I’ve said for a long time that news organisations need to have a distribution strategy for the web as much as they have one for offline. Well now the Daily Mail’s rise to the top of the ABCe charts is causing some to ask whether they have just such a strategy, albeit a rather clumsy one. Andy at Canofpop.com goes as far as to suggest:
“I reckon some of their global traffic is down in part to the spamming of popular social news portals.
“Increasingly I’ve noticed that Diggand Reddit seems to be containing stories from the Mail, so much so it leads me to conclude that someone is doing a brilliant seeding job whether it’s a tech savvy employee or a paid for service by one of the millions of seeding/seo partners springing up, I can’t tell. “Even this morning in the latest news I can spot 2 articles from The Telegraph, 1 from the BBC and a few others from traditional news sources, are these down to social network links on these sites or auto submission bots?”
If this is true, the tactic is clearly working – for now. But it may yet backfire. OhForFucksSake.com calls the Diggs “turd drop news bites” and explains “some scroat [sic] at the Daily Mail has been able to work out how to add the Java plugin onto their website (they’re not alone obviously… I don’t claim it was difficult to add but I did manage to hack the Drupal plugin to add another 24 social sites).” His reaction is to ask for:
“a way to block it out in a more ingenious manner. Technology fighting technology if you will. I have found no way of indirectly blocking the headlines on their website which is a real shame. Someone really needs to code a way of customise your own RSS feed from Digg headlines and bar certain websites from it.”
Meanwhile, following the link trail you can see that John McGarvey noticed the sudden influx of Mail stories back in February, while in January Andy Baio discovered The Times was
“involved in an extensive campaign to spam social media websites with links to Timesonline.co.uk articles. “Since 2004, The Times retained the established SEO consulting firm Sitelynx to handle their search engine marketing. Working on behalf of The Times, a Sitelynx employee posted thousands of links to community and social news websites, including Mahalo, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Metafilter, Yahoo! Answers, Ma.gnolia, and Netscape’s Propeller. His actions were done without any disclosure of his affiliation to Sitelynx or The Times and were, in some cases, posted under the assumed identity of his wife. Update: The Times didn’t know what Sitelynx was doing, the Sitelynx employee was fired suspended, and The Sun is also involved.”
Further updates at the bottom of Andy’s post describe the fallout of that discovery, which is also worth reading in full. It’s a typical old media response to a new media context: outsource it. But how much networking can you genuinely outsource? Are we headed for a denouement similar to the fake WalMart blog? Will tactics like this result in the equivalent of being blacklisted by Google? Long term, you can’t fake relationships. Meanwhile, in the short term, McGarvey thinks the Mail has found “a new audience in an unexpected place”:
“it’s hardly rocket science. If you want your story to go hot on Digg, try and write about sex, sciency-sounding stuff and easy cures for common problems or diseases. Quick fixes are good – how to get better at something without having to make too much of an effort. And it won’t hurt if you can find a technology angle and drop in a photo of a young lady in skimpy clothing too.”
Sounds like the Mail have struck gold. But do they know how to keep it coming?
If you know of any other examples of online distribution strategies, let me know. (Thanks to Jon Hickman for the lead)
3 Comments
Hi Paul,
this kind of thing–spamming Digg and other social sites–is a practice among some marketing firms that specialize in “web 2.0″ or other forms of online marketing (none that I’ve worked for.) They put either a junior employee or an intern on a computer and have that person not just search for buzz about a client’s project, but also to go in and “digg” positive client articles as well as client blog posts. There’s also the emailing of associates and friends with alerts to go into the social sites and “digg” the stories as well. That’s one of the reasons why firms will hire very young people or people who already have a presence on Digg/Reddit, etc.
The Mail isn’t alone though. Rumor has it that at thw Wall St. Journal, reporters often go in and digg their own articles, as well as contact friends to go in and digg them as well.
Now some of this is supposed to be halted by the communities at these sites, but there have been changes in the algorithms and complaints by lower ranking members that have worked against the top users on these sites who are the social lynchpins.
I wonder, though, if some of us are being “purists” regarding the use of social networking sites, and if there aren’t more people doing with the Mail is doing, but are only better at it. There may be more Wizards-behind-the-screens and more social astroturf out there than we realize.
First of all, thanks for the reference to our little community.. it’s nice to see my words echo in the digital world!
But relating to this article, McGarvey is exactly right.. most people who know of The Daily Mail in the UK understand it is a Bovine Digest of Right Wing Propaganda and if you become their audience, you aren’t expecting intellectual stimulation, preferring to skim over the facts (and sometimes truth) to appease their daily intake of non-news and celebrity gossip.
I’d say that was also a pretty fair assessment of 90% of Digg users so it’s not all that surprising it is having a rise of notability and creating more of an online presence.
I stand my turd drop news bites assessment of their digital input. I don’t claim our site to be any more intellectually stimulating but our political commentary isn’t hiding a bigoted right wing agenda under the pretence of reporting the news.
This is a pretty common practice and is a major strategy for most newspapers this year. (Typically, they all have CPM ads and are looking to increase revenue here to bolster the sharp decline in print newspapers ad revenu) I’ve been personally approached by 3 major newspaper chains in the US to do this kind of work for them.
I turned them, and the nice pay rates, down.
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