Category: Gigaom

Historically, new-media ventures haven’t triggered the same kind of frenzied stampede of venture investors as other online businesses, in part because their profitability and scalability remains very much in question, but the last six months have seen an almost unheard-of amount of money pouring into media companies. It’s not like anyone is buying them for $22 billion, the way Facebook did with WhatsApp, but there’s no question that some very large — and potentially risky — bets are being placed.

The latest deals were announced on Wednesday by Mashable, which said it has closed a new round of financing worth $17 million — bringing the total amount it has raised so far to $31 million — and Business Insider, which has pulled in $25 million from a group of venture investors, putting its total investment backing to date at almost $60 million. Both companies say their readership and revenues are growing at a rapid pace.

Traditional media buys in

One interesting thing about these announcements is that the lead investor is both cases is a traditional media entity: at Mashable, it’s the venture-capital arm of Time Warner, the media conglomerate which spun off its magazine unit last year, and in Business Insider’s case it’s German media giant Axel Springer, which owns a number of leading German newspapers and magazines. Existing media also play a role in some of the other major deals that have closed in the past six months or so, which include:

Vice: Raised $250 million from A&E Networks for 10 percent of the company in August of last year, plus another $250 million from the VC fund Technology Crossover Ventures, both of which valued the company at about $2.5 billion. Vice is expanding its foreign reporting as well as its video operation, and is also one of the leaders in the “native advertising” market, with a custom-content unit that creates branded content for advertisers.

BuzzFeed: Closed a $50-million round led by Andreessen Horowitz in August last year, theoretically valuing the company at close to $1 billion. BuzzFeed now has almost 1,000 employees — including its L.A.-based video unit, known as BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, run by Ze Frank — and plans to invest in opening more foreign bureaus. Like Vice, it also has a large unit creating custom-content for advertising partners.

New players on the field

Vox: Closed a round of $46 million from a venture-capital group led by a fund called General Atlantic, which values the company at close to $400 million. Until it invested in Vox, General Atlantic — which invests on behalf of Chuck Feeney, the reclusive co-founder of the Duty Free Shopping empire — had never made a media investment. At the time, a partner in the fund said: ”We think we are at an inflection point. For the next five years, you are going to have the next generation of media platforms emerge. There are parallels to cable in the ’80s. There is going to be a huge amount of value creation.”

Business Insider: Just closed a $25 million funding round led by Axel Springer, which owns popular daily newspapers such as Bild and Die Welt. Business Insider, which has about 200 staff, says it plans to hire about 100 more and expand into video, and a source also told the Wall Street Journal that the company was profitable last year. Business Insider says it has the highest traffic of any business site in the U.S., with 35 million visitors per month.

Mashable: Just closed a $17 million financing round led by Time Warner Investments. Mashable says it will hire 100 new employees and is expanding into video. The Time Warner connection is particularly interesting because there was a widespread rumor in 2012 that Mashable was going to be acquired by CNN. Whether this investment is a stalking horse for a full acquisition remains to be seen. Mashable told the Wall Street Journal that its revenue in the past year grew by 45 percent.

Gawker: Although it isn’t an equity financing — since founder Nick Denton clearly wants to retain control — Gawker is in the process of raising $15 million in debt financing to pay for its planned expansion, including further investment in its Kinja discussion platform and mobile, as well as a new office planned for the Flatiron district in New York. Unlike most of its competitors, Gawker makes a substantial amount of revenue from affiliate links, which Denton says pulled in $10 million last year.

But can they scale?

As I tried to point out in a post late last year after the BuzzFeed and Vice financings were announced, there is still a rather large unanswered question about this influx of venture-capital funding into new media: Can these ventures scale to a point where they can justify all that investment? Both Vox and Business Insider make a point of talking about their content-management systems (which Vox calls Chorus and BI calls Viking) but having a CMS doesn’t make you a tech company.

When it comes to showing that they can scale to a size that would make them a competitor for existing major-media brands, only Vice has arguably achieved that, with a business that covers news on a global level, produces entertainment and drives a lot of advertising revenue, all based on a valuable millennial audience.

At the same time, however, advertising is also part of the problem. For the most part, these companies are still fundamentally identical to old-media companies in some crucial ways: for example, while they may have lower distribution costs because they are online, they still have to employ the most inefficient value-creation engines ever invented — namely, human beings. And their businesses are still driven primarily by advertising, which is going through almost as much upheaval and disruption as the media business itself. And the stakes have just gotten exponentially higher.

