Publishers Turn to the Crowd

digiday reporting:
It’s not everyday that a publisher is sold for $175 million. That’s why Turner’s purchase of Bleacher Report raised some eyebrows.
The lesson of Bleacher Report’s success, and that of Huffington Post’s as well, is it pays for publishers to take a page out of the platform playbook and get other people to create content. Bleacher Report, which relies on some 6,000 mostly unpaid writers to crank out about 1,000 articles a day, has raised $40 million since 2007 and brings in about $30 million a year in revenue. If Facebook and Twitter have taught publishers anything, it’s that it’s nice to have hundreds of millions of people cranking out content without calling out sick or asking for a raise.
Two old-school publications, Golf Digest and The Washington Post, are trying their hands at turning to their audience as content creators. They both bet they can augment their solid brands with low-cost (and, hopefully, high-quality) content created by the masses — for free.
Golf Digest has created Golf Digest Course Finder, a crowdsourced site that gives user recommendations — from text to photos — blended with editorial from the magazine about golf courses around the nation. Tapping into the collective reader, which ComScore puts at 505,00 uniques in July, is a new phenomenon for the outlet. According to the publication’s brand editor Bob Carney, in the past, the hurdle to comment was too high as the site’s primary function was to generate subscriptions, not engage its readers.
“If you get in a relationship with someone, sooner or later, they’ll like what you’re selling, and chances are you’ll be in contact with them,” Carney said. “If you put up a wall first, you won’t get interaction, and in the long run, they may not subscribe anyhow. So it’s been an education for us. It’s much more open, and we’re starting to appreciate the content people are getting us.”
The Washington Post is also taking a crowdsourcing mentality with its new aptly named site, “Crowd Sourced.” There are two verticals, a social technology page which looks at the influence of social media in society and an American competition page focused on business innovation. How it works: Post reporters pose a question to its readers on the site, and the readers answer and vote on the best responses.
While other traditional publishers have tapped its readers for help — remember the Sarah Palin email dumps – relying on readers to provide content that helps inform and shape the news is a novel idea.
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