In the fast-paced world of smartphones, a fierce rivalry has shaped the industry for over a decade. On one side, Apple, the epitome of…
24.com & Yahoo!
I wandered over to Yahoo! for the first time in a long time and was struck by the similarity of the site with our…
Online media is the new black
I’ve been at Mail & Guardian for a long time now, five years and counting, flying the online flag. Am blogging from our 2007…
Decline of the homepage
Website consumption patterns are changing. Remember when the main way to surf a website was via its homepage? Well, that was the old days. The rise of super-fast, super-efficient search engines mean that users are increasingly accessing websites via deep links that bypass their homepages directly to a website’s articles. It’s essentially a backdoor into your website. Search engines aren’t the only ones to blame. Bloggers generally link directly to the articles they are writing about, ignoring homepages. RSS feeds, which allow users to subscribe directly to article feeds, are also responsible for the decline of the homepage. So what does this mean? Paradoxically it is both a problem and an opportunity for publishers.
Where are the great online magazines? Where?
Magazines have not enjoyed the same high profile, runaway success of their newspaper counterparts in the online world. Magazines aren’t big online. Websites of print magazines have had a rather low profile in more than 10 years of internet in this country. Compare this to the high-profile online news brands that rake in big numbers and you will see what I mean. It’s no secret that the news brands dominate the top half of the local online readership rankings, whereas very few magazines even make the top 50 sites….
