Harnessing online traffic

Marketers and journalists may have more in common than they think. Both groups are trying to best utilize web metrics to maximize their reach. Some are just doing it voluntarily, while others are having it forced on them.

Writing for the New York Times, David Carr penned a fascinating column about the move to pay journalists for clicks and other online metrics:

The availability of ready metrics on content is not only changing the way news organizations compensate their employees, but will have a significant effect on the news itself.

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At the beginning of the month, TheStreet.com, a site that covers the stock market, announced it was expanding its platform to include new voices, and that contributors would be paid by the click. A contributor who receives 60,000 page views in a week, for example, would be paid $50. (A lot of mischief can occur when stock prices are being written about, but we’ll get back to that later.)

At the end of February, The Daily Caller, a conservative political site run by Tucker Carlson, said it would begin a hybrid arrangement in which staff writers were paid a base salary plus a traffic incentive. The Daily Caller’s publisher told The Washington Post that the new plan would lead to more traffic and higher overall compensation for writers.

Joel Johnson, the editorial director of Gawker Media, announced a program in February called “Recruits” that creates subsidiary sites for new contributors, attached to existing editorial sites like Gawker or Jezebel. The recruits receive a stipend of $1,500 a month, and pay back that amount at a rate of $5 for every 1,000 unique visitors they attract. They then get to keep anything above the amount of the stipend, up to $6,000.

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It’s not just digital upstarts that are starting to manage reporters by the numbers. The Portland, Ore., newspaper The Oregonian, the much heralded home of many Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, is in the midst of a reorganization driven by the desire for more web traffic, according to internal documents obtained by Willamette Week, a weekly newspaper in Portland. A year after big layoffs and a reduction in home delivery to four times a week, The Oregonian, owned by Newhouse’s Advance Publications, is focusing on digital journalism — and the people who produce it — with a great deal of specificity.

On the other side of the spectrum are marketers, who are trying to determine true reach at a time when more than a third of Web traffic is fake, writes Suzanne Vranica for the Wall Street Journal:

Billions of dollars are flowing into online advertising. But marketers also are confronting an uncomfortable reality: rampant fraud.

About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group.

So-called bot traffic cheats advertisers because marketers typically pay for ads whenever they are loaded in response to users visiting Web pages—regardless of whether the users are actual people.

The fraudsters erect sites with phony traffic and collect payments from advertisers through the middlemen who aggregate space across many sites and resell the space for most Web publishers. The identities of the fraudsters are murky, and they often operate from far-flung places such as Eastern Europe, security experts say.

The widespread fraud isn’t discouraging most marketers from increasing the portion of their ad budgets spent online. But it is prompting some to become more aggressive in monitoring how their money is spent. The Internet has become so central to consumers, that advertisers can’t afford to stay away.

Carr points out in his column that the potential for news sites to try and manipulate readers into clicking on their articles increases as it become tied to pay, something brands are already discovering.

And journalism’s status as a profession is up for grabs. A viral hit is no longer defined by the credentials of an individual or organization. The media ecosystem is increasingly a pro-am affair, where the wisdom — or prurient interest — of the crowd decides what is important and worthy of sharing.

Gawker Media now hosts Kinja, a platform where anybody can publish a blog post. The leader board on Kinja is a mix of people who write for a living, and people who wrote something about living that connected with other people.

It’s bracingly meritocratic, but there are hazards. Quizzes are everywhere right now because readers can’t resist clicking on them, but on an informational level, they are mostly empty calories. There are any number of gambits to induce clicks, from LOL cats to slide shows to bait-and-switch headlines.

But more than just traffic can be manipulated once you open up the gates, as Fortune recently pointed out. Authors promoting specific stocks posted to sites — including Forbes.com, Seeking Alpha, and Wall St. Cheat Sheet — without disclosing that they were paid to promote the companies they were writing about. The stocks were pumped and sometimes dumped without the reader being any the wiser.

As more sides of the business move to decisions based on metrics, it will likely create a situation where there is more equality, but also increases the chances that online clicks will be manipulated. The tech industry should determine if there’s a better way – metrics 2.0 – that will help both sides. It looks like the future of journalism may depend on it.