Every now and then an article comes along that really grabs my attention. I recently read an interesting analysis by Elan Lohmann of traffic to various South African news websites from January 2008 to April 2009, which showed who is gaining and who is losing market share. You can read the article here.

In another lifetime I sold advertising space, banner based, into high traffic websites in Europe. We talked CPM and user retention, click through rates and cost per click analysis. As we went on we found that we could measure and track the exact cost per user aquisition and even in some cases analyse the path that user would take to get to the sites we were advertising. We could track practically all of them once they were there and how they behaved thereafter. While this is still very interesting and relevant information, what we are seeing now is loyalty to news sources and user profiles based on an ageing local Internet user demographic.

We are not happy to be directed and driven to our destination anymore. Now we do the driving.

Why is this important? This shows us the path our Internet model will take and more importantly shows us what readers want and where they go to get their news ‘fix’. What sources they trust and what styles of delivery they are engaged by. No longer are we only simple ‘point and clickers’ enticed by rotating banners with snappy taglines conveniently placed via our ‘cookie footprint’ on the sites we frequent. Now we follow news sources via RSS email subscriptons and sites we have bookmarked. We are designing and digesting our news media the way we want to and media delivery giants like Google know this and are constantly tailoring their products based on what we subscribe to, what we choose to read rather than what we can have placed in front of us.

They are not replacing newspaper material, they are simply replacing the the raw material, the way the news is delivered.

So how does this affect us? Let’s take the South African news sites in this study as an example. News24 and The Times are gaining ground where sites like SABC news and iAfrica are losing it. Why? The answer is really simple. Blogging and the relevant multimedia. While multimedia is not neccesarily the easiest method to follow, and may not take over from the written word for some time yet, sites like The Times make a good fist of it. Bloggers take this onboard and comment on it. As readers, we are now deciding to follow bloggers and writers we instinctively ‘trust’ because they are not paid writers in the true sense.

Readers are repeaters, retweeters if you like. Joe Public has come to the party on these sites.

The pulse of our nations news is kept healthily beating by the sites I see at Afrigator and the musings of bloggers like Seth Rotherham at 2oceansvibe. I don’t particularly subscribe to everything Seth blogs about for example, but I get where he is coming from. He is the voice of Joe Public in the sense that he blogs about what he sees fit to blog about, things that have irked him, media he finds interesting and products he feels like endorsing. Furthermore he represents the man in the street who has used the Internet from inception in our market, and that is exactly why he has credibility. He has staying power.

Whilst a lot of what he writes about is general humour with a good dose of paid for article marketing, there is enough of a lifestyle and opinion based rhetoric, all delivered with great humour, to keep me interested over and above the product placement that I may or may not heed. I quite often find the things he blogs about at other sites before he writes about them, but to me whats important is what HE thinks about the goings on in our media and social landscape. This doesnt mean that if Seth has a bad experience at a particular store that I will be inclined to think the same, it just means that I know that someone else out there has the wherewithall to write about these experiences and thats what drives our collective consciousness as consumers.

Moving along to the guys at Afrigator and the content they uncover and deliver to us, via the excellent Afrigator website, the fledgling but wildy exciting Gatorpeeps application and the ever so interesting Adgator product. Why is this important to me? Well I can digest what ordinary south africans think, what ordinary South Africans feel it neccesary to ‘peep’ about, and be exposed to the brands and media around such discussion. A few short months ago I used to get my daily news fix from a multitude of South African news services. Not anymore. I get it from Aggregator sites like Afrigator, certain choice news sites such as News24, all opinionated on by blogs like 2oceansvibe, imod and the like. If you’re a publisher of any size, pontificating like me or simply making a running commentary (also like me) then ignore these sites at your peril.

When I decided to launch my personal opinion based personal news site here at Socialyz.com, my first thought was to extract interesting news and relay my opinion on such matters via a blogging platform which was slightly ‘magazinelike’. This would serve to a) dish up the content in a digest format where certain opics can be taken in channel by channel and b) allow for a less rigid, more opinion based type of article that readers can lap up, take apart and comment upon.

I found that making comment on certain popular media topics does stimulate debate on my site, and that is EXACTLY what I’m after. I’d like to know, hear and read what my readers think of the material I’m delivering. Give it a thumbs up or down, its your prerogative. Moreover, I find that by actually putting the thoughts out there on certain topics, they can be revisited and rehashed at a later date, to, amongst other things, guage what we liked, what we hated, when we liked it and when we hated it.

This open kind of communication spells one thing to me. User maturity. As we grow as an audience so we grow as commentators, as we grow as critics, so we grow as targets for other critics.

Put simply, we are on our soap boxes, mass broadcasting of the message from these soap boxes is sure to follow in other formats, whether via braodband episode based ‘bite sized’ programming a la from the couch, and 2oceansvibe.tv or via the comment such sites and episodes stimulate.

So whilst I have nothing against the back markers in this race, or the people working tirelessly at these organisations. That said, each race must be led by someone, and everyone loves a winner. Call me a media whore or a social media slut, but my money is behind the bloggers as the trend setters and race leaders.

Joe Social

I'm writing this cos I have a lot to say and sometimes I cant sleep unless I write it. Then its gone from my head.

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