Adfero: Pride or publicity (well, traffic)?

Traditionally most news agencies, including Adfero, take pride in the speed at which they can break an article. The goal of improving speed and accuracy has caused many Adfero journalists sleepless nights, long hours and missed lunches. The sandwich-boarded youth of Victorian Britain shouting “read all about it” and the foundations of modern journalism are all based around the principle that the first to publish gets the readers.

So what has happened online? Has publishing news online using aggregator services such as Google and Yahoo allowed news agencies to publish faster? Well the obvious answer is yes, but will this continue or will the news agencies reach a Google News “stand off” and delay publishing their articles online?

Perhaps I should explain a little more. Over the past few years we have been tracking/working with and utilising Google News for a whole host of Adfero products. I recently attended a conference and got together with some other news agencies to specifically talk about Google News and how it affects the flow of traffic to news websites. Whilst everyone loved the fact that you could get upwards of 60,000 unique visits from one story, the issue comes when trying to predict the type of story and most importantly when to publish an article to ensure maximum Google News traffic from that article.

At a basic level Google News works like Google but for individual articles, not entire websites. The news sites accepted by Google are trawled much more frequently and by submitting dynamic site maps to Google News, this can allow Google News to monitor when an article is updated on a site. The position an article appears in the news ranking is based on relevancy (of course) but also publication time with the most recently published articles being top. This means that the first company to publish an article about a breaking topic will soon be pushed off the top spot by other agencies writing similar articles on the same issue more recently published. Generally it will take a few hours for the public to hear about the issue and start searching for it on the news section. This means some “traffic hungry” editors “sit on” breaking articles, watching Google Trends and Microsoft Xrank to find the exact time when the public is searching for the topic, while other agencies have already posted articles, so that their article will be at the top of Google News for the longest period when most people are searching for it.

Are these “traffic hungry” agencies swallowing their pride in place of money? Or simply providing the best results for their advertisers? What would happen if all agencies started doing this? Would we reach a Google News stand off with everyone being afraid to be the first to publish online and therefore slowing news delivery?

At Adfero we are still striving for speed and accuracy. As proven yesterday when I spoke to a very stressed Matt West (Adfero consumer news editor) who was desperately trying to hold of one of our political correspondents in Westminster to leave the G8 select committee and get over to the Michael Martin resignation to make sure we had all the information first and were among the first to publish the article.

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