Archive for Content Delivery And Distribution
Online Content Distribution: Guide To The Best Content Syndication Services
Posted by: | CommentsOnline content distribution services allow you to syndicate your content to other web publishers while improving your prestige, visibility and in some cases, even your end-of-month revenue. In fact, such content redistribution partners can be major publishing giants like USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. In this guide I have brought together and reviewed the most interesting online content distribution services presently available.
Photo credit: Roman Antoshchuk
Despite the abundance of sources available on the web, and the apparent ease of preparing new content, professional, high-quality content is still extremely difficult to acquire, and even more challenging to create.
Online distribution services try to sort this problem out by acting as intermediaries between web publishers like you and online distribution partners. The content you produce on your site is syndicated to relevant distribution partners who are free to to re-contextualize your original content in the way they see most fitting. For example, USA Today may republish a video you have shot to add more value to a news article, or The New York Times may add one of your blog posts to provide further details about a specific live event it is reporting.
The two main benefits of syndicating your content are:
1) The fact that in most cases where a distribution partner republishes your content, you are also getting a link back to your web site. As you well know, this not only may likely bring you quite a few extra visitors, but it can also boost your ranking inside the SERPs (search engine result pages).
2) The opportunity to generate extra revenues when your content is being syndicated. This means that each time an ad-enabled content widget containing your article, is published on a web site, you earn part of the advertising revenue. Or if you use a service like Mochila, which works as a content marketplace, anytime a publisher purchases your content you earn a percentage of the selling price.
3) The extra visibility and prestige that your presence on quality content partners can generate.
One thing you should be careful about, is signing exclusivity agreements. When you do so you are obliged to stick with just one distribution partner, and you cannot publish your content on other sites or through other syndication networks.
To learn more about content distribution and syndication I have prepared a comparison table where I confront the key traits of the main online content distribution services out there. Here below, the specific criteria I have personally selected to review these services:
- Exclusivity: Distribution restricted to only one partner.
- Content distribution partners: USA Today, The New York Times, Reuters, etc.
- Compensation: Potential revenue payback.
- Analytics: Content distribution data.
- Pro features: Options included in paid accounts.
Here all the details:
Online Content Distribution Services Comparative Table
Online Content Distribution: Guide To The Best Content Syndication Services
- Gigya
Gigya is a widget platform that lets you distribute, track and monetize your content using web widgets. Wildfire, the proprietary technology used by Gigya, allows you to freely customize your content widgets and is designed to distribute re-shareable widgets on major social media networks, blogging platforms and even desktop platforms easily. Before embedding your widget, you can check out demographics info and the content of the website you are interested in to maximize the performance of your content inventory. Each widget can also be tracked after embed on your personal dashboard, using real-time metrics. To monetize your widgets, join the widget advertising network. Gigya pays you to promote widgets from top-tier brand advertisers. Widgets support both static and rich media ad formats. You pay only for the installs you budgeted for at the beginning of your campaign and Gigya retains a part of the revenues you make from running advertising campaigns. Every interaction, impression and viral grab is free. Each widget also lets you interact with major social networks: you make your friends sign-in and share their content using their existing accounts on Google, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. Users can then connect with each other right from the widget, without leaving your site. No list of content distribution partners available. Gigya does not retain exclusivity rights to distribute your content.
http://www.gigya.com/ - Mochila
Mochila is an online media marketplace aimed to both content buyers and sellers. You first submit your acceptance request to the company and, when accepted, you can start looking for content to publish on your site using a widget or submit content to Mochila that others will purchase and share. If you store your content, you can select licensing rules, ad displaying and customization options (ads you deploy or ads served by Mochila), and other settings. You then earn revenues form the syndication transaction when your content is published. Web publishers instead, can acquire any syndicated content for free with advertising support or buy any content a la carte while being able to place their own ads to earn more revenues. Content can be published either along other existing information available on your site or using a micro-site format, which is a website entirely build upon a series of content widgets. The analytics reporting facility allows you to track the performances of the content you have bought or sold and deploy advertising campaigns tailored to your needs. Mochila content distribution partners include: USA Today, Reuters, MSNBC, BusinessWeek, and others. Mochila does not lock you into exclusivity distribution rights for your content.
http://www.mochila.com/ - Clearspring
Clearspring is a widget syndication platform that helps you redistribute and monetize your online content. After a free registration, you can access the management console, where you can configure every aspect of your widget: styling, embed options, metadata, keywords, backlinks and more. You can also set the analytics feature to focus your target audience and monitor the performances of your redistributed content once published. Clearspring allows you to run ads inside your widget (both textual or interactive) and even use the whole widget as an interactive ad to fully engage viewers. Widget are generally redistributed by grabbing a piece of HTML, but using the Clearspring Launchpad service your viewers and you can avoid using embed codes most of the time. Widgets are embeddable on major social media sites just using a point-to-click system which automatically integrates the widget inside your social pages (more information on the website). To further monetize your widgets, you can either join the affiliate partners program and partner with social websites, widget providers and layout sites that are earning money promoting widgets or simply running ads along with the content of your widgets. Clearspring does not retain exclusivity rights to distribute your content. No list of content distribution partners available.
http://www.clearspring.com/ - BlogBurst
BlogBurst is a syndication service that allows you to spread your blog content to multiple destinations, automatically. Destinations include A-listers media networks and publishers like Fox News, Reuters, McGraw-Hill, and more. You then gain more visibility and exposure for your content while also attracting new potential readers and backlinks for your niche of interest. Top bloggers also get rewarded for the content they provide. By calculating headline impressions inside a quarter, BlogBurst lists all bloggers in a chart where each blog earns a fixed compensation depending on the position reached inside the chart. To use the service, you need to comply with BlogBurst guidelines which require to publish full RSS feeds, not have ads in your feeds, produce family-friendly content, avoid typos, post at least on a weekly basis, and more (detailed guidelines available on the site). From your dashboard, you can track in real-time your headline impressions, click-troughs and other metrics of your content. BlogBurst is free to use but the service does not clearly state the agreement behind the revenue sharing program and the money the company makes using your content. Your content is not meant for exclusive use by BlogBurst.
http://www.blogburst.com/ - Daylife
Daylife is an online content aggregation and distribution platform. What Daylife does is pulling content from thousands of popular sources online (and your own archives), analyzing that content and then syndicating relevant information to your web site in multiple formats (text, referrals, images, video, Twitter feeds, etc.). With the content you get from Daylife, you can even create whole new pages, sections, and entire sites made up of fresh, relevant content to add vast depth on any topic, while always retaining complete editorial control. Content distribution partners include: USA Today, Sky News, Newsweek, The Washington post, and many others. Different solutions are available for both large and small publishers like customizable APIs, in-line interactive windows, embeddable widgets or point-and-click windows you can customize and add to your web site. The service also allows you to integrate ads inside the content you serve, to generate revenues while creating more click-trough opportunities and links back to your site. No analytics features. Daylife aggregates all the content it serves complying to the Google guidelines, so the company does not retain any rights on what you display on your site. Prices available upon request.
