> From:          Vin Crosbie 
> With the easy of hyperlinking, will electronic publications be able to insist that the 
> webpages of ad copy reside on the publication's website, when advertisers want to own 
> and control the copy from their own linkable websites? In a medium that allows 
> advertisers to deliver ad copy directly to consumers, circumventing the publication 
> except to use it to create awareness of the advertisers' website, is the value of the 
> publication lessened?

All depends how you do it.  Our Web site just went up (nearly killing 
me and the others working on it, but that's another story), and most 
of our ads reside on our site.  Why?  We've created a system that can 
give them the kind of demographic info and reader interaction they 
can't get on their own sites.

Our site requires registration (we've set up a bypass for people who 
already subscribe to the pub; we're controlled-circ, so we already 
have their data ).  By itself, this means we can give 
advertisers detailed demographic info on what sort of people, and how 
many, are hitting their pages.  But we've also created a system in 
which users can click on a "Learn More" button to bring up a form 
addressed to the advertiser in which they can ask detailed questions 
about the products (a big deal in the networking biz) -- when they 
submit the form, the advertiser gets sent the question and contact 
info for the user.

As for hyperlinks out of editorial, we're relying heavily on them; 
it's what makes us different from our competitors at this point.  But 
we're not simply linking to IBM's home page in a story about IBM -- 
that was cute a year ago but is now more annoying than anything else. 
Instead, a major part of my job is to find *relevant* hyperlinks.  So 
if the story is about IBM's asynchronous transfer mode strategy, I 
want to find the link to IBM's white paper on the subject; to the 
Gartner Group analysis of their strategy, etc., etc.  Our goal is to 
take full advantage of this new medium and essentially create 
mini-reference works out of all the stories we hyperlink.  I'm not 
afraid of readers leaving the site and not coming back; hopefully, by 
creating a page of all these links, I've saved the reader a fair 
piece of work (even with InfoSeek, Lycos, etc., it can still be 
relatively time consuming to find a specific piece of information on 
the Web), and they'll return to follow our other links.

And, yes, I do have to be careful about whether I'm sending a reader 
to a piece of marketing hype rather than to a straightforward 
technical discussion.  Part of that's editorial judgment; part of 
that is letting the reader know beforehand that he's about to jump to 
a document put out by the vendor, rather than to a story from our 
archive.  For our existing readers, at least, I do this by creating a 
page consisting of the story lede and then a listing of the links, 
with short explanations after them (we also have the full stories up, 
with embedded hyperlinks, but I haven't yet spent the time to figure 
out how to embed the related caveats).


Adam Gaffin
Online Editor, Network World, Framingham, Mass
agaffin@nww.com / (508) 820-7433

------------------------------

End of online-news-digest V1 #349
*********************************


From owner-online-news-digest@marketplace.com Wed Sep 27 15:25:39 1995
Received: from marketplace.com (majordom@marketplace.com [199.45.128.10]) by cnj.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id PAA01891 ; for ; Wed, 27 Sep 1995 15:25:27 -0400