时事新闻:关于网络媒体的八个不争事实

【英文原文】

Eight hard truths about online media
Many a consumer looks at an “overnight sensation” such as Twitter or Facebook and muses: “That service is so simple — I could do that.” If only it were true.

It turns out that starting a business on the web is hard. Very hard. And I’m not tAlking about the technology – although that part is hard, too. I’m talking about the business part: building a user base and finding a way to make money. Those are really hard problems.

Whether you’re a start-up or an established company, here are the hard truths you must face if you want to build a successful online media property.

All the good names are taken. All the “real word” URL’s are taken and buying one will cost you a pretty penny. That means your options are made-up words and phrases (YouTube) or deliberate misspellings (Digg). These names are hard for users to remember and type correctly into a browser.

Once you do find a name and launch a site, good luck getting the press to cover you. The modern public relations channel is broken. No one reads newspapers anymore, and they only cover “stories” anyway. Unless you have some big time founder or VC, you’re probably not a “story.” Blogs can give you some exposure, but their audiences are typically not big.

Offline advertising won’t help you with exposure. Don’t bother spending your money on billboards, TV ads, radio spots or print ads – none of them will grow your audience. People don’t migrate their attention from offline ads to online activity. Spending your money on this type of marketing is a well-beaten path to failure.

Online advertising won’t work much better. Banner ads suck – no one clicks on them. Search ads are great for one-off visitors (or if you’re actually selling something and then they’re an arbitrage play), but won’t convert to organic visits. You’re buying your visitors literally one at a time, and that’s no way to build an audience.

Search engine optimization is an option, but a limited one. Sure, you can likely scrounge together some visits and show some growth but you won’t build direct traffic or a direct audience through it. To make matters worse, even long-tail queries—think “daily vitamins for German Shepherds”—can be very competitive. Only Wikipedia has pulled off the trick of building a leading Web property through SEO, and they needed 2% of Google’s total traffic to do it.

If you are an established media company, your offline brand probably won’t translate into a large, ready-made online audience. The web is an entirely different medium, and old brands have lots of trouble translating. Just ask the newspapers and magazines how their online brands are doing.

Stealing the competition’s audience doesn’t work online. The two traditional ways of stealing market share – price competition and convenience – don't work. Media on the web is free and every site is literally one click away. Product is the only way to build an audience. And the product you build has to deliver a unique experience. And that’s no small feat.

If, in spite of all of these obstacles, you are successful in building an audience, here’s your reward: low monetization rates. Ad rates online are priced by CPMs (cost per thousand impressions). Your typical news or media site (i.e. not search or ecommerce) probably commands, on average, CPMs of a buck or two — site-wide. If the site is a social network, a forum page or other community offering, that number goes down to $0.15-$0.30. To make any real money, you need to serve A LOT of page views.

In other words, online is not for the faint of heart. It’s very far from an easy place to build an audience, much less make any real money. Ecommerce and search are the only really proven businesses online – and those have a whole host of other issues that go along with them.

So the next time you see some company build a site that grabs a big piece of the market and starts making real money, don’t dismiss its success as easy or lucky. Rather admire it for rising to the top in a very difficult environment.

【中文译文】

很多消费者看到类似于Twitter和Facebook的一夜成名，就认为：“这太简单了，我也可以做到。”如果真是这样就好了。

事实上，网络创业真的很难。我在这里指的并不是技术（尽管这部分也很难），而是商业运作部分：也就是说建立用户群和找到赚钱的方法，这些才是真正的难点。

无论是新兴公司还是已经发展成熟的企业，如果想要建立成功的网络媒体资产，那么以下是必须要面对的不争事实。

所有好的域名都已被抢注。所有的实字域名都已被抢注，而且每一个这样的域名都价格不菲。这也就意味着你们在选择域名的时候要么是造字或造词（像YouTube一样）或者是有意而为的拼写错误（如Digg）。但是这些名字不容易被用户记住而且也不容易正确输入。

一旦找到了合适的域名并建立站点，想要得到媒体的报道则又是一个问题。现代公关渠道处于破裂状态。大家都不太看报纸，而且报纸也只报道一些新闻。如果创建者不是红极一时的成功人士，如果没有成功的风投，那你的创业也成不了新闻。博客倒是可以增加一定的曝光度，但是博客拥有的观众群通常规模有限。

离线广告对增加曝光效用不大。还是不要大费周章花钱在广告牌、电视广告、广播或印刷媒体广告上，因为哪一项也不会增加你的受众群。人们对离线广告的关注不会转化为他们的在线行动。花钱在这样的营销方式上注定是走向失败。

在线广告也并不那么奏效。网页上的横幅广告行不通，因为根本没有人会去点击这类广告。针对一次性访客，搜索广告是个不错的选择（如果你确实有东西出售，而这些访客也想从中套利），但他们不会转变为系统访客。这样一来，你也就是每次只能赢得一个用户，而这不可能为你形成大的用户群。

优化搜索引擎是一个选择，但效用有限。当然你可以四处搜寻访客，访客也因此得到增加，但是由此不会形成直接的访问流量，也不会形成固定的访客群。更糟的是，长尾搜索如“德国牧羊犬每天补充的维生素”，这样的搜索也很具竞争力。只有维基百科通过这样的搜索引擎优化将自身建设成了顶级的网站，即使如此，维基百科也需要借助谷歌（Google）2%的访问流量。

如果贵公司是一家发展成熟的媒体公司，但是你们的离线品牌不一定能给你们带来大量现成的在线用户群。网络是一种完全不同的媒介，一些老的媒体品牌在转换方面遇到不少困难。看看一些报纸和杂志的在线业务运营状况，答案就不得而知。

就在线业务而言，挖竞争对手的墙角不会有结果。两种最传统的争夺市场份额的做法，也就是价格和便利度，对在线业务不适用。网络媒体本身就是免费的，而且进入每个网站也就是点击一下鼠标的事。网站自身的质量是获得用户群的唯一途径。那么你的网站必须能带给用户一种不同的体验，而这也并非易事。

如果你能越过以上所有的障碍而成功赢得你的用户群，那么你的回报是：低收费率。在线广告费率是按照CPM来定价的。一般来说，典型的新闻或媒体网站（如不是网络搜索或电子商务）的平均CPM是1至2美元。但如果是社交网络、论坛或其它社群网络，CPM则下降到0.15至0.30美元。这也就是说，如果要赚钱，就必须有大量的页面浏览量。

换句话说，网络媒体创业不适合胆小鬼。首先要赢得一定的用户群就并非易事，更别说实现真正的利润。目前来说，电子商务和网络搜索是网络媒体的成功典范，当然还有一些成功的网络媒体也兼营着其它很多业务。

因此，下次你再看到某家公司建成一个网站，赢得了大块市场并开始赚钱，千万别说这一成功是因为一切都太容易或者仅仅是运气，相反，你应该对在这样困难的环境中取得的成功表示敬佩。