http://www.daylife.com/ - Sphere
Sphere is a content syndication platform that allows you to spread your content on high-traffic websites and augment your website visibility. Whether if you are a big or a small publisher, you can distribute relevant matching content automatically to several content distribution partners like Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc. Big publishers can integrate contextual articles, referrals and videos inside third-party websites or take advantage of an interactive, redistributable widget. Small publishers can only use the embeddable widget to share their content. You can also use the automated widget inside your own blog posts to provide relevant content to your readers with no work from your side. The widget is free to use and optimized for major blogging platforms like WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, TypePad, and others. Sphere also provides you with a bookmarklet to install on your browser that lets you quickly share any relevant content you want to display inside the widget placed on your website. Sphere partners with ad agencies to deploy ads to your site and pay for the costs of the service. If you are an advertiser, you can also set your own ad campaigns and start deploying advertising in various formats inside widgets. Advanced paid features are available to customize the look and feel and crawling of web widgets. Sphere publishes your content under a non-exclusive agreement.
http://www.sphere.com/ - Newstex
Newstex is an online content syndication platform that aggregates real-time content on the web and serves it on your site according to your focus. The company adds value to the content gathered by adding metadata, stock ticker-symbols, keywords and other categorization fields that make your content easy to find. Three distribution services are available: Blogs On Demand, News On Demand and Video On Demand. Each service automatically gathers contextual blog posts, news and videos to display on your site and engage your readers. You can also submit your own content to syndicate to other web sites. When the content you submit to Newstex is approved, the company allows major content distributors like Amazon, LexisNexis, Reuters, etc. to republish and distribute your content to their end-user customers. Also, each time an end-user customer views your blog content you earn a 30% royalty of the gross revenues based on your royalty pool participation for each product your posts are included in. No content served by Newstex is editorially reviewed before posting. Newstex does not retain rights on content aggregated and published on third-party destination sites. No analytics features available either. Contact a Newstex representative for pricing information.
http://newstex.com/
Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on August 3rd, 2009 as “Online Content Distribution: Guide To The Best Content Syndication Services“.
Self-Publish Your Book: Guide To The Best Self-Publishing Services
Posted by: | CommentsWhen working with a traditional book publisher, you, the book author, give up a large degree of editorial control, and many times you have little to no input into the design and layout of your book, its distribution, and its marketing approach. Self-publishing allows you, the writer and author of a new book, to publish, print and distribute at a very low cost physical books on your own, bypassing at once the traditional, established publishing houses.
Photo credit: Tom Perkins
As a matter of fact, the key distinguishing characteristic of self-publishing is the absence of a traditional publisher. Instead, it is you, the book author who fulfill this role, taking editorial control of the content, and leveraging one of the many self-publishing solutions available online to produce, print, ship, distribute and make a profit out of your writing / publishing skills.
Self-publishers are not anymore those individuals who would go down to their trusted typographic shop and actually paid for the printing of their own writings. Successful self-publishers today leverage the benefits provided by print-on-demand services, where they need not to waste money on printing costs or on inventory and stocking fees.
When customers order their books, self-publishing outlets like Cafepress, Lulu, Createspace and others will print on-demand as many book as needed and they will also ship them and get payments for them from those ordering. You, the book author, do not have to worry about anything but collecting your profits which are simply based on your chosen extra margin on top of the printing and shipping cost. As you, the book author, make the final price, you can decide how much to charge for each of your publications.
These self-publishing services are a mix of print-on-demand (POD) companies and marketing and distribution venues, providing key opportunities for distributing your book on major book selling platforms, like Amazon and others.
Typically these self-publishing services accept uploaded digital content as Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, text files or RTF files and book authors choose the type of format, size and design of their own publication. There is no money to be spent upfront, as the self-publishing company prints your book only when an order comes in. At that point, the self-publishing service charges you a base price for printing on demand your book but you decide what is the final price charged to a buyer, before shipping. That extra margin, on top of the self-publisher charges to you, is your book profit. This is how, without any upfront investment you can use one of these companies to bootstrap yourself into the independent book publishing universe.
For an additional cost, a self-publishing service may offer additional services such as doing your cover design, review and proofread content, do indexing, proofreading and even promotion and marketing. Some, provide also the option to output your book optionally to an ebook format in addition to your hardcover and paperback editions, as some others will offer you the opportunity to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), which allows for your book title to acquire official “book” status and to become more easily found online.
Key advantages of self publishing are:
- Retain the rights to your book.
- Take home a bigger royalty than you would normally get from a traditional publisher.
- Have complete control over your book. You decide format, paper quality, cover image and, most importantly, you set the price.
In this guide to the best self-publishing companies you can find a selection of the most interesting services as well as a comparative table facilitating your task of reviewing these key players and their offerings.
Here all the details:
Best Online Services To Sell And Promote Your Book Comparison Table
Best Online Services To Sell And Promote Your Book
- Lulu
Lulu allows you to create, publish, sell and promote your books, completely on your own. The service also helps you digitalize your existing books and take care of publication and sale only. Other than books, you can also create digital products like photos, music tracks, calendars, and ringtones. Lulu provides collaboration features like group blogs and forums where you can meet other people and receive feedback about your work. All books published with Lulu are labeled with an ISBN, a unique number that identifies your book inside bibliographic databases. Books submitted are automatically converted to PDF file, so you may want to check that formatting is perfectly preserved after uploading your book or, better off, directly upload a PDF file. When your book is ready for publication, you can set the price and sell it in ebook or print version. Purchasing one of the premium plan (starting at $369) you can also customize: binding type, paper quality, templates and book cover and have other extra features like the inclusion inside Amazon listings and advanced formatting capabilities. You can promote your books with a personal storefront, using Google Book Search (which also makes your book content indexed inside Google search results), or distributing your creations via Amazon (requires a premium plan). For each book sold using Lulu, you retain the 80% of the retail price.
www.lulu.com - CreateSpace
CreateSpace is an on-demand commerce company owned by Amazon. You can take advantage of Amazon distribution service to sell your books and also convert your books into Kindle format. Other products you can sell via CreateSpace include CDs, DVDs, videos and ebooks. If you prefer to set a customized store to sell your books, you can create an eShop on your own website. CreateSpace assigns automatically to every book a unique identification number (ISBN). Customization options for your book include: binding type, cover images, internal images, and paper quality. Books must be submitted in PDF format. You can also join a community of other publishers to receive feedback on your book and perfect your creation. Your earnings depend on the solution you choose to sell your books: you can opt for a Standard (free) plan or a Pro plan, which costs you $39 per book plus $5 of annual renewal fee. The Pro plan lets you retain more for each sale while allowing customers to pay less when ordering copies of your books. The basic rule is you set a list price and Amazon charges a fee once the item is sold. The fee is 20% of list price for eShops and 40% of list price for books sold via Amazon. For a comprehensive overview of all pricing combinations, also depending on the type of book you choose (hardcover, softcover, black / white, colour, etc.) check the “Pricing and Royalties” page on CreateSpace website.
www.createspace.com - CafePress
CafePress is a service specialized in user-generated commerce. You can choose an item inside CafePress catalogue, brand it with your company logo or your own images, and then buy your customized item to sell it. To sell your books, the e-commerce service creates a “shop”, which is a personal storefront owned by you. When an item is sold on your shop, CafePress retains the base price (the price you paid to buy that item from CafePress) and you earn the markup you set above the base price. Books must be submitted using PDF format. Options to customize your books include binding type, cover image and internal images. To make sure your product is also indexed by search engines, CafePress provides a set of guidelines to obtain the best visibility for your customized items. You can open a Basic Shop for free, but only sell one of each of the products with your image(s) at a time. Premium shops starts from $6 for one month and allow you to sell unlimited items and access further customization possibilities regarding the layout of your shop. No free distribution via Amazon or writers feedback.
