thenewnewmedia.com

I’ve come to a conclusion (not “the” conclusion) that there are, broadly-speaking, two different approaches to building an online business (or even building new online businesses within an existing one). Its something I’ve been thinking about, trying to distill examples of ideas, strategies and executions into distinct approaches.

A CNET news.com interview with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about building communities helped put some of my thinking into something logical:

Fake speaks about being inside Yahoo! and trying to build new things and experiment… This is obviously not the easiest thing in the world, largely due to a company like Yahoo!’s size and corporate culture.

She speaks about being tasked with building new things:

At Yahoo!, I joined the technology development group–new products, innovation, culture and rapid development. These were our mandate. And the guy who runs the division, Jeff Weiner, said, “How can we build the next Flickr at Yahoo?” I laughed and said, “No way, Jose, that will ever happen here.”

And she’s solved it. Well, at least she’s grappled with the complexity of the task and come up with some strategies. And most people involved seem to work this way instinctively, the strategies are almost blindingly obvious, but she’s framed them very well.

There is one kind of process developed for building and maintaining large-scale products, like Yahoo! Mail. And the development processes for that are very different from what it takes to build a new product in a short amount of time…

If you have 200 million mail clients, you need structure, reliability, uptime and dependability. Those things are very different from launch fast, take risks and embrace failure. Bureaucracy has its purpose, which is to keep the trains running on time. But building in small teams and launching early and often, bugs and all, is a very different proposition.

She likens the approaches to a supertanker versus a speedboat.

And this is really the point of this post: I don’t necessarily feel the South African online landscape is that ready/willing/eager to take risks with projects. We’re seeing deep-pocketed, well-researched, scaled launches of web properties in SA that media companies are prepared to back and make work. There’s little innovation and an attitude of “well, this user-generated content thing has worked overseas, let’s get our audience to write us letters”.

Maybe recent developments driven chiefly by Vincent Maher at the M&G have sparked a trend? I hope so.

I do think that the approach of the M&G (which Vincent describes to Bizcommunity this morning) to be a facilitator is a riskier one (than simply being a content producer). It means the M&G online will in all probability be launching lots of new platforms, new sites, new ways to aggregate and display content. He might not agree with my assumptions here, though I’m guessing he will.

Maybe some of them won’t succeed. Others (like Amatomu) will almost certainly become huge successes.

Take the risks.

Someone’s noticed! Yes, Marketingweb has had a redesign. Tyler has blogged about it and has offered some things he likes (and one he doesn’t) about the new site.

I agree with Tyler’s views that:

The home page is much more appealing than the last one.

The events and jobs sections have both been given more attention.

These both formed the core of the original redesign plan, and seem to have been received positively.

On the negative side though, he mentions that the home page size is huge (”a hefty 270kb”). What causes this problem, specifically on the home page is the fact that there are around 220kb of ad banners and scripts on it. Oops.

It’s interesting that a niche site such as this is being blogged about (The Moneyweb redesign itself had very few posts dedicated to it).

What’s important to remember is that the redesign in each of these cases (this can pretty much be expected with any redesign) is only the beginning.

Now that this has distracted me, whatever it is I wanted to write about this morning will have to wait…

Looking forward to meeting Tyler who I’ve only heard about and who I think? is coming to the 27dinner.

Disclosure: I helped migrate Marketingweb from its old site to the new one (much the same as I did with Moneyweb and Mineweb).

Had a chat with Vincent Maher a while ago about social media: Fidentia scandal sparks an excellent case study in social media on Moneyweb

As he says, it makes for some interesting reading…

This list comes from a fascinating report I’ve just read, called ‘Digital Media Outlook 07′. Its published by Avenue A | Razorfish (the largest interactive advertising agency in the US).

1. Your website is like everything and nothing you’ve ever known.
2. Distribution will trump destination.
3. Accountability will rule the day.
4. Today’s web is in its “Uncle Milty” stage.
5. The consumer is not in control.

Go check it out.

Johncom’s mass market “tabloid”, The Sowetan launched a new look website a fortnight ago. While the overhaul provides for much improved categorisation of content and quite frankly looks better than the old one, it totally misses its audience. The Sowetan newspaper of two or three years ago used to be a lot more serious and sedate than its current guise. Changes were made to how content is displayed and what content is included specifically to counter the Daily Sun’s growth in the lower-end of the market.

I don’t have a problem with these changes, in fact I agree with them. And they have paid off – circulation stopped falling off a cliff and has been growing consistently since the changes.

Now anyone who consumes news on the web can tell you that the new Sowetan website runs on the same backend as sister paper the Sunday Times, which is all well and good. No problems there. Obviously there are certain efficiencies and cost-savings in running any number of websites on the same system (most media houses do this). Staff can use a common system to publish content on multiple sites, development of extra features can be rolled out to all sites in the network – these things are obvious. From the sounds of things, the new Johncom web backend is also a lot more stable.

The main question though is why the three sister sites (Sunday Times, Sowetan and reporter.co.za) look almost identical? Surely the audience overlap between all three is not significant?

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