GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com

About: GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com


Steve Outing has launched an blog focused on launching, managing, and tending a news site. Being an ex-newsie, this is a good thing, and Steve’s reputation as an online news guru is top notch.

“Welcome to GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com. This website serves a narrow and fascinating niche: news publishing online. What you’ll find here are regularly posted tips and ideas on how to grow your news website, how to make more money from advertising and other sources, how to grow your user base, etc. You’ll find USEFUL information and advice here. (This is not an industry news source.)

Hi, I’m Steve Outing, editor of GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com. If you’re interested in this niche, you may know me already as an online news pioneer and longtime columnist for Editor & Publisher.”

Google’s Data Asset

Google’s Data Asset | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

Brad Burnham, partner at Union Square with Fred Wilson, blogs about the impact of Google’s data driven services. In discussions over dinner last week with Dan Gertsacov from GoogleTV, we got onto the topic of data as differentiator in advertising. Brad nails the same point in this post (which is about the impact of marginal data collection on services)

“Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. It is easy to see this in the context of an advertising network. If the ad network knows that a user is female it can show more relevant ads. But, If the ad network knows that female’s age, it can do even better, and data about location, household income, and recent web sites visited all add value to the existing data points, making it possible to show more and more relevant ads. Google’s services all benefit from additional data albeit in different ways.

“So what does all this mean about the market for web services. It means that we all need to begin to think about the degree to which Google’s enormous data asset will allow it to dominate this important sector.” [emphasis mine]

The hot buttons in the last paragraph are “think” and “dominate.” Data driven ad services (or cloud computing) are squarely in the sights of the privacy stewards and the federal government. Anyone who had to answer reader mail in 1995 when a web user freaked out about a cookie being placed on their harddrive knows never to underestimate the public and government’s paranoia about data.

As an advertiser, Google’s data store and processing capability is extremely valuable in transforming next-marketing-dollar allocation. The other networks don’t possess the same analytical and data driven rigor. It could, if I take Brad’s post to the paranoid extreme, be a harbinger of Google’s future focus on persuading the world that a) their data is anonymous and b) safe with Google.

The Lost Weekend with Feedburner

I’m a Feedburner fan and run this blog’s RSS through the service so I can gain some sense of traffic trends. Per Peter Kim’s M20 measurement criteria, I made my RSS subs visible with this badge that tallies my feed subscribers.

Every weekend about ten percent of my subscribers seem to unsubscribe or vanish. By Tuesday, they return.

So what happened to the 43 mystery subs? And why do they go away every Saturday?

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