When Longform Takes… Other Forms

The whole concept of “content marketing” puts downward pressure on the quality of the content. It becomes about quantity, instead of quality.

The job of content should be to attract, engage and delight your readers. That way, they’ll keep reading. And they’ll find your sales pages, because they were impressed by your content pages.

via Nick Usborne, Why I don’t much like the phrase, “content marketing”.

Packaging is vital to our growth, too. It’s imperative for all our editorial, design and technology staff to improve the product experience with highly relevant and related content, applications or tools. Last week’s record-breaking launch of Best Places to Live is prime example. At its traffic peak, each visitor to Best Places was consuming as many as 27 pages each.

via Chris Peacock, VP and Executive Editor, CNNMoney.com’s brand of business journalism « Talking Biz News.

I’ve been curious about the Journal’s video strategy for some time. But when Murray tweeted several weeks ago that they’d established a steady flow of 6 million-7 million streams a month, we started a correspondence that resulted in an invitation to see what it takes to make live television at a newspaper.

via Marion Maneker, Is the Wall Street Journal the Future of News Video? | The Big Money.

The challenge is to really understand that audience and identify the way that compelling content can build a strong relationship, creating new opportunities for monetization elsewhere. In this respect, passion-based products such as Times Plus (or Guardian Extra) that reward keen readers with additional content and offers represent a smarter long-term solution than a simple paywall that drives users into the welcoming arms of your (free) rivals.

via Nick Thomas, Publishers Need Popcorn, Not Paywalls | paidContent:UK.

Eun will present the new AOL content structure—a slimmed-down 30-plus sites channeled into 17 “super” networks—at an all-hands meeting today. That’s a major change from the previous URL-based approach with more than 80 distinct sites. Eun explained the strategy and the thinking behind it to paidContent in one of his first interviews.

The new structure is like a newspaper in some respects with the super nets divvied up into our groups—AOL News & Info, AOL Entertainment, AOL Life, and AOL Commerce (plus the AOL.com front page as its own)—but with a TV-like emphasis on programming and production. Nearly all of the content remains but the branding is changing.

via Staci D. Kramer, David Eun Puts AOL On A URL Diet With ‘Super Net’ Strategy | paidContent.