look at, could we use that to source breaking news before anybody else,” Elowitz says. “And we’ve got some proof points that say yes, and some proof points that say it’s hard. …
“But the other thing is, once you have a great story, how do you package that to make sure you’re exposing it—which is half the value of investigative journalism as well. If you write a great story and don’t publish it, it doesn’t have an impact. So it’s not just about the content, it’s about connecting with the audience, even in the most hardcore [news] parts.”
CHANGING CHANNELS
Even in the past year, since Wetpaint made a big switch from hosting fan-generated wiki sites to a more professionally produced entertainment portal, there have been big changes in the way content moves around the Web. Already, Elowitz says, Wetpaint has seen the importance of search dropping off as more people use social channels like Twitter and Facebook to share and find content—something that should sound familiar to anyone who’s followed the rumors of Facebook’s next suite of features.
“The most interesting thing is how relationship-oriented consumers can be with brands in a social world. And so we find our users in Facebook, for example, see us 25 times a month,” more often than their cousins, Elowitz jokes. “You can actually build a brand relationship, and that’s a flip-flop versus search, where the only relationship anyone has is with Google.”
“The second thing is that it’s totally real-time, and that’s the opposite of what was really popular in digital media in the last five years, which was to go for evergreen content that would show up in Google forever,” Elowitz says. “So that’s why eHow and Demand Media are always pumping out these how-to articles that never expire—but they also never get shared, because if I’m changing the ballcock on my toilet, it’s not the kind of thing that I’m going to suddenly share.
“So it turns out, there’s a science behind social distribution,” Elowitz says. “I think that’s the most important part. And if you can dissect the science of social distribution, you can actually put it to work to serve the audience better.”
MADDENING MEN
Want to see a techie go nuts? Turn him loose on media and advertising, two establishments that have decades of legacy procedures to unwind and layers of built-up inefficiencies keeping things from changing, all while the audience quickly dumps the old distribution and advertising channels.
“TV kind of defined the game as being about the 30-second spot in a program…and then it’s just about how much reach and frequency can you hit. Particularly reach. And digital’s always been hampered because the reach has never been that great compared to TV, which is why digital’s lagged in terms of spending,” Elowitz says.
“So Madison Avenue is built to help their clients hit massive reach numbers, and the most convenient way to do that is to go to Yahoo and MSN and AOL and buy from the top down the largest sites that have the highest reach numbers,” he says. “But as a convenience, it just measures who’s been there once. And it’s been a problem for advertisers, because in the end, they’re getting the reach they want, but they’re not getting the impact they want.”
So how does a next-generation media property like Wetpaint solve that problem? It’s hard to do. The stats for engagement can show that the audience has a real relationship with the site and its content, but it’s really hard to prove how that relationship transfers to brand advertisers—which are the truly big fish in ad spending.
One way Wetpaint is trying to tackle this is by having particular types of coverage sponsored by corresponding brands—like having a fashion label sponsor the fashion coverage, for instance. And that sounds a lot like the way advertising was done in the early days of TV, where individual products were actually in the title of the variety hour or daytime drama—it’s where we got the term “soap opera.”
“I hate to whine about it because I’m not a whiner, but it’s so complexly wrapped up with different incentives at every level of the chain,” Elowitz says. “It has so many layers with different incentives that it’s not a clean system, and yet you have all these enmeshed interests. It’ll take decades, I think, to change.”