www.cafepress.com - Blurb
Blurb helps you self-publish your own book for free, either in printed or digital format. You can submit your book using the free BookSmart software (Mac + PC) or just upload a PDF file. Once your book is uploaded you can customize a set of options to personalize your creation, these include: binding type, cover image, internal images, paper quality and Blurb logo removal from your book pages. You can also add an ISBN number to your book just by creating a JPG image (with or without barcode) and place it on your book. You can offer customers a 15-page preview of your book to help them evaluate a potential purchase. To ensure the right visibility off your books on search engines, you can add tags and set a category which your book fits in. You can also promote your book using a Blurb badge on your own website. Blurb forums are available to share ideas with other publishers and receive feedback and suggestions on your work. All pricing options are available on Blurb website, but a quick way to estimate how much your book will cost to you (and then the sell price) is to use the free Shipping Calculator. Whatever your earnings are, Blurb retains a $5 fee from your monthly profit. No free Amazon distribution.
www.blurb.com - Xlibris
Xlibris is a “back office” that allows you to self-publish and sell your own books without head-scratching. After submitting your book (either in MS Word or RTF formats), a cover image, internal images, a customer representative helps you choose the best packaging that suits your needs and takes care of publishing and selling your book. First premium price level osts $299 and offers: custom cover, internal book design, ISBN assignment, and more. Besides hardcover and softcover options, Xlibris offers also leather-bound editions of your books. Ebooks are not available for the time being. Each book published with Xlibris has a unique ISBN, so that customers and bookstores can easily search your book inside bibliographic databases. The retail price of your book is determined by the options you choose when customizing the print options of your book: if you want to maintain control of your retail price (and the earnings you get out of that price) you can purchase the “Set Your Own Price” option for $249. To receive help setting the best retail price for your needs, use the free Xlibris Book Calculator. For each sale made on Xlibris you get royalties corresponding to 25% of the retail price. If your book is sold via Amazon (only available for premium plans and Black & White books) you earn 10% of the retail price. Each plan you choose has a fixed number of copies to print your books. No writers feedback.
www2.xlibris.com - Lightning Source
Lightning Source offers a print and distribution model that takes care of all the hassle of publishing. You can have your books printed, distributed, sold and shipped using just one service. Ebook selling is also allowed. While Lightning Source can also drop-ship directly to customers, the company is partnered with all major book publishing distributors, including Amazon. Books can be submitted either in PDF or printed format. If you submit your work in print format, the service takes care to scan and digitalize your book for you. ISBN identification number is supported. Publishers can customize binding type, cover type (hard / soft), cover image and internal images of books using a dedicated free tool. The cost to access Lightning Source service is $12/year per book. When a book is sold, the service pays the publisher the wholesale price of the book, less the cost of printing the book. The cost of printing is based on a unit cost for each book plus a cost per page. No writers feedback.
www.lightningsource.com - CreateBooks
CreateBooks is a book publishing service that assists you when self-publishing your work. CreateBooks has a particular focus on the physical crafting of your book. Books must be uploaded in MS Word format. The service also takes care of providing you with a valid ISBN and bar code, if you want to distribute your book inside bookstores (see pricing options for more details on the cost of these options). Also, depending on the pricing package you choose, you are allowed to choose between different print options for your books: cover (hard / soft), binding type, cover image and internal images. Profits from sales operated by CreateBooks are all retained by original authors. The service shares also a set of guidelines that may give you helpful suggestions and tips to obtain good rankings for your books inside search engines. Books published withCreateBooks are also published inside Google Book Search listings. Marketing supports to promote your book sales like business cards, posters, promotional book cover and other material are also available for purchase. Distrubition via Amazon is accepted. No writers feedback.
www.createbooks.com - UniBook
UniBook is a virtual bookstore where writers and publishers can print, publish and sell their books. Books submitted must be in PDF or DOC format. UniBook allows you to customize: binding type, cover type, cover image and internal images. Ebooks are not available for the time being. For each book you submit you need to insert tags and choose a category, so that your book can rank inside search engines. UniBook has a free service to calculate the price your books is sold to customers: just choose a format, input the number of pages of your book and the percentage of royalties you want to earn from the sell. The service returns all the options you have and even the available discounts if you order large quantities of book copies. Whatever solution you choose, UniBook will retain the 50% of the retail price. Starting price to utilize UniBook services is $79, which includes 5 book copies and worldwide distribution. No free Amazon distribution nor writers feedback.
www.unibook.com - BookSurge
BookSurge is a company that allows publishers and authors to self-publish a book and also take care of the sell process. Since BookSurge is a subsidiary of the Amazon group, you can distribute the book through Amazon bookstore and also convert your works into Kindle format (or into a traditional PDF ebook). You have to submit your work in PDF, DOC, RTF or TXT formats or send a print copy to BookSurge which takes care of digitalizing your manuscript. You can either purchase a Total Design Freedom Package to have complete control over the customization of your book (($799) or the Author’s Advantage Publishing Program which offers a set of ready-made templates and limited customization options ($499). Options you can always customize inside your book (whatever pricing plan you choose) are: cover format, cover image, internal image, chapter titles, external / internal fonts and fleurons. BookSurge retains the 35% of the retail price of your book. There are several marketing options you can optionally purchase to increase the visibility of your book like posters, sell sheets, press releases, custom reviews and more (prices available on site). No writers feedback.
www.booksurge.com - Trafford Publishing
Trafford Publishing offers a set of commercial solutions to print, self-publish and sell your book. Publishers can sell books either in print copies or digital format. No info is released on the format to subscribe your manuscript, tough guidelines are available inside the FAQ section of the website. First pricing plan starts at $799 and offers the following options: paperback format, custom cover design, author support, ISBN assignment, custom interior layout, Amazon distribution, and more. To have further customization options you need to upgrade to another pricing plan (starting from $1299). Your earnings are calculated as the 20% of the book sale. The retail price of your books is determined by the option you choose and the number of pages your book is made up. No writers feedback.
www.trafford.com - Spire Publishing
Spire Publishing allows you to print and sell a manuscript of your book completely on your own. The service is available only for US and UK markets. Books must be submitted in PDF, DOC or RTF format. Ebook selling is not permitted. The first pricing plan you can purchase is the Print Ready Publishing plan, which allows you to get five paperback copies of your book: for $299 you get a custom cover image, ready-made design templates ISBN assignment, and more. If you prefer a hardcover instead of a paperback binding, the price raises to $549 (for three copies). These two pricing plans do not include distribution and sale of your book. To have your book sold via third-party bookstores (Amazon included) you have to purchase the Print Ready Plus Publishing plan (same options of the basic plan) at $399 for five paperback copies and $749 for three hardcover copies of your book. Your earnings consist of the retail price less the print cost of the book (which is the price you pay to Spire Publishing to buy your book). The print cost depends on the options you choose. On Spire Publishing website you can also find marketing tips and strategies to promote your book. No writers feedback.
