Disqus - Latest Comments for Paul Bradshaw

Re: We Never Sold Journalism

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:51:39 -0000

Even though I often say the same thing, I think the picture is slightly more complicated for some newspapers (particularly nationals) that get the majority of their revenue from cover price.

That said, it's been the growth of advertising that has both made and broken publishing - lying behind the incredible growth in publishing in recent decades, the merger and acquisition behaviour that put many publications into the hands of shareholders who saw gold in them there 20-30% margins, who then squeezed the operations for more profit, and didn't prepare for a shift like this which has seen them lose the control of the supply chain that they had in print. For all the talk of a 'dotcom bubble', we're just emerging from a 'print advertising bubble' of over-borrowing on inflated valuations.

Re: Does Google mean I’m famous?

Paul Bradshaw — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:27:56 -0000

I always find it interesting that paulbradshaw.co.uk comes top for searches on my name despite onlinejournalismblog.com being linked with my name far, far more often. Demonstrates just how important the URL is, even compared to links. But clearly content matters too - paulbradshaw.com is nowhere on those results as it hasn't been updated in years.

Re: 25 Ways to Build Your Community

Paul Bradshaw — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:11:15 -0000

A point on no.17 - Martin Belam's research suggests that those 'share this' widgets have no effect on bookmarking (http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/09/socia...) - it would make sense. I bookmark, but I only ever use those widgets when on my mobile. On a PC I use the bookmarklet isntead.

Re: Local media need dual business models, not dueling models

Paul Bradshaw — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:24:00 -0000

I agree with your general point about exploring a dual business model. The idea about PageRank is an interesting one, but will probably not work because Google will see it as linkspamming and will penalise the site's PageRank as a result (as it did with the Economist, Irish Independent and others when they failed to include a nofollow tag on text ads). I've turned down text based ads on my blog for that same reason. Sadly, in a nutshell you can't sell PageRank.