If you mention social-media platforms like Twitter or Facebook in the context of political uprisings in places like Turkey or Ukraine or Egypt — or even the Occupy movement in the United States — the person you’re speaking to will likely either a) agree that they can be very powerful tools, or b) argue that they are just sound and fury, signifying nothing, and have had no real effect on the outcome of these movements.

But the truth is actually much more complex, according to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has spent her career studying the effects of such social platforms on political behavior.

In a paper published in the Journal of International Affairs, Tufekci looks at this question in detail, based on her observations of and interviews with protesters in her native Turkey and elsewhere. And her conclusion is that while social platforms can have a positive impact on the ability of dissidents and alternative political movements to organize and communicate — as she has described in previous articles looking at social tools and the political “tipping points” they helped to trigger — they can also have far-reaching negative effects.

Crucial information source

The benefits are obvious when looking at uprisings like the “Arab Spring” in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, or the political events leading up to the more recent Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Tufecki says. In the latter case, social media became a crucial source of news, in part because the traditional media in Turkey weren’t covering the demonstrations for fear of upsetting the government. And in Egypt, mobile phones and blogs became the tools of a protest movement that ultimately helped unseat the government:

”The advent of blogging and the rise of cheap cell phones with video cameras also created major changes as activists started acquiring, publishing, and circulating video evidence of the many grievances that made every day life difficult for citizens.”

By giving dissidents the ability to share this kind of information quickly, social tools such as Facebook (which was much more widely used in Egypt than Twitter) made it easy to connect groups of protesters and plan events. That kind of organizational feature can have a powerful psychological impact, Tufekci has said, because once people know that others share their beliefs or feelings about a movement it becomes easier to take collective action, something she calls an “information cascade.”

The landscape has changed since the Arab Spring, however. As the University of North Carolina professor and Harvard Berkman Center fellow notes in her paper, governments have more or less caught up to political protesters when it comes to social media. Twitter and Facebook aren’t just for nerds any more — they have become mainstream, and that means governments have figured out not only how to block them (or how to force Twitter and Facebook to remove content) but how to use them for their own social purposes.

”Many governments have developed methods to respond to this new information environment, which allows for fewer gatekeeper controls, by aggressively countering these new movements, often with a combination of traditional repression as well as novel methods aimed at addressing online media.”

Double-edged sword

But that’s not the only problem: As Tufekci discussed previously in a post on Medium, the use of ubiquitous social tools by protest movements and dissidents is a double-edged sword: the fact that these tools make it so much easier to find like-minded individuals and organize them is a positive thing, because it allows a movement to grow and become effective much more rapidly, and to adapt to a changing environment.

At the same time, however, those same features may prevent protest groups from becoming as cohesive and robust as they need to be in order to survive over a long period of time. Old-fashioned political movements took years — or even decades — to develop and build an organization, and while that often meant that political change also took a lot longer to occur, the movements themselves were arguably more powerful.

”Digital technologies certainly add to protester capabilities in many dimensions, but this comes with an unexpected trade-off: Digital infrastructure helps undertake functions that would have otherwise required more formal and long-term organizing which, almost as a side effect, help build organizational capacity to respond to long-term movement requirements.”

In a sense, it’s probably fitting that social media would be a double-edged sword when it comes to political movements, since the internet as a whole has proven to be the same kind of thing: even as it facilitates piracy and arguably incites hatred and violence, it also promotes creativity and helps people in need find others who share their problems. We often want things to be either good or evil, but they rarely are. You can read Tufekci’s paper here.

Back when the iPad was just a rumor, there was much excitement within the newspaper and magazine industries at the idea that this new device might allow them to create a kind of “iTunes for news,” in which readers would pay a monthly fee for an all-you-can-read subscription to their content. Nothing like that happened, of course, but there are still those trying to make it work — except now they call it a “Spotify for magazines” or a “Netflix for newspapers.”

The latest comes from Magzter, a company that is offering an all-you-can-read subscription to a universe of 2,000 magazines for $9.99 a month. Most of the titles the service offers tend to come from international sources (the company started in India but is now based in New York), but it has magazines from a number of U.S. publishers, including Maxim and Men’s Fitness.

Magzter’s subscription feature is similar to one already offered by NextIssue, which gives readers access to more than 140 top magazines for $9.99 a month, and some other services like Blendle, which is a Dutch company trying to provide an iTunes-style service for newspaper content. NextIssue (which is backed by major publishers like Hearst, Conde Nast and News Corp.) recently raised $50 million in financing from a group of VCs including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, so there are clearly some who believe in the model.