www.spirepublishing.com - AutorHouse
AuthorHouse is a self-publishing company that helps publishers and authors print and sell their works outside the traditional book publishing channels. Manuscript must be submitted in MS Word or Adobe InDesign 2, CS, or CS2 file formats. Ebook publishing is available. The first pricing level costs $549 and has the following features: custom cover, custom, interior layout design, ISBN assignment, Amazon distribution, and more. The price of your book depends on: book size, cover type (softcover or dust jacket), final page count, where the book is purchased, and the royalty percentage you choose. The royalties you can earn from AutorHouse depend on the retail price of the book and the amount of money you want to get from your book sale (10%, 20%, 30% or 50%). AutorHouse provides also a range of services to market and promote your book (prices available on the site). No writers feedback.
www.autorhouse.com - Infinity Publishing
Self-publish company Infinity Publishing takes care of all the book publishing process following a print-on-demand-philosophy. Ebook publishing is not allowed. No information is provided on the file format to subscribe your manuscript. First pricing plan starts at $499 and covers all aspects of self-publishing your book: custom cover, distribution to third-party bookstores like Amazon, custom barcode, ISBN assignment, and more. You can also include a CD to ship with your book for $200 more. Other optional services include: Spanish translation, extended book distribution, marketing packages, advance reading copies (for reviewers and columnists) and book editing services (price details on the company website). Monthly royalties are paid on the selling price: 30% of retail, 15% of wholesale, and 10% on purchases by the author. Authors are also free to increase / decrease the price of their book within a 25%-75% range. Infinity published books are priced according to page count – the greater the number of pages, the higher the retail price. No writers feedback.
www.infinitypublishing.com - SelfPublishing
SelfPublishing allows publishers and authors to print their works either in print or digital format. SelfPublishing does not take care of distributing or selling your work to book retailers. No information is provided on the file format to subscribe your manuscript. Book customization options include: binding type, custom cover design, custom book layout, and more. You can purchase a single ISBN license directly from SelfPublishing for $99. The self-publishing company has one pricing plan which costs $249 for three years. No writers feedback or Amazon distribution available.
www.selfpublishing.com - WEbook
WEbook is a free book publishing service based entirely on social collaboration. You cannot import your existing book, but only start your writing inside WEbook. The service community will assist you along the way with feedback and suggestions to help you perfect your work. To get in touch with other users you can access the forum, start a group, or comment inside the official blog. Once your book is ready, your work is reviewed and rated by the WEbook community which is the only subject that decides whether a book can be published or not. Only the highest-rated books are sold via WEbook. Ebooks selling or ISBN identification are not available for the time being. If you are allowed to sell your book, you can also share the revenues with the people that helped you improve your work with their feedback. Authors and major contributors receive 50% of all profits generated from the sale of WEbook titles. If you are allowed to sell your book, you can also share your revenue with those people that gave you helpful feedback. Inside WEbook website there are no info about binding types, paper quality or cover type options to personalize your book once published. The only choice you have seems to be to upload a cover image. Book published with WEbook are distributed via Amazon.
www.webook.com
Other Self-Publishing Guides and Resources Worth Checking
- Self-Publishing a Book: 25 Things You Need to Know
… The basic premise is anyone can become a small publisher. You call the shots. You retain the rights to your book. And you take home a bigger royalty than you’d normally get from a traditional publisher–if you sell any books. Against the advice of my agent, I began perusing the big self-publishing companies’ Web sites and evaluating what they had to offer. Then I started poking around blogs and message boards to get customer testimonials. What I found was a veritable minefield with roads that forked in every direction and very few clear answers.
- 6 Ways to Publish Your Own Book
Online self-publishing services have given users the tools they need to create, publish and promote their work. These sites allow authors to bypass the process of finding an agent and pitching to publishing houses, a venture that can take months, if not years. Here are six great sites that will help you publish your work, guaranteeing you a published book that can be sold via different outlets, such as Amazon.
- Lulu vs. CreateSpace: Which Is More Economical For The DIY Author?
At the risk of coming off as some kind of Amazon shill, I’m afraid I’ve just got to blog about one of their services again: CreateSpace. I feel this is necessary because I keep seeing tweets, posts and Facebook notes from indie authors–especially authors outside the US—who intend to go through Lulu based in part on a belief that Lulu is the most economical choice for the services offered, and in many, many cases, this is simply not true.
Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on June 29th, 2009 as “Self-Publish Your Book: Guide To The Best Self-Publishing Services“.
Kindle DX – Is Charging Premium Access For Content The Best Strategy?
Posted by: | CommentsThe Kindle DX allows publishers to charge premium access for content. But is distributing locked-down, must-pay-for content through a proprietary platform a good strategy for content publishers?
Titles are being pushed into Kindle format as quickly as Amazon can handle the conversions and postings.
In a year in which print book sales are sluggish, the reduced price of Kindle-edition books offers publishers a discount-bin pricing strategy with zero inventory or print-on-demand cost exposure.
But are low-prices and easiness of publishing really sufficient to stand the army of netbooks and other mobile devices used to read most content today? And, most importantly, are publishers fully prepared for extending their workflow to include an e-book media format addition?
In this article, content media author and corporate publishing expert John Blossom dissects and analyzes the Kindle content sales and distribution strategy and the opportunities and issues it opens.
Here, Mr. Blossom valuable insight on the future of the ebook distribution market:
The landscape of Europe is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of castles and city walls dating from the Medieval era of feudal rule, when local kings, dukes and other land-owners defended their claims to farms and forests through their ability to repel invaders from behind their castles’ walls.
Castle defenses worked reasonably well for several centuries, but eventually the use of castles as power bases became obsolete.
Was it improved war technology that made castles charming antiquities? To some degree, perhaps, but the larger force that made castles irrelevant was the rise of a new way to store and protect wealth: banking.
Once the rise of wealthy merchants made the marketplaces of towns and cities the real battlefields for proving out power, castles protecting farmlands became far less important for securing power than having an economic system that could enable efficient trade. Yet those old castles still stand, and, darn, they do look rather nifty even today.
The Kindle DX Opens a Promising Market
Fast-forward to 2009, as Amazon introduces its Kindle DX, the latest iteration of their wireless ebook reader that offers a larger screen with eInk technology.
Just as those kings and dukes were thrilled to build ever-larger battlements against their enemies, publishers are flocking to the Kindle as the wonder machine of choice, now with a screen size that lends itself to larger materials such as magazines and newspaper articles.
With a USD 489 price tag, the Kindle DX is hardly an economy model digital device; in fact, many new netbooks with similar screen sizes go for hundreds less and offer color displays with Web and PC functionality.
But as the copy from the Amazon catalog page reminds us, this new Kindle is slim, “Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines“.
Why even compare a Kindle to a netbook when it offers such obvious advantages and comforts to print readers? And if the price is a little to steep for some people, a few of them may be able to rejoice (a little): some major newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globeare offering a discount off of a USD 400 – plus annual subscription to their papers via the new Kindle – if you live beyond the delivery range of their paper editions.
This new-fangled technology does allow some miraculous breakthroughs, doesn’t it? It’s not as if the Kindle does not have its own unique virtues – or its own promising revenue streams. Sales of smaller Kindle units have been brisk, and the affluent older people buying them online are also fueling skyrocketing ebook sales.
