Ideas to Innovate in a Newspaper

Innovate in the Business Model of a Newspaper, Content Web or Blog. Is it possible?

Innovation in a traditional business model involves removing some barriers, skipping others and assuming some risks. That is to say, without a change of mentality, and without assuming that some experiments will go wrong, it is not possible to achieve an innovation solid enough to modify a business as traditional as that of a newspaper.

Without wanting to kill the business of journalism on paper, I firmly believe that the present and the future go through bringing the news to the Internet.

In the market there are many cases of websites that can give us ideas to innovate in our own blog, and in this post we are going to see some that can help us.

Ideas to innovate in a newspaper, web content or blog

Innovation is the key to continue maintaining businesses and companies and in the world of online content, it cannot be otherwise. As a result of some work we have done with the media, and an analysis of the sector, we have realized that it is not going through its best moment and it is a good option to observe which companies are doing well, in order to learn from their successes and failures.

We are going to see some keys that can contribute ideas to develop a new line of business in this type of pages that provide news, relevant content or opinion articles.

Look at those who are doing very well on the Internet

Of course, a large number of websites that have a large number of visits and that provide content are doing well and have discovered a business model related to online journalism that is working for them.

Have thousands of hits a day, which can sometimes translate into revenue and sometimes not as easily as it might seem. A lot of visits does not imply a business model, but telling twitter that it has worked for years without generating a dollar. But it is true, that having a large mass of users is easier to find the mechanisms to make that audience profitable.

It is not enough to publish news. Journalism must be a service to the user

Some websites like Google or Amazon present you websites or articles according to your interests. It is no longer enough to present the same thing to everyone, large Internet companies tend to present content based on the tastes and preferences of the reader.

It is an exciting and controversial subject, but undoubtedly, it is a line of work to explore to innovate in the business model of a newspaper or web content, present the news depending on who the reader is, where they are, their tastes, hobbies, and so on.

You’ve stopped to think that Google doesn’t offer the same content to you as it does to someone else. Google personalizes the content based on the knowledge it has about us, web we have visited previously, search terms, etc..

The result of the search was totally different for someone who likes fashion, searches, tracks and follows trends, than for someone like me, who has a much more limited interest in this respect, I am a man (the term was cowboy skirt) and I do not usually look for related things,

On the contrary, the search engine offers a lot of ads, and in some cases, even the order of presentation of the pages is different.

This shows that Google, knows our tastes, where we are, what we buy, what we visit and much more and with all this, selects what content to offer us to make it more interesting.

Measure user loyalty.

Build a loyal audience, key to the growth of any business, including a newspaper, web content or blog.

We already commented in another post, talking about metrics to launch a new line of business, that one of the keys of any company is to create loyalty in users and customers. In the case of a newspaper, without a doubt, it is even more important.

The graph shows the importance of retention to achieve growth. Without user retention, it is impossible to take off a new line of business.

This has been done especially well by large companies such as Facebook or Google, but also by other portals with much smaller content, which have been able to specialise in specific market niches.

Other relevant metrics

Continuing with the topic of metrics, since I think it is fundamental for any company, but especially for a newspaper, a few days ago I read another article that spoke of Elmeme.me. It’s an argentine website specialized in popular culture and entertainment news. In the article I talked about the importance that they give in this platform to metrics, but not to the metrics of visits and page views, as is traditionally done, if not to other types of metrics: “Fidelity metrics” or “attention metrics”.

The concept is very similar to what Google does with the pages it has indexed and where the modern seo goes: evaluate and improve the user experience of each website.

In line with the title of the book that you commented before, And Google, how would you do it? In the sense of metrics, we know or intuit much of what Google does to evaluate the behavior of users on websites, as we commented before, and therefore, knows what content must offer to make it for each user.

Leaving aside the number of visits and the number of page views, there are much more interesting metrics that we could apply to our newspaper.

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