Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr/Bing and Google in a Race for Search Features

Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr
By JENNA WORTHAM
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02tumblr.html?th&emc=th


By now, plenty of traditional media companies have hopped on the social media bandwagon, pumping out news updates on Facebook and Twitter.

But do those companies have the time and resources to work yet another Web outlet into their daily routine?

Mark Coatney certainly hopes so. Mr. Coatney, a 43-year-old journalist, is the latest hire at Tumblr, a fast-growing blogging service based in New York that says it has 6.6 million users.

Until last month, Mr. Coatney was a senior editor at Newsweek, where as a side project he headed up the magazine’s social efforts on Twitter and Facebook. Last year he decided to add Tumblr to his repertoire.

“I saw it as an opportunity to talk to our audience in a new way,” he said. On Twitter, he said, “the main feedback comes mostly from retweeting,” or retransmitting an interesting message. On Tumblr, “the tone is a lot more conversational.”

Mr. Coatney quickly cultivated a following on Tumblr for his thought-provoking, quick-witted posts. Often they included commentary that was funny and bordering on acerbic — something he was able to get away with largely because “no one at Newsweek really knew what I was doing,” he said.

The credibility he established among Tumblr users, and the fact that Newsweek was one of the first big publishers to sign on, cemented Tumblr’s decision to hire him, company executives said.

Over the last few months, other media outlets have caught wind of Tumblr, which is free to use. The newest recruits include The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, BlackBook Media Corporation, National Public Radio, The Paris Review, The Huffington Post, Life magazine and The New York Times.

But many of those outlets have done little more than set up a placeholder page. In his new job as a “media evangelist,” Mr. Coatney’s role, and in some ways his challenge, is to help them figure out what to do next.

Mr. Coatney describes Tumblr as “a space in between Twitter and Facebook.” The site allows users to upload images, videos, audio clips and quotes to their pages, in addition to bursts of text.

As on Twitter, users can follow other users, whose posts appear in a chronological stream on a central home page known as the dashboard. Users can indicate that they like an item by clicking on a red heart next to it or “reblogging” it.

One of the big differences between Tumblr and Twitter is that Tumblr does not display how many followers a user has, said David Karp, Tumblr’s 24-year-old founder and chief executive.

“Who is following you isn’t that important,” he said. “It’s not about getting to the 10,000-follower count. It’s less about broadcasting to an audience and more about communicating with a community.”

Moreover, he said, the site was designed with creative expression in mind.

“People are creating identities and personalities that Facebook and Twitter are not designed to allow you to do,” he said.

Since Tumblr is currying favor among a young crowd, it could prove valuable for traditional companies and media outlets that are trying to build a relationship with that audience. And those companies are no doubt aiming to win points by being early adopters of a site that is on the rise.

Tumblr is still dwarfed by Facebook and Twitter, which each have hundreds of millions of users and can be significant sources of traffic for online publishers.

Mr. Coatney estimated that posting links and notes to the Newsweek Twitter feed and Facebook page sent roughly 200,000 to 300,000 readers to Newsweek’s Web site each day. By comparison, Tumblr sent closer to 1,000.

But Tumblr is growing quickly. It says it is adding 25,000 new accounts daily, and each month it serves up 1.5 billion page views.

Items posted on Tumblr can also ripple out to far-flung corners of the Web.

When The New Yorker posted the Escher-inspired oil-spill-themed cover for its July 5 issue on its Tumblr page, it drew many links from other sites.

Alexa Cassanos, director of public relations for The New Yorker, which began using the service in late May, said the cover resonated in unlikely places, like the news aggregator Reddit.

Ms. Cassanos said Tumblr afforded The New Yorker an opportunity to showcase some material that might otherwise get lost online.

“We can highlight graphic content like photo essays or slide shows to an audience that may not read the magazine,” she said. “You just couldn’t do that, visually, on Twitter or Facebook.”

Unlike Twitter, where it is not uncommon for publishers to simply set up accounts that automatically publish links to their articles and blog posts, Tumblr requires publishers to add more commentary and interaction if they want to win favor with its community.

Mr. Coatney acknowledged that this might not be an easy sell, particularly when the payoff was not immediately obvious.

“It’s a huge leap of faith for many of them,” he said. “Monetizing that relationship is still a difficult hurdle because you may not be getting new readers at that particular moment, even if you are engaging with them.”

For publishers, services like Tumblr reflect a broader shift in their relationship with their audience, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University.

“Going back 20 years, publications like Rolling Stone didn’t interact with readers except for letters to the editor,” Mr. Katz said. “One of the realizations that cultural leaders and publishers have had is that there is a lot of expertise, wisdom and ideas in their readership.”

The ability to respond online turns readers into co-creators, he said, which can give them a sense of ownership.

“That is an extremely valuable commodity for publishers these days, even if it does not yet translate to revenue,” Mr. Katz said.

For Tumblr, which is fleshing out its business model and recently raised a $5 million round of venture financing from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, the interest from media outlets is something of a feather in its cap.

“There is certainly some validation in it,” said John Maloney, president of Tumblr. “They’ve decided that this is the next social media platform they want to adopt, and that certainly can translate into a catalyst for us.”


Bing and Google in a Race for Search Features
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and ASHLEE VANCE
Copyright by tHe New York Times
Published: August 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02google.html?th&emc=th


Edwin Perello discovered that Bing, the Microsoft search engine, could find addresses in his rural Indiana town when Google could not. Laura Michelson, an administrative assistant in San Francisco, was lured by Bing’s flight fare tracker. Paul Callan, a photography buff in Chicago, fell for Bing’s vivid background images.