Charging Premium Access For Content
Silicon Alley Insider notes that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos brought a stunning statistic to light during the Kindle DX intro show: when Kindle-formatted books are available on Amazon, about 35 percent of those books’ sales are now through Kindle editions.
There was no breakout as to how many buy a print edition as well, but the chart behind Bezos at the intro showed this percentage hockey-sticking from only 14 percent in February of this year.
Based on my own experience with getting my Content Nation book into a Kindle edition, much of this growth is actually publisher-driven: titles are being pushed into Kindle format as quickly as Amazon can handle the conversions and postings. In a year in which print book sales are sluggish, the reduced price of Kindle-edition books offers publishers a discount-bin pricing strategy with zero inventory or print-on-demand cost exposure.
In other words, in a year in which the slowly-moving denizens of print are trying to salvage some semblance of sensible quarterly earnings, the ability to charge a premium for access to content on electronic platforms – or any platform, for that matter – has to be a strong plus.
Yet in doing so many of these publishers continue to invest minimally in developing a more competitive stance in the more competitive markets of online publishing that are able to reach younger and broader audiences far more effectively than Kindles.
Kindle is attractive to newspapers and magazines as a platform that can be used to appeal to older and more affluent audiences who are the targets of their advertisers, a fact that fuels hopes that a larger Kindle will enable them to sell display ads at good rates for this elite group.
Yet where will tomorrow’s older and more affluent audiences be congregating? Kindle, we hardly knew ye.
Kindle is an important content delivery platform that has enabled the book industry to begin its slow transition to the online era and that has offered a shelter for premium content sales in the face of an online content industry that largely baffles most publishers.
Yet for the most part it is a transitional proprietary platform, much as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online were proprietary transitional services for premium online content prior to the emergence of the web as a dominant content delivery network.
Is The Kindle a Transitional Strategy?
Publishers are welcome to continue to build short-term profits on Kindle as part of their transition away from the printed versions of their content, but the rush to Kindle at this very late stage in the online game is ultimately yet another indication that many publishers are ill-prepared to compete in the web world of highly distributed content production and aggregation.
If there were a commitment by publishers to use some significant portion of their revenues from Kindle sales to invest in making a more effective transition to Web revenues, then perhaps there would be reason to think that Kindle will represent an effective transitional strategy.
But with a soft economy making profits in publishing more elusive, it’s more likely to turn into a strategy that yet again kicks key decisions about web strategies down the road.
In the meantime billions of people around the world are going to be equipped with very affordable netbooks over the next few years – many of them being about as slim as a magazine, no doubt.
My book royalty checks say “Thank you” to Kindle for the time being, but underinvestment in advanced web strategies is making publishing via traditionally print-oriented publishers an increasingly unattractive option for authors trying to reach both mass audiences and affluent audiences.
The skyscrapers that house major media companies will stand for many years, no doubt, just as Europe’s feudal castles still stand today.
But unless those companies start to gear themselves for the reality of a market-driven content economy, instead of a property-driven content economy, we may see those glass buildings as tourist attractions displaying the hubris of a bygone era sooner than one may imagine.
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on May 7th 2009 as “The Great(er) White Hope of Publishing: Kindle DX Enables Locked-Down Content to Live On. For Now.“.
About the author
John Blossom’s career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.
Photo credits:
Charging Premium Access For Content – artzone
Is The Kindle a Transitional Strategy? – jpsdk
Online Newspapers Best Content Publishing Strategy: Free Or Paid?
Posted by: | CommentsWhat is best online publishing strategy for a struggling newspaper? Is it better to let online news content go out for free or to charge people to access it? The eternal Internet question is back and with a powerful sponsor behind it: Rupert Murdoch.
Photo credit: ktsdesign
If you haven’t caught this story yet, It is only a few weeks back that all major international newspapers reported of Rupert Murdoch public statements about the days of the free internet business model being over. While speaking on a conference call in which his own News Corporation reported a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits, Murdoch specifically said that “the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.” (Source: CNN)
“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning,” the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.
Rupert Murdoch described the present online news commercial approach a ”malfunctioning” business model which needs some rapid fixing. And that sparked a new wave of discussions and articles challenging again the eternal question: should online news content be free or should it be charged for?
Even a recent US Senate hearing on the “Future of Journalism” made it clear that there are quite a few newspaper companies who would like to go back to charging for their content (while lobbying for tax breaks at the same time).
But is charging for news content really the solution to newspapers crisis?
If you look beyond the appearances and official statements, the future of online news may actually be quite different from it would appear by just browsing through these story headlines.
As a matter of fact, I think that the very question we are asking is not the right one. It is not whether online news content should be free or paid, but rather which type of news content should benefit the most from being free and which one should drive enthusiastic paid subscriptions without one interfering with the other.
In this video interview, Alan Murray, Executive Editor at the Wall Street Journal, reveals quite a different story and vision from the one we have been hearing over the news. Murray reveals a more balanced strategy in which both free and paid content can play a strategically important role in which the two approaches complement each other rather than being opponents of two opposing extremes.
Here’s Alan Murray insightful video interview alongside a full text transcription. If you are wondering whether you should charge or let your news content be free, here some really valuable advice:
Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal On Charging For Content
Duration: 4′ 31”
by Alan Murray
Full English Text Transcription
Inside or Outside The Pay Wall
What’s happened in the last year and a half or two years is that we’ve discovered this is not a binary issue. It’s not pay wall / no pay wall.
We’ve put more and more of our content outside of the pay wall. You can get all our political coverage, all our opinion coverage, all our arts and leisure coverage free, available to anybody. A lot of big news stories, even business news stories, the coverage is available free, because we know that if we don’t put it out there you’ll just go to somebody else.
If it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and… we could hold that behind the pay wall. But if we do, BusinessWeek or someone else will simply write a story saying “The Wall Street Journal is reporting x,” and they’ll get all the traffic.
Why would we do that? So if it’s that kind of a big, broad-interest news story, we’ll put it outside the pay wall and go ahead and take the traffic ourselves, thank you very much.
The Wall Street Journal and The Google News Experiment
The Google News arrangement was an experiment. We thought, let’s let people who are looking for a story come in and read one story, any one story. Seems to have worked pretty well.
When people go to Google News, they’re not, by and large, people who have a relationship with The Wall Street Journal. They’re just looking for the best story on a subject. If we happen to have that story, we let them read it. But if they like it enough that they want to have a relationship with us, if they care about our business and financial coverage, eventually they’ll have to subscribe.
In a sense, we’re having our cake and eating it too, by making those clear distinctions between what’s going to be most broadly popular, what’s most likely to attract traffic on the wider web, but keeping in mind what the core value proposition is that we offer to subscribers who come to us for business and financial news they can’t get anywhere else.
Narrow Your Interest
The key is not to take your most popular stuff and put it behind a pay wall. That’s the been the mistake that some people have made in the past: “This is the story that most people want to read; therefore, that’s the one we’re gonna make them pay for.” That’s not the right answer.
The broad, popular stuff is the stuff you want out in the free world because that drives traffic, that builds up your traffic, and you can, of course, serve advertising to that audience.
I think what you have to think about is sort of narrower groups of interest where the interest might be deeper and more intense and therefore might make people willing to pay for it.