The discovery problem

I don’t share this enthusiasm, however, for a number of reasons: One of them is the user interface that is offered by most of these services — which tends to employ a somewhat tired “bookshelf” or “newsstand” metaphor that can be difficult to navigate. Meanwhile, the magazines themselves tend to be bloated PDF-style formats that are effectively giant photographs of existing print pages. They take forever to download they are cumbersome to navigate through.

Another reason why I’m skeptical is that the content doesn’t fit with a Spotify or Netflix model in several crucial ways. Music services, and even those devoted to TV shows or movies, benefit because people will often listen to the same song or watch the same movie multiple times — and are willing to pay for the privilege. I don’t know anyone who wants to read the same news story or magazine piece over and over, let alone pay someone for it.

But the biggest problem with such services is the problem of discovery: One of the main reasons why people like to use Spotify and Rdio and Netflix and similar services is that they make it easy to find new content, whether it’s by sharing playlists or by using algorithm-driven recommendation engines.

Netflix, in fact, has what is probably one of the most powerful recommendation algorithms on the web today, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing it and fine-tuning it so that it works for people. There is nothing similar in most of the NextIssue-style services, and so they essentially force you back into old-fashioned behavior — namely, browsing through magazines, flipping virtual pages.

The atomic unit of content

Magzter claims that it has solved the discovery problem, and that its recommendation engine will highlight content for users based on the titles they decide to click on and even what content they read within those magazines. But this kind of recommendation is incredibly difficult to do, especially across 2,000 or more sources. Has Magzter really cracked this problem? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

The bottom line is that these kinds of services may work for finding content to read in magazines that you know you like, but they aren’t very good for discovering new content in magazines you don’t already know about. For that, you have to use services like Prismatic or Nuzzel or Digg Deeper, which take in your social networks and then recommend articles based on what’s being shared and read by those you follow.

Another big flaw with the “Netflix for magazines” model is that it tends to see the magazine itself as the most important thing, despite the fact that in the current media environment — a world in which social sharing is rapidly becoming the most important tool for discovery — the article has arguably become the atomic unit of content. It’s as though iTunes or Spotify forced you to navigate by album instead of by song.

Of course, it’s possible that I’m completely wrong about NextIssue and Magzter. The latter says it has more than 20 million users, up from about 10 million a year ago, so perhaps there is a larger market for such services than I thought. But I still think this newsstand model is missing the point about how our consumption behavior is changing, and that will ultimately spell doom unless the model changes.

In the aftermath of the brutal killings of a dozen staff members at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo last week, rallies in support of free speech sprang up across Europe and elsewhere, most featuring the slogan “Je Suis Charlie.” Among those who spoke out against the terrorists and championed the cause of free speech was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — but as some users have pointed out, his company’s policies often don’t live up to that commitment.

The Facebook co-founder posted a long statement on Friday, in which he talked about being the subject of a death threat from an Islamic extremist in Pakistan several years ago, because the social network wouldn’t ban material that depicted the prophet Mohammed in a way that offended him. But Zuckerberg said he didn’t back down, and added that he remains committed to free speech despite such threats:

“We stood up for this because different voices — even if they’re sometimes offensive — can make the world a better and more interesting place. Facebook has always been a place where people across the world share their views and ideas. We follow the laws in each country, but we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share.”

Content routinely removed

It didn’t take long before someone questioned the Facebook CEO on his commitment, however: when Zuckerberg posted a follow-up on Sunday night about the marches in Paris and elsewhere and the value of being connected, a reader noted that Facebook had removed a comment from a user in Pakistan that questioned the limits of free expression when it is used for racism or other offensive ideologies.

To his credit, the Facebook CEO said that the comment was likely removed in error, and he asked a Facebook staffer — vice-president Justin Osofsky — to look into it. Several hours later, as The Guardian noted in a post, Osofsky said that Facebook had made a mistake in removing the comment and that it would be reinstated:

While that particular comment may have been removed in error, however, Facebook has become notorious for removing content of all kinds — in many cases without ever saying why it was removed. The social network seems to have a thing about breastfeeding photos, for example, which are still routinely removed, as well as content related to a number of dissident groups or anything that trips its standard filter for violence and other offensive content.

As many Facebook supporters like to point out, the company is a private entity and therefore isn’t bound by the First Amendment (which only applies to restrictions on free speech by the government), and it also has a duty to abide by the laws of the countries in which it operates, as Zuckerberg noted in his post. But the social network goes above and beyond those duties routinely, despite its founder’s rhetoric about the value of free speech.

Playing nice with governments

As Eliot “Brown Moses” Higgins has pointed out, Facebook has removed posts and even entire pages created by dissident groups in Syria, many of which were designed to record the outcome of attacks by the army on innocent civilians — including some using chemical weapons. By removing those posts and pages, Higgins notes, Facebook has actually destroyed an important part of the historical record of criminal behavior by the Syrian government.

