Newspapers (and Even Your Mother) Embrace Widgets
Have you ever tried explaining what a widget is to a civilian (non-Web 2.0 person)? Have you ever gotten a response that’s more than just, “oh…OK…” Here’s some news for those civilians out there, you may not know it but odds are you’ve probably used a widget.
Yesterday, AP reporter, Seth Sutel, wrote an article about how mainstream newspapers like USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are beginning to embrace the use of widgets. According to Sutel, using “widgets, newspapers are sending some of their content out into the world in piecemeal fashion and allowing users to share them with their friends – for free.”
Media fragmentation isn’t a new idea anymore, but it’s interesting to see ‘old media’ evolving. What are they evolving to? Hypersyndication. The distribution channels of information are being powered in ways that humankind has never experienced. Sharing content, ideas and stories is by no means a new idea (the cavemen did it…), but the way and scale in which it is happening is what’s new and exciting.
Why they’re doing this is also very interesting: “For newspapers, widgets represent a huge new opportunity to draw in new readers and to boost their brands throughout the Internet… Keenly mindful of steady declines in newspaper circulation and advertising, several newspapers are seeing widgets as a way to reach out to new, and especially younger, users online, those who might not otherwise come to the paper’s main Web site destination.”
There’s probably no more powerful tool in a publisher’s arsenal to drive engagement and audience growth than social media at the moment. Whether it’s using widgets alone to syndicate content or enabling a venue for citizen journalism right next to professional editorial, it’s good to see that the big boys like USA Today and WSJ as well as local news outlets like KSL in Utah [FULL DISCLOSURE: KSL is using KickApps] are seeing the value in all this.
With the audience growth and engagement piece of the equation being addressed now, what’s next? As of Monday, the New York Times finally agreed that the subscription model isn’t as effective as an ad supported online business and the WSJ seems likely to follow suit. Also, did anyone notice that Google announced Adsense for widgets today? Do you see where I’m going with this?
Sutel closes out his article by saying, the WSJ “says it’s building traffic to its main site by allowing users to embed WSJ.com video elsewhere, but the paper hasn’t yet signed up advertisers for its first widget.” Yet…
The industry has merely scratched the surface of the social media opportunity. A large and highly engaged audience + hypersyndication of content + targeted advertising opportunities = a completely new game for the media industry.
