Slides from my online content strategy course

1. Online Content
Strategies

2. What has the web
done to content?

4. –New York Times innovation report
“Only a third of our readers ever visit it. And
those who do visit are spending less time: page
views and minutes spent per reader dropped
by double-digit percentages last year.”

5. Death of the
homepage

6. Content Atomisation

7. How long should
content for the web be?

8. 1. Short

9. 2. As long as it needs
to be

10. 3. Less than 500 or
more than 800 words

11. –Kevin Delaney, Quartz
“We call it the Quartz curve. The place between
500 and 800 words is the place you don't want
to be because it's not short and fast and
focused and shareable, but it's not long enough
to be a real pay-off for readers.”

15. –Herbert Simon, cognitive psychologist, 1971
“What information consumes is rather obvious:
it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty
of attention, and a need to allocate that
attention efficiently among the overabundance
of information sources that might consume it.”

16. –Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, 2005
“So where does the attention come for the next
wave of blogs and web services? From the old
ones, I guess. In my case, its not going to
come out of my family's attention allocation or
my firm's.
So attention is a zero sum game and if we are
creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of
attention, then we are facing a looming attention
crisis.”

17. –Steve Reubel, Edelman, 2007
“The attention crisis is an epidemic. There's no
more room at the inn. People will cut back. The
key question is: What will they trim? Ad-
supported media, or content from peers?
Some will crave the media's ability to edit;
others will want to stay closer to their friends.
What's unmistakable is that choices will be
made.”

18. Tyranny of
the press

20. News List

21. Feature list

22. Content Strategy

23. CC: Erich Ferdinand

24. Print:
Fixed, yet transitory

25. Print:
Fixed, yet transitory
Digital:
Mutable, yet permanent

26. Stock & Flow

27. Flow

28. In the flow

29. News

30. Stock

31. Always relevant

33. How the Onion Uses
Stock Content…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li0AjbJca00

34. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

35. Liveblog vs Living Article

36. Living Article
• Written in real time, but not time-stamped
• Can be consumed during the event
• Majority of expected traffic is after the event
• May have several significant updates over time

38. Liveblog
• Time stamped
• Covers a developing event with unknown
outcome
• The most recent update is the most important
(score in a sports match, breaking news event)
• More useful during the event that after it