Facebook has also been accused of removing content related to dissident activity in China. And in a more recent example, the network removed content relating to a rally in Russia in support of opponents to President Vladimir Putin, after pressure from the Russian government. While Facebook is open to such pressure just as Google and other companies are, it’s interesting to look at the difference between how a company like Twitter responds to similar requests, compared with how Facebook does.

When Twitter was asked by the Pakistani government to remove access to posts that allegedly broke the law, it did so, but then reinstated them later after the government failed to convince the company that removing them was justified. And while Twitter has resisted attempts by the Turkish government to get information on dissidents who use the network or to block content the authorities don’t like, Turkey has boasted about its friendly relationship with Facebook.

Facebook can be a powerful force for free speech, as we saw during the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere, and I have no doubt that Zuckerberg is personally sincere when he champions the cause of free speech and not submitting to violent extremists. But the company is going to have to do a better job of following through on those principles in places like Turkey and Pakistan and Russia, if it wants to be believed.

The week or so between Christmas and New Year’s is always a slow period, even on social networks like Twitter, but one article made my feed light up despite the slowdown, at least for the media folks that I follow: namely, a piece in the New Yorker about Emerson Spartz, a 27-year-old entrepreneur the magazine refers to as the “King of Clickbait.” For most of my Twitter stream, the reaction to this piece was a combination of horror, disgust and resignation.

As depressing as the profile might be for those interested in “serious” journalism, however, I think it should be mandatory reading in all newsrooms, both traditional and digital. You may not like his work, but Spartz is learning everything he can about how content works online — which is more than I can say for plenty of other outlets. And the less we all know about that subject, the more likely it is that Spartz and his ilk will win.

By now, many media-watchers have grown accustomed to reading about viral content or “clickbait” specialists like Upworthy or BuzzFeed — which founder Jonah Peretti started as a kind of laboratory to test his theories about how and why content gets shared. People are pretty familiar with “attention gap” headlines and other tricks of the trade used by such outlets to drive huge amounts of traffic. But Emerson Spartz and his network of click factories make most of these sites look like the New York Times by comparison.

Spartz started at 12

I confess that I had never heard of Spartz before, nor most of his websites, and I expect I am not alone, even among those who follow the online media industry. His company is simply called Spartz Inc., and the names of the websites he runs are continually changing — and in any case their actual names or brands are almost irrelevant, as the New Yorker piece points out. All that matters is traffic, the vast majority of which (not surprisingly) comes from Facebook:

“The company operates thirty sites, which have no unifying aesthetic. Their home pages, which can be chaotic and full of old links, don’t always feature a Spartz logo; traffic is generated almost entirely through Facebook, so brand recognition is relatively unimportant. Most of the company’s innovations concern not the content itself but how it is promoted and packaged.”

Figuring out how content works online is something Spartz has been doing since he was a child: at the age of 12, he built and ran what became one of the largest and most popular sites devoted to Harry Potter, called MuggleNet. He used the funds from that to start a series of other sites — devoted to online memes, or inspirational content, or amazing facts. The main site in the Spartz stable right now is a site called Dose.com, formerly known as Brainwreck.

Put together, the sites run by Spartz and his team — which consists of about 35 people based in Chicago — are generating more than 60 million pageviews a month, with Dose.com accounting for about half that. By way of comparison, the Gawker Media empire of blogs like Gizmodo, Jezebel and Deadspin generates about 500 million pageviews in an average month and founder Nick Denton estimates the company is worth about $200 million. Emerson Spartz raised $8 million in venture financing last year, the New Yorker piece says, and made several million more in advertising revenue.

The fact that Spartz is building a company by trying to engineer viral content similar to BuzzFeed didn’t come as a surprise to anyone — but many in the traditional media industry did seem shocked by Spartz’s somewhat cavalier attitude towards crediting the sources of the content he uses (something BuzzFeed has also been criticized for). It’s almost as though he doesn’t see the actual source of the content as having any value at all:

“If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch — or, much more efficient, you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people… more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”

Providing either no credit or very little credit (usually by way of a “hat tip” link near the bottom) is arguably unethical, most of the media types in my stream pointed out. But the reality is that many readers don’t care where a piece of content came from, or even if it’s true or not — regardless of whether you think they should. I’m not saying that’s right, I’m simply pointing out that it’s a fact, one that people like Emerson Spartz will always use to their advantage.

