sites, Google News and the audience prefer the telling by some sites more than others.