Interessante articolo apparso oggi sul WSJ.
Keywords: a Growing Cost for News Sites
Media Firms Place Bids To Secure Top Positions With Search Engines
By EMILY STEEL
April 30, 2007; Page B6
It used to be that news-media outlets competed for the best stories or the most compelling photographs. Nowadays, though, some of the most furious competition in the news business is over the best Internet search words for a big story.
With the Web assuming an increasingly vital role for print and television news outlets, and online competition intensifying, more outlets are turning to search marketing to drive traffic to their Web sites. To guarantee their pages come up prominently when consumers search Google or Yahoo for news on particular subjects, newspapers and TV channels bid for keywords related to stories. They pay every time a consumer clicks on the link.
The practice was spotlighted after the Virginia Tech shootings this month when several news outlets were criticized for buying search terms relating to the incident. But news outlets commonly buy search terms for all kinds of stories. Recent searches using "Iraq war," "Don Imus" or "Apple news," for instance, led to sponsored links to the New York Times' Web site. A recent search for "congress news" on Yahoo resulted in sponsored links to washingtonpost.com, while searches for celebrities like Britney Spears sometimes lead to a sponsored link for Fox News Channel.
"Way back in the old days ... there used to be people standing on corners yelling, 'Extra! Extra! Read all about it!'," says Murray Gaylord, vice president of marketing for NYTimes.com. "The way people get that content now is going to that search engine," he says. "It is the same model; it is just the way the world has changed."
The New York Times started buying search terms for general news in 2004, earlier than many rivals, and now buys tens of thousands of them a year. Now, almost every major outlet -- from CNN and Fox News to ABC News and Washington Post Interactive -- invests a portion of its marketing dollars in search keywords. The Wall Street Journal's Web site, which makes much of its content available only to paid subscribers, has tested buying news-related keywords to increase subscriptions.
Because keywords are sold through online auctions, prices often spike for those connected with big breaking-news stories. On the day of the Virginia Tech shootings, the cost per click of buying phrases such as "Virginia Tech," "Virginia Tech shooting," and "Virginia Tech massacre" jumped as high as $5. Over the following week, prices dropped to six or eight cents a click, according to Reprise Media, a search-marketing firm owned by Interpublic Group. A longer-lasting news term, such as "Iraq war," costs on average 39 cents a click, Reprise says.
News outlets say they use search marketing to increase awareness of their Web sites, so that the next time people search for news they visit their sites first, instead of Google or Yahoo. Buying keywords is particularly important for outlets trying to lure audiences with breaking news. It can often take a couple of hours for a new page posted on a Web site to show up in a regular search. The only way for an outlet to guarantee that its site shows up immediately -- and prominently -- is by buying a link.
"That timeliness and credibility is essential. If people are searching for information about a breaking news story and we put CNN.com in front of them, we can assume that is going to be very high," says Andy Mitchell, vice president of interactive marketing for CNN.
Outlets also buy keywords to highlight features on their sites that generate more ad revenue, such as video. Some, like Fox News, uses search marketing to highlight enduring stories that attract audiences -- such as reports about celebrities or popular consumer products like the iPod. Buying search terms brings in hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month, says Bert Solivan, senior vice president digital media for Fox News. Foxnews.com had seven million unique visitors in February, according to comScore Media Metrix. Once the new visitors come in, they tend to click around a bit and see new areas of the site, he says.
"These are people who probably tend not to be Fox users. They are gravitating to a search engine to find a hot topic and are finding their way over to us," he says. "It's an ideal way to tap into a huge audience that may not look for us immediately but may get pushed over to us."
ABC News says that because of the high cost of buying breaking-news keywords, it tends to allocate its search-related marketing dollars to phrases that relate to exclusive news coverage or in-depth reporting. The price for each click is usually less, creating "more bang for the buck," says Paul Slavin, senior vice president of world-wide news gathering for ABC.
For instance, ABC recently bought phrases about gun control to link back to network reports on related issues. In November, the network bought terms related to its "Good Morning America" tour of the seven "New Wonders of the World." ABC also buys terms directly related to its programming, such as "Good Morning America" and "World News Tonight" and Chief Investigative Correspondent "Brian Ross."
Even satirical news outlets are buying news-related search terms to get their share of the traffic. Recent searches for "George Bush" on MSN revealed a sponsored link to Comedy Central Web sites for "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report": "Get Fake News About Pressing World Events. See Daily Show Clips Here!" one reads. Another says: "Because You Can't Get Enough Report-ing, Watch Videos Here!"
Labels: google, keywords, wsj
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