The other thing that seemed to horrify many of the media people I follow was the fact that Spartz is not particularly interested in objective measures of quality — the only factor that determines whether his content matters is whether people share it or not. As he puts it in the New Yorker piece: “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality.”

What do readers want?

Journalists and publishers, of course, prefer to define quality in terms of the industry awards that their content wins, or the attention that it gets from a specific audience. But in a very real sense, Spartz is right — you can produce the best content you want, but if it doesn’t reach readers, then on some level it has failed. And how does it reach readers? That’s the part we all need to understand, and currently people like Jonah Peretti and Emerson Spartz are doing a better job of it than many traditional media companies.

Does that mean you have to indulge in clickbait? Not at all. But it does mean that you have to pay attention to how your content is (or isn’t) flowing and moving and being shared online, and that means devoting resources to it. BuzzFeed thinks so highly of data around this question that it recently appointed Dao Nguyen, the head of its data team, as publisher. Mashable doesn’t have a front-page editor — its front page is created algorithmically based on what people are reading and what they are sharing.

Media companies are still used to thinking of themselves as being in control of content, and of having some say in how and when it reaches readers, but this is a fiction. What control they used to have over distribution channels is gone — Facebook and Twitter and SnapChat control it now. Content has been freed from its restraints, like a virus escaping from a test tube. We can figure out how it works and what it wants, or we can twiddle our thumbs while others do.

The news that Citigroup now thinks Instagram could be worth as much as $35 billion likely caused some mouths to fall open last week, and the list of those who found themselves agape probably included co-founder Kevin Systrom and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, although for very different reasons. Whether Citigroup has the actual number right or not is impossible to say — but what is clear is that the Instagram acquisition could be one of the smartest things that Facebook has ever done, and one of the best deals of the past decade.

The reason why Kevin Systrom might be shaking his head a little at the valuation is that such a huge number implies he might have sold the company too soon, something that Silicon Valley founders and their financial backers often worry about after the fact. Of course, it’s difficult to say whether Instagram would ever have gotten there if it had remained an independent company and not had Facebook’s marketing power behind it.

As for Dick Costolo, he’s likely remembering when Twitter tried to buy Instagram — and, according to some reports, had a deal ready to go — only to have Mark Zuckerberg swoop in and yank the company out of his grasp with a much higher offer. Now Instagram not only has more users than Twitter (although Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said recently that he doesn’t care about those figures) but it is now worth more too, at least theoretically.

Photo sharing = ads

Getting to $35 billion requires you to do some mental gymnastics of the kind that Wall Street analysts are pretty accustomed to — you take the 300 million users that Instagram says it has, then estimate what each one could generate in terms of advertising revenue, then look at what proportion of Facebook’s overall revenue that represents, then apply the same multiple that Facebook’s stock has and bingo: eventually you get $35 billion.

So Citigroup analyst Mark May previously argued that Instagram was worth about $19 billion based on this arithmetic, but now he says its almost twice as much. Why? Because he thinks that Instagram’s advertising — with companies like Adidas, GE and Lexus — is going so well that the company could bring in far more revenue than he expected. In fact, he estimates that Instagram’s revenue will be close to $3 billion next year, or about three times what Facebook paid for the company.

Even if you disagree with the $35 billion price tag that Citigroup has come up with, it’s hard not to argue that Mark Zuckerberg got a hell of a deal when he bought Instagram for only $1 billion, even though that sounded like an awful lot of money at the time (of course, that was before Facebook paid an even more mind-boggling $19 billion for WhatsApp). Is it the best deal of the past decade? I think it’s right up there.

Better than YouTube?

It’s not just that Facebook paid $1 billion for something that might now be worth $35 billion, although that is pretty incredible in itself. It’s that by buying Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg was able to tap into something that had the potential to disrupt Facebook in the worst kind of way: a photo-sharing app that not only was growing like a weed, but appealed to younger users — the very same user base that was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Facebook proper.

Facebook’s purchase looks even smarter because of what it did after the acquisition, which is virtually nothing — in other words, it left Instagram alone to function more or less as it had before. I come across younger fans all the time who don’t even know that Facebook owns Instagram, and that’s probably for the best. This is a classic example of Zuckerberg’s willingness to disrupt himself and his business at the drop of a hat, often by spending billions (WhatsApp is another great example).

