時事新聞:關於網絡媒體的八個不爭事實

【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.

【中文譯文】

很多消費者看到類似於Twitter和Facebook的一夜成名，就認爲：“這太簡單了，我也可以做到。”如果真是這樣就好了。

事實上，網絡創業真的很難。我在這裏指的並不是技術（儘管這部分也很難），而是商業運作部分：也就是說建立用戶羣和找到賺錢的方法，這些纔是真正的難點。

無論是新興公司還是已經發展成熟的企業，如果想要建立成功的網絡媒體資產，那麼以下是必須要面對的不爭事實。

所有好的域名都已被搶注。所有的實字域名都已被搶注，而且每一個這樣的域名都價格不菲。這也就意味着你們在選擇域名的時候要麼是造字或造詞（像YouTube一樣）或者是有意而爲的拼寫錯誤（如Digg）。但是這些名字不容易被用戶記住而且也不容易正確輸入。

一旦找到了合適的域名並建立站點，想要得到媒體的報道則又是一個問題。現代公關渠道處於破裂狀態。大家都不太看報紙，而且報紙也只報道一些新聞。如果創建者不是紅極一時的成功人士，如果沒有成功的風投，那你的創業也成不了新聞。博客倒是可以增加一定的曝光度，但是博客擁有的觀衆羣通常規模有限。

離線廣告對增加曝光效用不大。還是不要大費周章花錢在廣告牌、電視廣告、廣播或印刷媒體廣告上，因爲哪一項也不會增加你的受衆羣。人們對離線廣告的關注不會轉化爲他們的在線行動。花錢在這樣的營銷方式上註定是走向失敗。

在線廣告也並不那麼奏效。網頁上的橫幅廣告行不通，因爲根本沒有人會去點擊這類廣告。針對一次性訪客，搜索廣告是個不錯的選擇（如果你確實有東西出售，而這些訪客也想從中套利），但他們不會轉變爲系統訪客。這樣一來，你也就是每次只能贏得一個用戶，而這不可能爲你形成大的用戶羣。

優化搜索引擎是一個選擇，但效用有限。當然你可以四處搜尋訪客，訪客也因此得到增加，但是由此不會形成直接的訪問流量，也不會形成固定的訪客羣。更糟的是，長尾搜索如“德國牧羊犬每天補充的維生素”，這樣的搜索也很具競爭力。只有維基百科通過這樣的搜索引擎優化將自身建設成了頂級的網站，即使如此，維基百科也需要藉助谷歌（Google）2%的訪問流量。

如果貴公司是一家發展成熟的媒體公司，但是你們的離線品牌不一定能給你們帶來大量現成的在線用戶羣。網絡是一種完全不同的媒介，一些老的媒體品牌在轉換方面遇到不少困難。看看一些報紙和雜誌的在線業務運營狀況，答案就不得而知。

就在線業務而言，挖競爭對手的牆角不會有結果。兩種最傳統的爭奪市場份額的做法，也就是價格和便利度，對在線業務不適用。網絡媒體本身就是免費的，而且進入每個網站也就是點擊一下鼠標的事。網站自身的質量是獲得用戶羣的唯一途徑。那麼你的網站必須能帶給用戶一種不同的體驗，而這也並非易事。

如果你能越過以上所有的障礙而成功贏得你的用戶羣，那麼你的回報是：低收費率。在線廣告費率是按照CPM來定價的。一般來說，典型的新聞或媒體網站（如不是網絡搜索或電子商務）的平均CPM是1至2美元。但如果是社交網絡、論壇或其它社羣網絡，CPM則下降到0.15至0.30美元。這也就是說，如果要賺錢，就必須有大量的頁面瀏覽量。

換句話說，網絡媒體創業不適合膽小鬼。首先要贏得一定的用戶羣就並非易事，更別說實現真正的利潤。目前來說，電子商務和網絡搜索是網絡媒體的成功典範，當然還有一些成功的網絡媒體也兼營着其它很多業務。

因此，下次你再看到某家公司建成一個網站，贏得了大塊市場並開始賺錢，千萬別說這一成功是因爲一切都太容易或者僅僅是運氣，相反，你應該對在這樣困難的環境中取得的成功表示敬佩。