The Cut and Paste Web

OK, so newspaper readers, advertisers and classifieds are jumping ship, it's not clear when Web sites will make up for the revenue gap, and Romenesko has essentially become a daily roll of bad news in the media industry.

Now it's time to really get scared.

Steve Rubel, who's always a bit ahead of the curve, has a fantastic post today arguing that the way in which media is consumed on the Web is about to change radically.

Entitled "In the Cut and Paste Era, Traffic Happens Elsewhere," Rubel's post suggests that the rise of widgets, RSS, embeds, aggregation sites and other new formats already has begun to significantly redistribute content to the places where it's most convenient for readers to find it. In the process, that leaves little reason for readers to come to the originating sites. And that, of course, has some rather frightening implications for traffic and advertising revenue for those originators.

Rubel calls this phenomenon the Cut and Paste Web, and writes:

For all of its benefits, the Cut and Paste Web is potentially more disruptive to big traffic sites than Web 2.0 was. If almost all content can be lifted from one spot and placed somewhere where it’s more convenient to the user, just how will it be monetized? The ramifications reach far and wide. It will impact anyone that wants to attract eyeballs - media companies, brand marketers and community/social networking sites.

Of course, linking and redistributing content have always been fundamental to the Web, but what's happening with widgets, RSS and other embedded content is changing the rules of the game significantly. With a do-it-yourself-homepage (or Facebook page, or whatever) made up of these cut-and-paste elements, readers are creating personalized portals that don't necessarily lead back to the original sites—or their advertising. It's the customizable Daily Me we've always talked about—except that we never really talked about how to monetize the Daily Me.

Anybody who uses an RSS reader heavily already knows what this is like—conveniently aggregating content that's been largely disassociated from its original site. You can read headlines and entire stories without ever going to their source. It's shocking how many major news sites haven't even figured out how to include advertising with their RSS feeds to at least recapture some of this lost traffic and revenue. As Rubel argues, such practices are going to be essential in the decentralized cut-and-paste future.

This is fundamental, important stuff, changing a game that a lot of news organizations already have been struggling to keep up with. I'll be writing more about the implications of distributed content in the weeks to come. But in the meantime, read Rubel's post and get a taste of the future. And start thinking about how to adapt to it.

Comments

[Rocky]

This is where media sites that do things beyond text have a huge advantage. With ordinary news stories, people can cut and paste sections (or the entire body) and you don't get the traffic.

With video and audio, that's harder to do. And if you're smart, you make it easy for them to cut-and-paste the way you want them to. Then stick your pre-rolls/post-rolls/other monetization strategy into that widget.

The other thing media sites can do is build community around their personalities. If I'm part of the conversation (see: this comment), I come back to your site, not just to comment, but to see what others have said or what you've said in response.

[Tim Hood]

You are right Mark, Steve Rubel is regularly ahead of the game and his article really does make sobering reading for anyone who wants to monetize either websites or applications (and what you thought was the former, could very quickly turn out to be the latter).

It's still not clear to me what the business model for a Facebook application is. You could get a million users who get bored of your application within a few weeks and see barely a penny of revenue to recoup the cost of a dozen servers, frantically purchased.

Alternatively, you could facilitate the generation of top class user content and not even know who was reading it, where.

Perhaps the web application market will turn out to be like the art market- you either need a patron or a serious talent for hype to get a show in the big galleries and to get your work bought by the big collectors.

[Elliot Turner]

Microchunking, cutting-and-pasting, whatever you call it, this stuff is definitely game-changing. Great post, especially pointing out the parallels to RSS content consumption. I've been talking about this same topic on my blog, and for the curious, there's a a screen cast of a system in development that lets users "visually" cut-and-paste arbitrary web content (web pages, search results, anything).