I had this conversation with one newspaper editor where I said: “Look, what’s your equivalent of our business readers – the group of people who really need to read you because there’s something they desperately care about?” And one of those editors said to me: “It’s really local sports“.
It’s the high school football game or the high school basketball game. Not necessarily of interest to all the paper’s readers, but to the people who want to read it. They really want to read it because maybe their kids are involved. Maybe they’re willing to pay for that. Or maybe there’s a photography service that’s connected to that where you can download pictures of your kids or of the game. But only if you’re a subscriber.
That’s just one example, but I think that’s the kind of thing.
People Will Pay For Value
The truth of the matter is there are tons of people out there paying large amounts of money, billions of dollars, to buy information every day.
There were a couple of guys in Texas who started the ultimate news service on the oil business with oil rig counts and all that. They sell it. They’re driving around in Mercedes. Why didn’t The Houston Chronicle do that? Why did that have to be some outsider?
The question is to find the information that has an enormous value to not necessarily a big group of people. Maybe it’s a small group of people, but enough value that they’re willing to pay for it. I think those opportunities are out there for lots of newspapers.
We’re working on a premium initiative to launch a series of more, as you say, niche or narrower information services that we can sell at a premium to smaller groups of subscribers on subjects that they care most about.
Energy might be an example. Obviously a lot of our readers are deeply interested in financial subjects. Perhaps some sort of a news service for chief financial officers.
There are a lot of ideas that are on the table. We’ve started prioritizing them, got a few that will probably come out first. But I’m not going to break that news on your video.
Alan Murray’s Highlights
- The best content publishing model is a mix of paid and free content.
- The content you don’t give out for free will be published elsewhere and you will lose traffic.
- Do not charge your audience for the most popular content you have on your site.
- Target your paid content to highly-focused niches.
Original video of Alan Murray republished with permission of Nieman Journalism Lab. Video transcription prepared by Daniele Bazzano and first published on June 2nd, 2009 as “Online Newspapers Best Content Publishing Strategy: Free Or Paid?”
About the author
Alan Murray is online executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, and author of the “Business” column, which runs on page 2 every Wednesday. He is also a regular contributor to CNBC, and author of the book “Revolt in the Boardroom: The New Rules of Power in Corporate America”. Mr. Murray has management responsibility for the Journal’s multimedia efforts, including its relationship with CNBC television, the Wall Street Journal books business, the paper’s events business, and a variety of online ventures.
Photo credits:
Free vs. Paid Content – adempercem
Narrow Your Interest – 3dfoto
People Will Pay For Value – Giskard
The most recent statistical data by duplicated content analysis engine Attributor indicates that nearly half of the web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 percent of the original text of articles. For prestigious and long-established news organization like AP, this is a completely new battleground and understanding how to counter such new issues has rapidly become of critical strategic importance.
Photo credit: David Humphrey
What is the most effective path towards revenue growth for major online publishers in the face of such obstacles?
Charging for the news like Murdoch advises?
Many such large publishing companies are still trying to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, but is not always successful and it often brings back negative PR consequences.
With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world’s attention span has permanently embraced this “Content Nation” as a source of information that they trust. Why not leveraging their ubiquitous presence and their reporting and content production abilities?
What are the possible roads to online sustainability for major online news publishers?
Content business and news media expert John Blossom, analyzes the Associated Press story and the possible paths that could help AP and similar organizations to ride (and not fight) in the new online information ecosystem.
Here his analysis:
Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?
by John Blossom
There’s been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press‘ moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment.
The latest developments in the war for news organization survival were kicked off by the AP board’s announcement that it would be moving aggressively to identify and to challenge web site publishers that were using unlicensed AP content illegally.
Where Associated Press Is Headed
The “why” of this move, largely ignored by media reports, is contained in the rest of the announcement: AP is introducing a new schedule of lower fees for its member news organizations that will make it easier for them to participate in AP distribution and news use.
Faced with having to respond to the revenue crunches experienced by most news organizations this year, AP has no choice but to ensure that their online revenue streams from organizations consuming AP content can be captured as effectively as possible.
From the perspective of public relations, any constructive aspects of the latest AP moves appear to have been lost in a sea of furor rising up from bloggers, Twitters and other online voices.
TechCrunch viewed AP’s moves as being akin to the RIAA’s moves to prosecute consumers for downloading relatively meager quantities of music on to their PCs – legal moves that have backfired in many ways both from a legal and public relations perspective for the music publishing industry.
TechCrunch also highlighted a cease-and-desist order sent by AP to a web site using AP-posted video from YouTube in an embedded video player. Of course YouTube videos are made for embedding in other web sites, and the site that happened to be using it was that of WTNQ-FM, already an AP affiliate member.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented in the wake of these PR fiascos by AP, that it’s a good idea not to “piss off your customers“- especially those who are doing their very best to abide by fair use policies for the reuse of copyrighted content.
AP could certainly take some lessons from Google’s efforts to get publishers to swallow some of their own bitter pills with much kinder and gentler approaches to public and professional-level communications.
The Quest for New Revenues
The question is, though, what is really the most effective path towards revenue growth for AP at this time – and are they handling the rollout of new strategies in a way that will help those new revenue streams to materialize? From the looks of things, AP is still struggling to find answers to that question.
Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, and it’s not without its merits.
Data published by Attributor indicates that nearly half of the web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 percent of the original text of articles.
Knocking out parasite web sites that copy unattributed content strictly for the purpose of sucking up ad revenues that would go otherwise to the original publishers would do the bottom lines of all online publishers a great favor.
It’s a shame that AP’s initial efforts along this vein have resulted in embarrassing misfires – it’s an important goal that should not be sidelined by a mishandling of the policies built on top of the underlying copy detection technologies.
But the larger concern is whether AP is really “getting” how to make money in the online publishing environment.
The AP board announcement included a statement indicating AP’s intent to build a search portal that would feature only content from “authoritative” news sources. While this is a constructive goal of sorts, we’ve had such search engines for years already.
The Topix search engine focuses primarily on traditional media sources, and, for that matter, Yahoo! News and other major portal news services have focused on aggregating and searching mainstream news even longer. Both are good efforts in their own ways, but they’re not floating the boat for most online news publishing revenues and they’re not growing in any significant way.
Why would yet another search portal wind up being the solution to news publishers’ concerns?
Get Valuable Content and Make Money From It
The future that AP needs to embrace can be summed up in a fairly simple phrase: get news content that people really want to read to where it can make money.
In broad concept that’s pretty much what AP’s mission has been all along, but in insisting that that mission cannot be expanded or altered significantly in light of how news is created today is holding back both AP and its member organizations from surviving and thriving in online news markets.
Media organizations need to become better at aggregating sources of news more agnostically: if someone is streaming live video via Qik from their mobile phone at the site of a plane crash, then AP should be the natural source to which news organizations would turn to find such content as breaking news, not “i-reports“.
The idea of “authoritative” news need not always be synonymous with editorial and news-gathering methods that grew up in the era of printing presses.
With today’s publishing technologies editorial values can be implemented in many ways that can expedite the most compelling information getting to the right audiences at the right time.
This recognition that its own members need better agnostic aggregation of news sources is key to AP supporting the economic performance of those news organizations.
Thomson Reuters CEO noted recently at a conference, “Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices?”