The only acquisition I can think of that comes close to Facebook’s purchase of Instagram is Google buying YouTube: just as it was in Instagram’s case, most analysts thought the $1.65 billion price tag for the video-sharing site was insane — especially given the potential copyright issues. This year, YouTube is estimated to be worth about $40 billion to Google, which is right in the same ballpark as Instagram, if you believe Citigroup’s numbers. And Google did the same thing with YouTube as Facebook did with Instagram — namely, mostly left it alone. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Every month or so, it seems, a media outlet decides to get rid of their comments. The latest is The Week, which follows Reuters and Re/code, both of whom shut down their comments recently. Every outlet that does this says the same thing: conversation has moved to social media, etc. But as New York Times staffer Mat Yurow argues in a post at Medium, this argument is essentially a cop-out. Comments need to be fixed, not killed.

In its post about shutting down comments, The Week says that “in the age of social media, the smartest and most vibrant reader conversations have moved off of news sites and onto Facebook and Twitter.” But even if this is the case — which I’m not disputing — whose fault is that? Most sites have done virtually nothing to try and make their comment sections a more hospitable place for smart and vibrant discussion, so why wouldn’t it go elsewhere?

The Week piece also says that the site has “a deep respect for the intelligence and opinions of our readers.” But not enough respect, apparently, to allow those readers to post their thoughts about its articles on the same page where those articles appear.

Instead, readers are forced to try and track down the writers and editors of the magazine on various social networks and then do their best to find the conversation about whatever article they are interested in, and then convince someone on the staff to engage with them. What many news outlets seem to mean by the discussion “moving to Twitter and Facebook” is that it’s much easier to ignore.

Engagement equals value

Yurow, by contrast — who works on the audience development team at the New York Times, and before that worked for Huffington Post and Bloomberg — believes as I do that handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake. Not only does it give up something valuable, but it suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble:

“To simply give up, and hand our most engaged users over to Facebook and Twitter is a major loss to a industry that is in dire need of loyalty. We need to come up with real, sustainable solutions?—?solutions that view community through the lens of modern culture, technology and business. It is imperative that we save comments. We owe it to our readers, we owe it to our writers, and we owe it to ourselves.”

Comments are broken, Yurow argues, because most publications have not put the time or resources into trying to make them work, and so they have become troll and spam-filled backwaters that everyone tries to avoid. But that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of value. So how can this perception of comments be turned around? Yurow outlines several ways in his post.

For one thing, media sites could look at the actual return on investment that they get from engaging with readers — which is real, and can be measured. It’s easier for sites with subscriptions to do this, since they can track how many commenters eventually “convert” into being subscribers. But it’s not that hard to tie reader time spent with things that matter to your business, whether it’s advertising or something else. As Yurow points out:

“Commenters do (at least) two things most site visitors do not: they explicitly demonstrate interest in your product, and they willingly hand over their email address. In any other business, we’d call these people ‘warm leads.’ In media, we call them trolls.”

Readers deserve our time

The other key point I agree with Yurow on is that many sites are to blame for their own troll-filled comments, because their writers and editors fail to engage even with the intelligent commenters, and so the predictable happens — flame-wars and offensive behavior take over. As blogger Anil Dash pointed out in a post in 2011, if there is bad behavior in your comments then you as the site owner are partially to blame. Yurow notes:

“It is important that some action is taken to remind readers that their voice is being heard. This can come in the form of a featured comment, a short response, or even a strategic email or tweet. Will this completely stop belligerence at the bottom of the page? Absolutely not. But it will help set the expectation of civil discourse and conversation.”

Among other things, Yurow also suggests that publishers try to figure out some way to make comments more relevant for more readers — whether it’s by having editors and writers highlight or point out interesting comments (something Forbes and other sites such as Gigaom already do), or by using algorithms and other tools such as reader votes to surface the best, something the New York Times itself has experimented with in the past.

In a recent piece for BuzzFeed, writer Charlie Warzel looked at what he calls the “mutation” of citizen journalism, and how this dream of a more democratic media has somehow turned into a vicious form of vigilantism — including incidents like the one in which a right-wing blogger tried to identify the victim in a controversial campus rape incident. But I think in his haste to condemn that kind of activity, Warzel overstates the case against citizen journalism.

There have always been attack-dog style bloggers, especially on the right, and I don’t think this kind of approach is any more virulent than it was five or 10 years ago, although it may get more attention thanks to Twitter. Also, it’s not as though citizen journalism was somehow bastardized and became vigilantism — they are opposite edges of the same sword. We can’t have one without enabling the other, and to the extent that we crack down on one we also cripple its alternative.

Are there examples of when bloggers and other amateur journalists lost their way or went too far in their pursuit of the capital T truth? Of course there are. One of the most infamous occurred after the bombings in Boston, when some members of a Reddit sub-forum tried to identify the alleged bombers and targeted an innocent man. But this kind of over-stepping isn’t confined to amateurs: journalists at Gawker have engaged in what some might call vigilantism by “doxxing” or publicly identifying children who posted racist remarks following Barack Obama’s re-election, or outing anonymous Reddit moderators for offensive behavior.

