virtualeconomics

Wikileaks tips over one million Facebook "likes"

Some time in the last hour Wikileaks passed the one million Facebook "likes" mark. In the world of investigative journalism, Wikileaks is now ahead of the New York Times and every other major newspaper in terms of Facebook popularity, and behind only The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, both with "likes" in the 1.5m to 2m range.  

Is it a big deal? It's a significant milestone, and one that other news organisations have so far failed to reach so nods to a shift in the journalism landscape. And if you see the Wikileaks drama in terms of power vs The Internet, which is a popular enough narrative, then of course it matters that Wikileaks can raise this level of popular support. Power vs the Internet only makes sense if the Internet is really on board and this is one of the key markers that it is (or, one should say, we are). As John Naughton wrote in the Guardian (HT Emily Bell)

"The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet."

It's perfectly clear where they stand. Let's make sure they know where we do. 

Latest on Posettigate

Thinking about Posettigate again, the interesting thing now that the case has been effectively dropped is what it's possible to believe about Chris Mitchell's motives in bringing it in the first place.

(1) He genuinely believed that a newspaper editor suing a journalist for defamation was a sensible and positive way to protect his professional reputation, and that the consequences for his reputation would be positive.

(2) He knew what everyone else immediately spotted - that the consequences for his professional reputation would be disastrous (though perhaps not as globally disastrous as it has proved) - but for some other reason he went ahead and did it anyway.

No-one else believed (1), and everyone says the guy is neither mad nor stupid. What might reason (2) be?

Update on the AOP's engagement survey

On Wednesday the AOP released the results of a survey on "the relationship between consumer engagement with website content and how it impacts on their reaction to advertising on different website types: original content sites, portals and social networks."It found that approximately twice as many respondents to the survey trusted the advertising on content sites as on social media

It raised some questions for me which I posted here. If trust and engagement are such key indicators of the value of online advertising, how can content sites maintain CPMs that are ten times greater than those achieved by social media when their own research is able to show only twice as much trust for their advertising?

New AOP research shows content sites overpriced versus social networks

New research commissioned by the AOP, and reported by Journalism.co.uk earlier today, shows that 

"...engagement and advertising responsiveness is strongest on original content sites compared to other site genres. Respondents are almost twice as likely to trust advertising and brands on content sites vs. social media sites".

Journalism.co.uk also highlights some detail from the report: "respondents were significantly more likely to trust advertising on content sites than social media sites, with 59 per cent trusting content sites compared to 34 per cent for social networks." 

Which is hardly good news for those original content sites which (at one remove) funded the report, given that as it stands they achieve CPMs almost ten times those achieved by social networks for what they appear to have just proven is only twice the value.

Update: newspaper of record poll

Last week loyal readers will recall I posted up a poll to see whether the Times was still considered the UK's newspaper of record, now its website sits inaccessibly behind a paywall.

Since then Roy Greenslade very kindly picked up my question and linked back to the poll, which brought a lot more votes in over the past few days. Also the Telegraph is now thought to be implementing its own paywall next year which complicates the picture.

The results are currently about 3/1 in favour of the Times not being our newspaper of record, but they're still based on a relatively small sample (150 people) and there's a significant pro-Guardian weighting to the sample, almost certainly because so many participants came from the link there. So if you haven't already do click on the link to vote, and if you can get the poll in front of Telegraph, Times, Indy or Mail readers too that would certainly make the sample more robust. Thanks. 

Why a paywall might make sense for the Telegraph this time

Earlier today the FT broke the news that the Telegraph is (probably) joining the Times, FT and indeed News of the World by putting up a paywall next year. A spokesman told Reuters by email that "absolutely no decisions have been made on the introduction of a paid-content model," but a number of Telegraph execs appear to have confirmed to the FT that there would be a paywall in place before the end of 2011. 

Paywall experiments over the past ten years have been a disaster for online newspapers. However, the Telegraph's move could perhaps be justified by two fundamental changes to this market - an increased scarcity of professional journalism online, and the effective collapse of the Telegraph's current commercial model, occasioned primarily by Facebook. 

The trouble with the end of privacy, geopolitics edition

Just as Facebook and ubiquitous CCTV spell the end of privacy for the individual, the latest Wikileaks revelations look like the end of privacy for governments. Unfortunately, social proof means that enforced openness is unlikely to be any healthier for governments than it has been for individuals.

While some individual privacy has been given up voluntarily (we publish our thoughts, our locations, our moods), some has been given up without much in the way of consent (in the UK we are watched by 4.2 million CCTV cameras, one for every 14 people). And while some government privacy has been given up ostensibly voluntarily, if grudgingly, (freedom of information legislation) some has simply been taken away (Wikileaks keeps publishing the United States' secret documents). Technology makes privacy hard to maintain and if three people can only keep a secret so long as two of them are dead, what chance had three million? One of the strangest aspects of this leak - which governments terrified of embarrassment continue to claim with almost charmingly blatant ulteriority puts lives and national security at risk - is that these "secrets" were already known to three million US government officials, "a diplomatic outreach", says Simon Jenkins, "that makes the British Empire look miniscule".

Freedom of tweets - hopefully a solved problem

The editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, says he will sue journalism commentator Julie Possetti for defamation after she tweeted the allegedly false claim that for political reasons he stifled debate on man-made climate change at the paper. The details of the story are at Crikey.

Jay Rosen asks "what newspaper has ever revealed itself to be such a threat to freedom of the press as The Australian?", and j-blogger Jonathon Oakes calls it "a ridiculous vanity suit", pointing to a recent pattern of The Australian squabbling with the internet. 

Happily, freedom of tweets is pretty much a solved problem, as we saw with the #iamspartacus response to the Twitter Joke Trial. And while I can't quite claim to be going first, since blogger Syd Walker has already reproduced the allegedly defamatory tweet on her blog, I'll happily take the honour of going second.

Is the Times still the UK's newspaper of record?

 Since the Times swept its website behind a paywall, its content is almost unique amongst UK newspapers in being inaccessible to the general public - only a relative handful of print and online subscribers can now read what appears therein. Clay Shirky says it is now a newsletter. Emily Bell says that it "conceivably has outlived its editorial purpose as a lever of influence." And yet we continue to list it as the UK's primary newspaper of record. I do not believe it should be any longer so regarded, and have knocked up a poll to assess the matter - click here if you'd like to vote.

Probably looks, then

 
From today's Mailonline - "would you rather be known for your brains or your looks?"...with the options "yes" or "no". Better still, at time of writing 69% of people had opted for "yes", 31% for "no". (Via NadiaKnows)