Out With A Bang

As one or two of you might know, we have developed something of an interest of late in events in Northumberland.

There is, after all, a chance that the initial contours of the UK’s new media landscape might be drawn out in the rolling vales beneath Hadrian’s Wall…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=331

Today and Johnston Press boldly went where few weekly publishers have gone before by erecting a new wall around the ‘Premium Content’ contained within the Northumberland Gazette; from now on you will have to pay £5 a quarter to access the ‘inside pages’ of the Gazette.

http://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/sectionhome.aspx?sectionID=1117

And, sure enough, click on the canoeist and the dramatic rescue at sea story; and ‘Bang!’ its nose against the JP pay-wall…

http://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/Canoe-sparks-fullscale-search-in.5869961.jp

.. without your fiver in the meter, you’re going no further.

A fiver for three months access doesn’t, in fairness, sound too bad. And I guess there are people who would do it. If the online version of the Gazette is that engrained into their lives; I don’t know.

We never got the subscription model to MyFootballWriter to work; ended up with a real hard-core of c70-100. Never really budged much beyond that. There was never enough ‘premium’ – and for that in football terms read ‘exclusive’ – content to go round.

That and the fact that we never quite mastered the anti cut-and-paste technology that you need to make a wall a wall.

But what interests me is what happens to the advertising – and, in particular, the local advertising pertinent to Alnwick, Amble, etc – when you build a wall around it… and offer just a two-paragraph teaser on the front.

Because what is interesting – and this is me just guessing a bit – is that the 30-40 word teasers offers the Google search spiders even less of a clue as what ad to serve up next to that content; that with precious little to latch onto key words-wise, the relevancy of the text ads served up below becomes ever more remote.

As remote as New Zealand, in fact.

Or at least that’s the ad I see in suburban Norwich…

http://www.newzealand.com/travel/sights-activities/activities/water-activities/fresh-water-canoeing-kayaking.cfm?cid=uk0909_search_paid_google&gclid=CKT40pLAs54CFVeY2AodiRmVlA

Two uses of the word ‘canoeist’ rings a distant bell in sunny California and up pops the 100% New Zealand experience…

OK, maybe that’s just a one off; one story that proved a point…

http://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/Rape–short-word-long.5870288.jp

Use the word ‘rape’ and I presume that’s when the Haven Centre, in London, pops to the top of the ads beneath…

http://www.thehavens.co.uk/

How many people in Alnwick or Amble will be making use of a service in Paddington or Clerkenwell must be a moot point; again, I’m seeing these ads in Norfolk; maybe the ‘locals’ get a different view of Google’s world underneath the gates of the Gazette’s pay-walls.

Of course, what goes on ad-wise behind the pay-walls where the fuller story lies none of us will ever know. Because I’ve very little intention of popping a fiver into the JP meter to discover that the Google ads grow in relevancy behind the paywall where there is more for the Google bots and spiders to latch onto.

What I think is safe to assume is that the Shilbottle Coal Company will take an awful lot of persuading to pay for an ad that lies beyond those walls.

The world and his passing wife can see his ad here…

http://alnwick.journallive.co.uk/

And, for a fiver, that makes sense. Place my ad where I know people can see it…

There…

http://www.coaldirect.co.uk/

Am I going to place my ad – or, rather, entrust someone else to place my ad in a space where I’m not sure how many people are going to see it…?

No.

In fairness to JP, tis only experiment; one of the thousands we need to conduct right now, Mr Shirky would tell us, given that ‘nothing works, but everything might…’

And pehaps pay-walls, subscriptions, micro-payments etc will, indeed, all have their part to play in under-pinning our future journalistic lives.

But at that local level, so too will locally-sourced advertising.

For me, the fight has to be to win that fiver off the Shilbottle Coal Company on a regular basis; do that and we can then start to edge towards a ‘not-for-loss’ proposition; a first rung on the ladder.

But putting a pay-wall in the way of the Shilbottle Coal Company finding his online punters isn’t the way to go; he needs to be encouraged to find a new, digital home in this new, emerging landscape – just like the rest of us.

And his home won’t be behind a pay-wall. He won’t do it.