In the wake of the Apple iPhone 4th generation prototype leak and Gizmodo getting their hands on it, I came across the VP / Legal Guru for Gawker Media (parent company of Gizmodo), Gaby Darbyshire.

And I happened to run across this from an interview she did in 2008 about the future of media online:

Print won’t ever die completely, but it will shrink: there will have to be consolidation in news providers simply because print papers can’t afford to maintain large numbers of staff reporters to compete in chasing “commodity news.” Reporting of base facts will be produced centrally by agencies like Reuters, AP, etc., the brand papers will distinguish themselves by the insight they provide in analyzing the facts, and producing in the in-depth editorial pieces specific to their brand. And the best of the writers will be measured and become stars, and the workaday hacks who are interchangeable will be reduced to working anonymously for the big agencies, without the bylines and the perks. That’s why journalists are so afraid of change.

First, I agree with this completely.

Second, it underscores the importance of content, and it delineates this idea of commodity content vs. insightful content.

Commodity content struggles to drive revenues and profit (especially from a subscription standpoint) because you can find it anywhere for free.  There’s no incentive to pay for something so widely available.

Insightful content generates subscriptions because it’s not nearly as easy to find.  And if you can deliver insightful pieces on a regular  basis, that’s where you’re going to find the sweet spot.  That’s something people will pay for.

It has been a while since there the requisite “SEO is dead” conversation.  But I’ve been thinking a lot about the longevity of search.  Let’s face it, my career revolves around the product offerings from roughly three main companies (and one of those companies controls a 70%+ market-share).

While Google is nowhere near going out of business, the search industry is seeing a significant challenger in social media.  Numerous start-ups have sought to capture the social web.  A few have already seen significant traction, a la Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter.  Social sites are now starting to drive more referral traffic to some major sites than traditional search engines.  Crowdsourced traffic is surpassing algorithmic traffic (in a few select cases).

So what does this mean for search marketers, particularly SEOs?  First, I think it means that the search engines will have more external factors to consider when ranking pages.  Many of the SEO bloggers who acknowledge this point refer to it as the catalyst for the demise of SEO.  But we have seen this before.  In the past few years, external linking has increase in importance to drive traffic and rankings.  But SEOs have been able to adapt and find ways to gain quality links.

Still, I feel as though keyword targeting will eventually become less and less important, as SEOs will have less and less control over targeting specific keywords.  Search marketers will need to take a more holistic view of their campaigns, as they realize that they have less and less direct control over the factors that are used to rank sites in the search engines.

With this, content and architecture will increase in importance.  Yes, these factors are important already, as SEOs know.  But big companies still do not embrace best practices, opting instead for Flashy, easy to manage sites that present significant issues for search.

As external ranking factors become more important, specifically pertaining to social media, companies will need to make it as easy as possible for lay users to share sites with friends, family, coworkers, etc.  Strategically, search marketers who can harness social media to direct traffic to landing pages where users can perform a desired action will find success.

While marketers grasp with the decreasing ability to control keyword rankings, content will become more important.  Latent semantic indexing (LSI) will gain prominence as search engines try to develop more information about the domain and what the domain’s content is about on an aggregate level.

Social media will change search, but it will not not be the demise of search.  The fundamentals will still be to create great content  with site architecture that allows content to be easy to find, easy to share.