Wot’s news?

But what about the negative side, which is the way that will affect people who are searching?

You can charge for content but don’t necessarily opt out of search indexes. That’s a marketing decision, you still want people to be able to find your content, know that your site exists but also know that you have some content on a particular subject.

If I can find a headline and a snippet from an article that looks of interest to me on a search engine and I go through to the site and see that I actually have to pay to per view to read specific article or I need to pay a monthly subscription fee to get in there, well I still might do that and the search engine has helped the user to find that content and it brought that sales opportunity to the table for the publisher. So to me they seem like two different things.

But you’re not going to build the large communities that will attract the advertisers and you won’t be so well ranked on the search engines if you only do allow a small amount of your content to be free…

Well I’m not sure if that’s right. We don’t show full text articles at all because it’s not ours. We’re a search engine and we just show enough for users to help them find the news that they are interested in and then we pass them through to the originating publisher.

You do searches on Google for all sorts of different types of Australian business news or Kevin Rudd news or whatever and Wotnews is doing reasonably well in the search engine index, so 70% of our traffic comes from Google and we do somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 unique sessions a month at the moment.

I think they are two separate decisions. Do I want to charge for content if I really believe users will pay for it because it’s valuable and it’s not just something that’s taken off the wire that I can get at countless other sites, it’s unique, it’s analysis, it’s editorial, it’s somebody’s effort to go and analyse a particular issue? I think the answer to that is yes. Or at least, it’s certainly worth trying.

But I think opting out of indexes to me sounds like a political play, especially with Google. I mean everything obviously Google does is an advertising play and it takes a punch of the ticket on the way through from the user/advertiser kind of relationship before the user gets through to the actual publisher. So that’s a bit different from what we do. So it feels like political posturing to sort of push Google to the negotiation table to give up some of that revenue.

I read somewhere a pretty good analogy on this, if you just think of Google as the newsagent; I mean people go to the newsagent, they browse the magazines, they flick through to decide what they want to buy and then they pick up the magazine and go to the counter and pay for it and then they leave. So the idea of charging people to get to the newsagent or not allowing people in the newsagents at all just seems strange to me.

I think that the concern is where sites go into competition in terms of either charging people to view others content or charging advertisers to advertise on it.

So we’re talking about Google now because we’re not talking about Wotnews.

Google’s already moving into building these portals in those major areas.

To deliver content or to do advertising?

To do advertising.

It seems to me a bit rich for the publishers to be complaining about this now after 10 years of Google delivering them traffic and eyeballs that has essentially allowed them to sell their own advertising to their advertisers.

Why are they complaining about it now? The only answer is that Google is doing incredibly well. The GFC has started to take its effect and instead of coming up with innovative new ideas on how to compete, it’s let’s start pressing the legal buttons and forcing people to the negation table.

Which just seems a bit negative to me rather than actually looking for fresh new ideas on how to compete and do things differently. And I think there are plenty of opportunities to do that. The publishers have large amounts of traffic and therefore if they energise that traffic appropriately to create a large community, they’re well positioned.

You look at community driven news sites like Topics in the States where people want to participate in the news, they want to help create the news, they want to comment on the news. My gut feel is that they want to do more than just write a comment at the end of an article. I think that there are opportunities to explore that enthusiasm by users to really become part of the news reporting ecosystem, but I don’t see any publishers here trying. We think that there’s an opportunity in that environment and we’re certainly going to have a go as well as the tech licensing stuff that I spoke to you about.

So would you be trying to get people to add their news to what you’re already aggregating or are you talking a separate site?

I’m thinking that large businesses are news publishers in their own right, for example, why isn’t that news kind of projected into a news site that’s specific to a particular company where it can be blended with new search results from across the web with commercial news feeds that they have access to? I think the real issue is that in large organisations people understand that news is a valuable resource for market intelligence and that goes back to that fundamental truth that I talked to you about with you at the very beginning.

The reality is there are lots of people in organisations that should be reading the news and they’re not. They’re not staying across what’s going on in their sector and across their clients that they are supposed to be servicing.

If you could push the news into an organisation that’s very specific to particular individuals or particular areas or disciplines in the organisation and it makes it easy for people to just receive that news tailored to them and to their job. And then you allow them to share news across the organisation. And say ‘hey I know Johnny over in Sector S is just an absolute news junky, I’d like to see exactly what he’s reading, I want to follow what that guy is reading’. It’s a little bit like that sort of Twitter idea of following interesting people.

So I’m just kind of sewing the seed of a few ideas that I suppose that we’ve been throwing around for quite some time and we think there’s an opportunity to build tools of that nature that we could actually charge for that kind of service into a business. And that isn’t competing with traditional publishers because they still need the content from publishers, they can buy full text content if they want to. They still need search results from out on the web but we’re adding something new that I don’t see anybody else adding at the moment.

You might well see it that way but it will cause further fragmentation of their markets.

And you know what? My answer to it though is that the opportunity is out there. They are the best positioned to be doing that right now. And if they’re not doing it and another, smaller, nimbler player is coming into the market to do it well, hey this is called competition.

Richard, lastly, what’s it been like having Graeme Wood come on as an investor in Wotnews? You’re not a naïve sort of entrepreneur that’s learnt new disciplines with the older statesman coming in. So how’s it changed the company?

Graeme’s been very much a part of it for a long time. He made his investment in the business while we were Plugger, so this is going back 18 months.

Is he running the company?

He’s a majority shareholder. We kept working under the Plugger brand until we felt really comfortable that we had a rock solid website underpinned by rock solid technology because we’ve actually got a brand licensing arrangement with Wotif which is the “Wot” in our name.

Wotif doesn’t have any ownership of us at all but we just have negotiated a brand licensing with them so we have certain responsibilities to that brand such as we can’t have a site that’s going offline, we have to be professional etc.

So he entered while we were Plugger then we re-branded to Wotnews in September last year.

But I suppose to answer your question, we feel very, very fortunate to have Graeme on board backing us and participating in what we do. Obviously he’s our major investor which if you’ve got wonderful ideas but no investment, you have nothing really. So that’s obviously the first thing. But he brings a heck of a lot more than that. He’s a fantastic mentor for us. He gives us plenty of freedom to go and experiment and try things and yet he offers very wise words when they’re required and he has everybody’s respect in here because he’s just a great guy to work with. And obviously he has pedigree in this environment, he’s actually come up with ideas himself, had fantastic success so he knows what he’s doing. So he’s fantastic.