1) Newser has no less than 5 ads per page, and most are being provided by 3rd party networks including ad exchanges (networks like Interclick) which means he is likely averaging .15 CPM. And means he is not selling too many direct ad campaigns.

2) Aggregators like Newser have few returning visitors and a high bounce rate. The traffic is coming from search engines due to the sheer volume of posts (it’s easy to do when you are copying others content etc). Newser also gets a lot of their traffic by purchasing it: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/why-did-newsers-traffic-fall-off-a-cliff/

So once you remove the purchased traffic, and the search engine traffic, I have to wonder whether anyone is actually intentionally going there or not??

This is a fake site, with fake content, fake traffic and no real value.

The true power of content providers is that they get real visitors. The problem is that marketers have traditiionaly had a hard time distiguishing between the fake sites and the content providers; but this is changing.

Keep in mind that Thrillist.com is expected to do $10mm this year in sales off of 1mm list subscribers. Why? Because these are people that have opted in deliberately. Thrillist does not buy lists or add people on their own. Quality is prevailing in this case. Big media will educate marketers and the aggregators will eventually die off. There is a reason no one will buy Digg.com – there is no value, just like newser.com.

From MC> Read the link. Dont agree. All the things you mention are features. Not products. In this day and age, adding features is easy to do and easy to copy. When its easy to copy, people are going to stop paying for it as soon as someone else offers it for free

But on news — you’re way off! First of all, why bundle? Bundling is inefficient. Why should I have extra stuff I don’t want shoved in my face? Why should I be locked in to one source of news? Why should content creators see their work mis-allocated to people who aren’t interested?

Instead of increasing inefficiency by bundling, you can increase efficiency by un-bundling, and smartly targeting. Give me good specific recommendations (a la Amazon & Netflix) that I can trust, and I will be willing to pay per article for news. It would be one-click, I could continue to read from a variety of sources, and I’d keep a running tab with a trusted third-party payment provider. Even with $0.01/article, a big site like nytimes.com could gross $100M/year.

Yes micro-payments, that’s the big opportunity, IMHO. It would take a gigantic effort and that’s where big media companies should be throwing their weight now, not trying to turn back the clock to closed networks with captive audiences.

Do you really think that in 2009 people would accept to get all their news in a bundle from one corporation like Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp? What you suggest may work for Procter & Gamble, but news is not like shampoo. Maybe it was in the mid-20th century, but now the Internet has been in homes for 15 years. It’s widely understood that having dozens or hundreds of news sources at your fingertips is an enormous public good! If Internet news became an oligopoly of conglomerates offering closed subscription services, that would be a tragedy! I hope the majority of news will be sustainably supported by ads and/or micro-payments, so that average people can still get news from 15 different sources if they are so inclined.

How to charge for your content in five easy steps:

Take a page from Hulu’s book. Hulu proved that on the internet, where people generally prefer “indie” content providers, the audience is willing to overlook your Big Brand Name if you give them a convenient and effective delivery system. And yes, it has to be (kinda) free. So…

1. Start your own Newser/HuffPost. Get the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal together (hey, NewsCorp and GE did it…), and create your own aggregator. Provide article summaries linking back to your actual sites just like the other guys do, and split the ad revenue, with up to 80% going back to the source content (20% for upkeep of the aggregation site). This way you double your money — ad revenue from the aggregator, ad/subscription revenue from your own site.

2. Get as many papers/sites as you can to join, and give them the same cut of the ad revenue from their pages that the big boys get, no matter how small they are. This would be a giant boon to the small-time paper industry.

3. Establish an independent editorial staff for the site, so that no one plays favorites and only the best stories get front-paged, regardless of source.

4. Create “Premium” services. Let people join your social network. Let them “create their own [sitename]” customized to their interests. Let them get updates in their inbox every morning. Hell, let them open their own blog/aggregator page, hosted by your site. Just charge them for it.

Deal not sweet enough? Throw up a pay wall on your papers’ sites, and add a free subscription to a participant site of their choosing along with a premium account on the agg site.

5. Become exclusive with this hip, new site and sue the other aggregators when they try to serve your content as their own. Lawsuits too much of a buzzkill? Install the aforementioned paywall and make it as hard as possible for anyone but the “industry certified” agg site to summarize your stories.

6. Profit!!