In other words, if the economics of news have shifted permanently, why try to justify subsidizing jobs that need to move elsewhere in the news economy simply because you want only specific people in specific organizations producing news a specific way?
With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world’s attention span has permanently embraced this “Content Nation” as a source of information that they trust.
The Strategy to Survive
That’s a fact that will simply never go away. Trying to make it go away is about at pointless as anyone who tried to sift the tea thrown overboard in Boston Harbor back in 1775. Even if you could do it, who would want to drink it?
Instead of arguing with people who are both consumers and sources of news, AP needs to take a deep breath and think about how they can power the profits of today’s news organizations using whatever content – news, metadata, links, video, anything – will help them to make money.
In some instances this may mean new members and approaches to membership, in other instances it may mean playing a very different role with existing members and in how they participate in its editorial efforts.
This can be a hard thing for any organization with a venerated history as rich as AP’s to do, and I know that they are trying their best to move in that direction. But if they were able to leave the confines of the Rockefeller Center behind to set up shop in dot-com West Side digs, one would hope that AP could help to carry both its traditions of excellence and of innovation to new levels of performance in the news industry that take it in directions that others have yet to dare to imagine.
The time to dream a new dream at AP has come. I do hope that they start to envision it and to realize that dream aggressively some time soon, both for their own sake and for the sake of their members.
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on April 9th 2009 as “Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?”
About the author
John Blossom’s is the author of “Content Nation“, a great book about the new media publishing revolution taking place. His career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.
Photo credits:
Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members? – Matthew Jones
Where Associated Press Is Headed – Vasyl Yakobchuk
The Quest for New Revenues – Rafael Angel Irusta Machin
Get Valuable Content and Make Money From It – Marc Dietrich
The Strategy to Survive – Daniel Gilbey
How To Get Your Images Indexed By Google Image Search
Posted by: | CommentsOne of my greatest traffic sources is Google Image Search, and, if you like me, utilize plenty of high quality, well-selected images for your web site, it is likely that the same thing has already happened to you as well.
Photo credit: Mario Lopes
In case you are not yet benefiting from this extra powerful source of web traffic here are a few tips and a video from Google itself, that should help you understand better how Google Image Search works, how it indexes images, and how to get your published images to become a valuable source of web traffic for you as well.
Here all the details:
Tips on How to Get Your Images Indexed
by Robin Good
Here some basic tips you can use right away to improve your ability to get your images indexed by Google and other major search engines.
- Since search engines can track pages / content through text, add a text description to each image by learning to use alt tags.
- In Google Webmaster Tools, enable enhanced image search.
- Select images that have a very strong visual impact and which are “essential” by testing them against adverse viewing conditions. Learn more about How To Select Best Images For Web Publication.
- Rename the name of image files so that they clearly reflects in clear and simple words, separated by dashes, the actual description of the image contents.
- Surround the image with text that is relevant and complementary (topic-wise) to the image subject.
- The larger the dimension of the image are, the greater the chances of getting more Google Image Search originated traffic.
Google Image Search
Duration: 14′ 45”
by Peter Linsley – Google
Full English Text Transcription
Introduction
Hi everybody, my name is Peter Linsley, I’m a product manager at Google, working on Image Search.
What we thought we’d do today was to run over some slides that I presented at SMX West in February 2009.
The slides were sort of high-level introduction to Image Search.
First of all I thought we’d run over to the presentation I gave at SMX West, and then afterwards I’ll run through some of the questions that came up which seem like topics of interest for webmasters.
Let’s start the presentation.
Mission
First of all, our mission with Google Image Search is to organize the world’s images.
We put a lot of focus on satisfying the end user, so when they come with a query and they have an image that they are looking for, our goal is to provide relevant, and useful images for that query.
Of course, the theory is that if they find what they’re looking for, and they enjoy their experience, they’ll come back and use us again.
What I wanted to get out of this talk as well was to start to engage a little bit more with the webmaster community.
If we look at what has come out of conferences like this where web search representatives from different companies, have gone out and had a conversation with the webmasters and found out what their pain points were, and we found a sort of ad hoc consortium came together and came up with things like the sitemap standard, or they came up with rel=”nofollow”, and they came up with robots wildcards, and things along those lines.
One of our hopes in Image Search is that we can trying start this dialogue and find out what sort of pain points you guys might have as webmasters, where we, the likes of Google and also other search engine companies, can trying come together and try to enhance the end user experience by finding an easier way for you guys to get your images both indexed and ranked.
Goals
I’m just going to move on to the first slide that I had:
I wanted to paint a little bit of a picture of image searchers. What they do and why they might be slightly different to the kind of audience you might be used to with web search.
Image Search appear in lots of places beyond images at Google.com. You’ve probably seen images appear in universal search, so whenever you do a query like “pictures of San Francisco” there might well be a portion of the results page that’s dedicated to show images for that results.
And the theory here is very much in line with our goal at Image Search which is that we are going to show you these results when we believe these are useful, and informative, and relevant to the query.
Images also appear in other places like on Maps. You might have seen a little row of images in Maps which come from Panoramio.com property, and it is a really cool product if you haven’t seen it before.
Images appear everywhere all over across our properties, and we’re really just trying to align it with when they match the user intent and enhance the user experience.
Search Behavior
Image searchers also have a very unique search behavior. They are a very different animals to web searchers.
If you think about the paradigm when they do a query, it’s not so much about what’s the first result. We don’t really have this sort of “I’m feeling lucky” paradigm. It’s more about saying: “Here’s a query. Well, here’s 20 images that you might like“. And users can consume those images in a heartbeat, and if the image they happen to like is at the bottom left-and corner or the bottom right-hand corner, so be it. They’ll see that, there’s something about the image that attracts them, and they’ll click through.
The other thing they do is they search a lot of images, so there’s a lot of next paging going on, they’ll go very deep looking for the images they like. One of the reasons why this happens is that a lot of queries we see are very subjective in nature, so if you see a query like “waterfalls“, then the waterfall that you like and the waterfall that I like might be on two very different pages.
There’s no way, as a search engine, we can figure out what you are looking for.
So, there’s a lot of next paging, users can consume results very quickly, and it’s just interesting I think what it might mean to you guys, as marketers, that is not all about being in the first position in the first page.
There’s also a lot of novel use cases on Image Search which we might not be apparent. Users use image search for inspiration. they want to get a haircut, or a tattoo, and they are looking for ideas. So, “tattoo ideas” and then they go through the pages looking for some inspiration. They’ll refine that query… there’s a lot sort of exploring and browsing with intent.
Users also use Image Search for shopping. They use it for research, health queries, or sometimes they just use it to kill time, just for the fun of it.
Another really interesting use case that we’ve seen is using Image Search as a visual dictionary.
There’s a googler in Germany who’s learning German, and if he hears a noun or a word that he’s not too sure of what it is, he’ll type it in and he knows exactly what the word means, even though he’s not looking it up in a text dictionary.
How Image Search Works
This is a slide on how does Image Search work:
Simply put, as a webmaster, you’ll see Googlebot come along and download the HTML as normal. Then what happens is, we pass through your page and we look for references to images.
Typically, references to images can come in one of the two forms:
- It’s either an “a href“, when you’re linking to an image directly,
- or it’s in-lined image with an “img src” tag.