Both professional and amateur journalists were also involved in identifying a man who posted fake Twitter alerts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Were all of these incidents justified? That’s up to readers to decide for themselves. I happen to think that some or all of them overstepped the bounds of what we consider appropriate investigative behavior — and the right-wing blogger in question has definitely done so — but it is a grey area at best.

Is there a way to legislate or prevent those kinds of incidents without preventing more beneficial reporting by citizen journalists and bloggers? I can’t think of one.

It’s easy to focus on the negative aspects of social media\, but it has also been an incredibly powerful tool for good: Just think of the information that has come out of Egypt or Syria or Ukraine that would never have made it into the public eye, or the work of bloggers like Eliot “Brown Moses” Higgins and his fact-checking of government and anti-government propaganda. Think of what a formerly little-known blogger named Glenn Greenwald was able to accomplish, and how much that has expanded what we know about the security and intelligence establishment in the US and elsewhere.

How do we distinguish between what bloggers like Greenwald or Higgins do, and what bloggers like Chuck Johnson do? I honestly don’t know if there is a way. The same tools that enabled Andy Carvin during the Arab Spring or Brown Moses in Syria or Greenwald’s Snowden scoop can also be used for evil, but does that mean they aren’t valuable, or need to be restricted? No. It just means that most swords come with two sides.

Nothing highlights both the strengths and the weaknesses of social media quite like a breaking news event, where rumors and misinterpretations appear alongside official accounts and expert analysis in a giant stew of instant commentary. That’s been the case ever since a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, and it continued on Monday night following news of the decision by a grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

In what even some legal experts said was an unusually combative speech about the decision not to charge Wilson with a crime, St. Louis county prosecutor Robert McCulloch spent a considerable amount of time — before he even got to announcing the decision — criticizing social media and “the 24-hour news cycle” for complicating the Brown case.

That opening statement sounds like, “None of this would be a problem except the Internet.”

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 25, 2014

According to McCulloch, erroneous witness accounts that were circulated through social media — including some that said Wilson shot Brown in the back while he was standing over him, or that he was killed while he had his hands raised in surrender — made it more difficult for the grand jury to come to a decision, and exacerbated the tension in the community.

A double-edged sword

Is there some truth to the prosecutor’s criticism? Of course there is. Twitter and Facebook inevitably extend the reach of false information and incorrect assumptions, just as they do with true information and correct assumptions. That’s the reality of a world in which anyone can publish their thoughts instantly and potentially reach a large audience, and it has always been a double-edged sword — as incidents like the hunt for the Boston bomber have shown.

If it wasn’t for Twitter, millions may never have learned Michael Brown’s name.

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) November 25, 2014

As more than one person has pointed out in response to McCulloch, however, that same ability has also allowed more information about the Ferguson shooting to emerge than would ever have been possible before — including information that the police department and the district attorney’s office might not want circulated, such as eyewitness reports and evidence.

Those same tools have also allowed black residents of Ferguson and plenty of other towns across the United States to talk about what it’s like to lose loved ones in police shootings, or to live in fear of their lives, or to not have their version of events taken seriously because they are the wrong color or because they are not from a police family, as Ferguson prosecutor McCulloch is.

In the early days following the shooting, a number of different versions of the events circulated: some said Brown wasn’t threatening at all, and that Wilson shot without provocation, or that he killed the teenager while he was running away. Autopsy results were released that showed young man had been shot 12 times, including what appeared to be several shots to the head, and that seemed like too many for an incident involving an unarmed man.

According to the testimony and evidence presented to the grand jury, many of these stories have turned out to be untrue — there is no evidence that Brown was shot in the back, and there are injuries and other signs that show he struggled with Wilson while he was in the police car. Some witnesses said he was charging towards the officer when he was shot.

That said, almost all of the evidence and testimony confirms that Brown was shot more than 10 times, and that he was unarmed — and that he was at least 30 feet away and probably more when the final shots were fired and he collapsed in the street and died. In other words, for many the central truth of the case has been proven: Wilson shot and killed an unarmed black teen even though his life didn’t appear to be in imminent danger.

More info is better

In an earlier time, much of the information about the case would only have come to light months or even years later, as a result of leaks from the prosecutor’s office or interviews with eyewitnesses and jurors — if it ever came to light at all. Were things better then? It’s likely that police departments and district attorneys think so, but it’s not clear that this kind of freedom of information (both correct and incorrect) has been a net negative for society.