Like most Americans, they still use Google as their main search tool. But more often, they find themselves navigating to Microsoft’s year-old Bing for certain tasks, and sometimes they stay a while.

“I was a Google user before, but the more I used Bing the more I liked it,” Mr. Callan said. “It’s more like muscle memory takes me to Google.”

Bing still handles a small slice of Web searches in the United States, 12.7 percent in June, compared with Google’s 62.6 percent, as measured by comScore, the Web analytics firm. But Bing’s share has been growing, as has Yahoo’s, while Google’s has been shrinking.

And while no one argues that Google’s dominance is in immediate jeopardy, Google is watching Microsoft closely, mimicking some of Bing’s innovations — like its travel search engine, its ability to tie more tools to social networking sites and its image search — or buying start-ups to help it do so in the future.

Google has even taken on some of Bing’s distinctive look, like giving people the option of a Bing-like colorful background, and the placement of navigation tools on the left-hand side of the page.

The result is a renaissance in search, resulting in more sophisticated tools for consumers who want richer answers to complex questions than the standard litany of blue links.

The competition is a remarkable and surprising twist: Microsoft, knocked around for so long as a bumbling laggard, has given the innovative upstart Google a kick in the pants. As the search engines introduce feature after competing feature, some analysts say they have set off an arms race, with the companies poised to spend whatever it takes to win the second phase of Web search.

“There is a cold war going on,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet and software analyst at Caris & Company, who watches both companies. “Clearly, you can see how Bing’s competition is forcing Google to try and catch up in some places.”

Google officials agree there is more competition, but say they are not simply reacting to the younger search engine.

Google’s new features have not been in response to Bing, said Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president for search products and user experience. “A lot of these things have been in the works for a long time,” she said. “Left-hand navigation we worked on for almost two years. We wanted to make sure we had it exactly right.”

Microsoft’s gains are far from staggering. Its share of searches has grown to 12.7 percent, from 8 percent, since Bing was introduced in May 2009, and Yahoo, which has a search deal with Microsoft, still handles a larger share of searches than Bing. And in the newest search frontier, mobile devices, Google has even more market share than on the Web at large.

Still, Bing’s gains have impressed analysts, who have watched Google fend off repeated assaults on its lucrative search and ad business, which accounts for some 95 percent of its revenue.

Building a more comprehensive, faster and more accurate search engine than Google is a daunting challenge, and a long list of big companies and start-ups have failed in their attempts. Microsoft endured plenty of ribbing as it spent years building and then scrapping search systems meant to help it compete against Google. But it kept experimenting until it found a way.

Microsoft has spent billions of dollars building the computing centers needed to power search and advertising systems and acquiring start-ups with niche expertise. In addition, it has thrown money at consumers, through cash-back programs on purchases, and at partners willing to promote Bing ahead of Google. Over the last year, Microsoft’s online services division lost $2.36 billion on revenue of $2.2 billion.

With Bing, Microsoft has tried to attract people like Mr. Callan by excelling at answering frequently asked questions, like those related to travel, health, shopping, entertainment and local businesses. For example, Bing has flight search and prediction tools that reveal price fluctuations for certain routes, and advises customers whether to buy or wait. Bing Health uses data from sources like the Mayo Clinic and Healthwise.

The hope is that “somebody would come back just for that and then, down the line, they would do other types of searches, too,” said Danny Sullivan, a longtime industry analyst and editor in chief of the blog Search Engine Land.

People do not always want to click on links and dig through pages to hunt out information, so when Bing started in May 2009, it pulled relevant information and stuck it on the top and left-hand side of the results pages. Search “Angelina Jolie,” for instance, and see a slide show and a list of her movies on top and related links on the side.

We said, ‘Let’s change the entire way we lay out pages,’ ” said Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audiences business. “We will not be shackled by blue links.”

Google, meanwhile, has quietly introduced its own new features that have in several instances looked a lot like Bing’s.

For example, in May, it too added the left-hand navigation tools — though Ms. Mayer of Google pointed out that many of the tools had already been available, just not easily visible from the search page.

“Certainly there’s been increased competition in the space,” Ms. Mayer said of Bing. “When there’s more competition, everyone’s search gets better, that serves the users a lot better.”

Bing’s travel tool uses technology from Farecast, which Microsoft bought in early 2008. In July, Google announced plans to acquire ITA Software for $700 million; ITA makes the same comparison shopping software for flights that Bing’s Farecast uses.

Then there is the look of the main search pages for each site. Microsoft has argued that the vivid images ever-present behind the Bing search box have helped its appeal; young people and women have shown a particular fondness for Bing. In June, Google offered people the option to have a colorful background image like the Golden Gate Bridge on its main search page rather than the stark, white page that helped make Google famous.

Google has also played catch-up to Microsoft in offering ways to search for and digest more images in one go, and has trailed in adding some tie-ins to social networking sites.

“Google’s new innovations have come at a slower pace,” Mr. Aggarwal said. “There was no one challenging Google until Microsoft decided it was a business they would not give up.”

Still, Mr. Sullivan and other analysts also say Google has been making many significant but subtle behind-the-scenes changes that make it better at responding to obscure and complex queries. Google made 500 tweaks to its secret search algorithm last year and introduced personalized search, which customizes results based on what users frequently click on.

Google executives often chide Microsoft that it overengineers software like Office and bombards people with needless features. But now Google has swapped its clean, simple approach to search in favor of a feature war with Microsoft.

“Google seems to do things because Bing has done something,” Mr. Sullivan said. “It’s a kind of knee-jerk thing — we have to do this product now because we don’t want people to think we’re weak.”