Then what happens is, we come along and crawl the images, and then we go through this process of classifying it. What we are trying to do here is to figure out how to bucketize these images correctly.
One classification we do, is to work out if “It’s a photograph or not?” Another one might be: “Does it contain a face?” Other buckets might be things like: “Is it line-art?“, “Is it black and white?“, “Is it an unsafe image?” that we can only show when SafeSearch is disabled.
This sort of classification goes on, and the reason we do that, is we found that image searchers really like to slice and dice their results. They like to do a query and then look at it and say: “Well, these images are sort of nice, but I really wanted to see just images with faces in them“.
If you’ve seen across the top of the results page, there’s a blue bar which contains some drop downs where you can filter the results down to just photographs, or just faces, or just line art, and so on and so forth. These filters tend to get used quite heavily.
We like to try and bucketize things off so they show in a more relevant context.
Finally, of course, the images are indexed and that’s where we scroll them away, we have an index of the image, with all text associated with that particular image.
Identifying the Duplicates
Another part of this process is about identifying the duplicates.
If you think about the way images are typically deployed online, you might put an image up and a particular page will refer to it, and another page might refer to it, and you might have other pages on your site that refer to it. Every now and again the image will get copies, and maybe it gets copied as is, or maybe gets transformed slightly. But as far the user is concerned, it is still very much the same image.
The next process we go through is one of trying to cluster all of the very similar or identical images and trying treat them as one. And this is very much the same as the way things are done in the Web, where web pages are analyzed for duplicates, and then one sort of canonical winner is picked out of that entire group. The same thing happens with Image Search.
We try hard to identify all the duplicates, and again the main reason for us doing this is that when somebody comes in and types “blue widgets” we really don’t want be showing them exactly the same blue widget 20 times, we want try and cluster them all together and say: “Here is one interpretation, and here is another one“.
There are multiple images. Our goal is to try and cluster these and figure out which is the best one, and at the same time we have multiple pages that are including that image.
Another task is the runtime and query time to try to figure out which one of these referrers makes the most sense for these particular images that we’ve chosen. And the answer for this is we’re trying to choose the best one.
We’re trying to choose the best image that meets the user’s intent more accurately, and maybe it’s about size, or maybe it’s about quality, or something like that. The referring pages that are included in that images are selected based on “how good it is” essentially, and that could be one of many things such as its relevance to the actual query itself.
And finally, ranking is performed on a whole lot of signals and typically we don’t get into details of the signals, but it’s very much like Web, there’s more than one signal that we use to try and figure out what the most relevant image would be.
Best Practices
The next slide is on best practices, so you say and you think: “This sounds great. I’ve got good images that I think will be useful for users as well… What can I do about it?”
Probably the best bit of advice we can give is to really focus on the user. You might be thinking: “What exactly does it mean? What can I go and do tomorrow to focus on the user?”
The answer is pretty simple.
If you think of a user who comes to Google Image Search, and what they might be looking for, it might take one use case, such as “coloring pages“. Maybe they’re looking for a site which has a lot of coloring pages and they trust to use Image Search to get there.
The first thing am I going to do is come along and type in “coloring pages” and they’re going to look at the results and maybe they see something that they like, maybe they don’t, they might hit next page a few times, and all of sudden one element will catch their eye. They like it for some reason, and maybe it’s just the quality of image itself. Or maybe it’s the snippet, maybe there’s something around the size, or the host name, and this draws their attention. Maybe, it’s coloringpages.com, “I know that site, I’m going to click through. I trust it“.
Then they land upon your page. And the question is: “What sort of experience are you immersing them into?” “What sort of experience are they getting now they’ve come to your page” given that they were looking for coloring pages?
“Do they see the current page they just clicked on above the fold?” “Is it large enough?” It’s one thing to send people to “coloring pages” page where they see very small thumbnails, and another thing is to show what they just clicked on and say:
“Here it is. Here is some descriptive text, here are some related pictures. Here is some commons from users, the readings, and all sort of things.”
It’s really about immersing the user into a very image-centric experience. These are the kinds of landing pages, these are the kind of images we’ve observed that our users tend to like.
Again, our intent is to try and match up the intent with the end user.
Image Search Tips
- Focus on the user
- High-quality images are always good, if you’re taking photographs to put in your site, go and buy a digital SLR, learn how to use it, get a good lens… take really nice high-quality pictures.
You don’t necessarily have to take up the whole screen with the photograph or the image, but just large enough is usually what the users like.
- Above the fold,
- and plenty of descriptive text, and fundamentally the impetus to all of image search is a search query and the extent to which you have a lot of descriptive text that’s on topic and talks about what’s in the image.
Maybe you want to expose EXIF data, maybe where the image was taken, maybe has a nice title across the top.
All those sort of things are really good clues for us to figure out when an image is relevant and not, but more importantly it’s useful for the end user. They can read the description, read the caption, and learn a lot more about the image.
Resources
The last slide… I talk about resources:
- We have the Webmaster Help Centers, where you can go and read a lot more about Image Search, and we also have forums, where you can post questions about Image Search.
We really encourage webmasters to come to these forums, and post all of their questions or concerns. We monitor this very closely, and we pick up these concerns, and we will take a look at them.
- There’s also a web search help and forum for end users, so if you are an end user of Image Search and you have questions, you can leave them there.
- The other thing is to monitor the Google Official Blog because that’s where we typically put our announcements of new features, and changes, and news… specifically around Image Search.
Pages Load Times and Analytics Data
That was the end of my presentation which I gave at SMX. In a nutshell.
At the end of the presentation we had Q&A and I wanted to pick up with some of the questions that came up during that time:
Q: The first question was: “Hey, you guys mentioned large images are a good best practice, but I have a concern with that because I don’t want load really the large version of the image that I have because it takes the page a whole lot time to load up. So how do I balance…. how do I manage the trade-off there?
A: I think the answer to this question is just to show an image that’s large enough. Typically 2/3 of the screen, maybe one sort of ruler thumb, but the point here being that users tend to like to be able to see the image, as opposed of being a very small thumbnail.
A good way to get around this, to allow the users to see the larger version if they wanted to, is to turn your image into a link to either the larger image itself or another HTML page that includes the larger version of the image.
Ultimately no-one wants to see an image that’s larger than the browser size.
Q: Another question that came up was about Analytics, and somebody was saying: “Hey, can I get Analytics information, traffic that’s coming from Image Search?
A: The answer is: “Absolutely“. In the referral string that we send across, that the browser sends across, both the query that ranks the image, plus the image itself, is sent in that stream.
One slight difference with Image Search of course is we are not necessarily sending people to your pages as much as we’re sending people to your image on the page, and there could of course be more than one image.
Bypassing upon the referral string you should be able to get all the Analytics you need to know to what queries sent the user there, and what image sent the user there.
Google video originally recorded by Peter Linsley for the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel on March 2nd, 2009 as “Google Image Search“.
Photo credits:
Mission – adistock
Goals – Tatiana53
Search Behavior – Lars Christensen
Identifying the Duplicates – Elena Elisseeva
Best Practices – Sergey Galushko
Image Search Tips – Christophe Testi
Resources – Ramon Grosso Dolarea
Pages Load Times and Analytics Data – Michael Osterrieder
Tips on How to Get Your Images Indexed – Vasyl Yakobchuk