Linkbait: the ‘dearth’ of news?

The media industry is locked in a struggle akin to the legendary competition between John Henry and the steam drill.  If online upstarts such as The Huffington Post are the steam drill, the part of John Henry is played by the tired media behemoths of old: The New York Times, National Public Radio, and even, it seems, CNN.  In our hearts, most of us want John Henry to win, but none of us expects him to survive the struggle.  None of us, that is, except John Henry.

And what, in this case, does John Henry look like?  He’s about 5’10″, slightly pudgy, with thinning hair and a swagger that says ‘I’m much cooler than I look, hell yes I am.’  Right now he’s sitting in a cluster of cubes lit only by the soft glow of his computer screen (new media divisions all look alike).  He might be sipping tea, but, chances are, he’s on his second cup of Starbucks by now, and he’s just digging into the morning metrics report.

The metrics report looks much the same as it does every day.  The most popular stories of the day, in particular, catch his eye.  Most of the headlines are classic linkbait:

• 10 Great Ways to Waste Time Online
• OMG! What Your Teenage Daughter Does When You’re Not Looking
• Man Mauled By Tiger [pic]

The above stories are massive audience builders: any one of them might drive as much as 5% of the day’s website traffic.  Every media organization (even The New York Times) generates a few of these headlines every day.  Were you to aggregate all these headlines for the day on a single site (and generate a few of your own by adding some sex appeal to other people’s stories), you could potentially grab enough market share to dominate the market for online advertising.  And if you didn’t have any of the pesky overhead of traditional media — like journalist salaries and hotel bills from the Baghdad bureau — you could, over time, topple traditional media.

This, in a nutshell, is the business model of The Huffington Post.  Stogy media, for all the billions of dollars it dumps into reportage each year, doesn’t have a clue how to sell a story.  So enterprising bloggers read their stories and resell them.  Say you’re reading a story from The Wall Street Journal.  The headline reads, Son’s Death Has Iranian Family Asking Why.  Boring.  But, what’s this?  Buried deep in the story is a nugget that’s sure to attract a massive audience:

…upon learning of his son’s death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a “bullet fee”—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back…morgue officials finally agreed [to wave the fee].

Summary: an insensitive morgue official demanded a bribe from a grieving family (newsflash: Iran is a kleptocracy) but, in the end, he changed his mind.  Although the original journalist or his editor at the Journal decided to push this story ten yards down on page A6, Nico Pitney, a blogger at The Huffington Post, saw an opportunity to turn this story into linkbait.  The headline read:

At the time, it was the top story on The Huffington Post, just below the masthead, and above pictures of Iranian politicians, presumably announcing or decrying the bullet fee.  The story has since been completely removed from the site.  Another Pitney headline that was recently retracted by The Huffington Post declared that Iran was in the midst of a coup.  That headline posted moments after the first reports of the protests began streaming in.  Weeks later, we’re still waiting on that coup.

A battle of words ensued between old media journalists and Huffington Post bloggers, who declared that Pitney’s Iran blog had ‘raised the bar’ at The Huffington Post.  Those bowtie-wearin’ pipe-smokin’ fountain-pen-wieldin’ old media types are just jealous.

Meanwhile, back in his cube, John Henry is reviewing the numbers on his own link bait.  That picture of the man mauled by the tiger got nearly 100,000 views yesterday.  Much further down the list (with half the page views) is a story about a religious sect that owns one of the largest security firms in the U.S.  At first glance, these numbers sound the death toll of news.  The security firm story required hours of reporting, photography, editing and audio engineering to produce.  The tiger picture was snapped by some dude on his lunch break at the Seattle zoo.

But looking deeper into the numbers, John Henry sees reason to rejoice.  Web analytics wonks also like to look at an important metric known as the ‘bounce rate,’ which measures whether a user remained on the site after viewing a particular page, or whether he left the site immediately.  A bounce rate of 100% indicates that everyone who came to the story immediately left the site.  A bounce rate of 0% indicates that everyone who came to the story clicked somewhere else in the site.  Bounce rate doesn’t indicate whether the user viewed ten pages or just two on the site, so it only tells you that, at the very least, those that didn’t bounce viewed twice as many pages as those who did.  But it’s possible (and, in many cases, probable) that those who didn’t bounce liked what they saw, stuck around for a while, and decided to become a loyal member of your audience.  In that case, you’ve turned a casual viewer into a loyal customer, and you’ll never have to vie for his attention again.  He’s hooked.

The tiger picture got a bounce rate of 98%, whereas the security firm story earned you a bounce rate in the low fifties.  That means that the security firm story probably won some real audience share today, whereas the tiger pic provided brief amusement to a group of people with paleolithic attention-spans looking for something to do while they waited out the refractory period between two porn surfing sessions.

And another thing of interest: that tiger pic won’t even make the rankings tomorrow (because someone, somewhere, will get mauled by a panda), whereas the security firm story might bounce around for a few days.

I don’t mean to trivialize the very real threat to journalism that is posed by a changing business model that coincides with a global economic crisis.  Journalists everywhere are losing their jobs or making massive concessions in their compensation plans.  Certainly we’re experiencing a dearth of real news in the age of mass communication, and that dearth is likely to last until old media reinvents itself.

But it’s also certain, at least in my mind, that the master link-baters like The Huffington Post pose no real threat to traditional media.  We’ve been telling stories since before the first fire lit up the night sky.  That’s not going to change with the internet, with linkbait, or any other method, yet invented, to out-shout the truthful storyteller.  And that’s got to make John Henry smile.