As it has with so many other events, such as the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt or the more recent demonstrations in Turkey and Ukraine, social media connects us to others who are experiencing things we may know nothing about, and allows us — if we want to — to gather much more information than we would have had before, and to come to our own conclusions about who is right and who is wrong.

That may take effort, but it is more possible than it has ever been. And while it may make it difficult for grand juries or police departments, as the Ferguson prosecutor argued in his speech, in the long run more information is almost always better — especially when it comes from people who are the closest to the situation. What we choose to do with that information once we get it is up to us.

As more and more apps become multibillion-dollar businesses — from WhatsApp and Instagram to SnapChat and Slack — it’s tempting to see them as replacing the web, or taking over from it. This helps explain the periodic outbreak of articles about how “the web is dying,” like the one Christopher Mims wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. But the truth is that, as is often the case when someone says a certain kind of behavior is dying, it’s a lot more complicated than such headlines suggest.

In his piece, Mims repeats many of the same arguments we’ve heard before about how apps have come to dominate our activity as mobile usage has grown. Instead of using web browsers, we go to task-specific apps, and these are in many cases “walled gardens” that benefit a single corporation and don’t play well with others — either in terms of the data they collect or in terms of links to other sites:

”Everything about apps feels like a win for users — they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.”

The “web is dying” meme has been around since at least 2010, when Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a feature entitled The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet, which talked about the rise of apps for services like Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and Netflix. It warned about the move from “the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms” and called the web “an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants.”

The web pie is growing

There were a number of problems with the Wired story, however — including the fact that the chart it used contrasted the growth of video traffic with the decline of “web” traffic, even though most of that video traffic was coming from websites and web-based services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix. But the phenomenon it was describing was definitely a real thing, and in fact has only accelerated with the growth of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, which don’t even have traditional websites.

As Zach Seward at Quartz notes, the Mims piece makes a common mistake by implying that the size of the web pie is finite — in other words, that mobile apps are stealing market share or user attention from the open web or the traditional browser, and therefore the web is dying. But the size of the web pie is arguably still growing rapidly, which suggests that apps are stealing attention from other things, including various kinds of offline activity.

Also, a number of people — including tech analyst Ben Thompson — have pointed out that a huge proportion of the time spent with mobile apps is devoted either to games or to various forms of instant messaging. Since neither of those things has ever relied that much on the web (or at least on the desktop browser), they aren’t really a conclusive sign that the web is being killed off by apps. As Thompson put it in a guest post at WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog earlier this year:

”The more interesting juxtaposition raised by Flurry’s numbers is not apps versus web, but games and social versus everything else. YouTube and other entertainment apps form a solid percentage of what is left (8%), but the remainder is a mishmash of utilities, productivity, the aforementioned news, and, of course the web.”

But one of the biggest flaws with the “web is dying” argument is that it assumes that apps themselves don’t drive more traffic to the open web — which they clearly do. Social-networking apps like Twitter and Facebook in particular, which consume a huge proportion of the mobile app time of many users, are at least in part about sharing links to content, and while many of these apps open links in their own in-app browsers, that still counts as web traffic.

The rise of silos

One of the concerns that Mims mentions, which Wired also hinted at in its cover story, is that the rise of apps is dangerous because they are “walled gardens” both in design and philosophy, and therefore they are a potential threat to the open web. The web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee raised similar concerns in a piece he wrote for Scientific American in 2010, in which he described the web as being “critical to free speech” and a civil society.

That said, it’s worth pointing out that Lee’s criticisms — which are very valid — weren’t about apps per se, but about the desire on the part of companies like Apple and Facebook to control both the experience on their platforms and access to the data that they collect from users. This isn’t something specific to apps: Facebook behaves exactly the same way on its website. The app is just another way of accomplishing the same goal.

As I tried to point out in a response to the Wired piece four years ago, apps make sense for certain kinds of behavior, and likely always will — whether it’s games, chat-style discussion, sharing photos, or searching for maps and directions. In many ways, the desktop browser-based web was never really much good for those things anyway. But that doesn’t mean the web is dead, or dying. As Thompson put it:

”There is no question that apps are here to stay, and are a superior interaction model for some uses. But the web is like water: it fills in all the gaps between things like gaming and social with exactly what any one particular user wants.”

I’m certainly not arguing with the idea that the open web needs defending, or that we should be aware of the efforts of large corporations to force increasing amounts of activity and content into their silos — that is definitely an issue with Facebook in particular, and with others. But to blame all of that on apps is short-sighted, I think. Apps are just a symptom.