The emergence of internet has, in the recent time, seen the growth of online media. Most of the operators of this online media platform, who are a one-man or a group of two or three, rely heavily on the website of traditional media outfits to pick their news in disregard to attribution or copyright.
They record high traffic because of their linkage with other social media platforms – Facebook, Linkdin, etc.
An individual who likes the page will be triggerd by the moment the online platform posts a news story. Much of the stories online are aggregated from traditional media, which is the primary and perhaps the major source of their news.
With this aggregated content, operators of online platforms enjoy followers most of whom are brief readers. In turn, advertisers are quickly attracted to the platforms with high traffic in the quest for deeper engagement with consumers. “Advertisers fight for the banner at the top of the page, believing it to be the prime spot,” according to a source.
Already, there is growing reliance on internet for news source in various climes, which is assisting to cause a decline in newspaper readership and subsequently declining profits.
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With online platform reliance on traditional media for content, which drives traffic and advertisement, some of these platforms therefore rake in huge sums of money without recourse to the major sources of their news. An average top banner in an online platform costs between N500,000 to N1 million for a month placement, while placement of advert on top side costs about N500,000 a month.
In his write-up in Marketing Magazine UK, Stephen Maher, chairman of #IPASocialWorks UK, discusses that social media is ever powerful and ever growing in influence in the lives of all brands – in their customer service, in their source of rich insight and in their marketing. But he says: “We hear about likes and retweets and views as evidence of success, but how often do we hear about social’s impact on revenues and business value and on ROI?”
According to him, the rigour and forensics that rightly determine the marketing investment decisions and returns for today’s brands are not always applied so intensively to social media campaigns, and this will get more difficult as social dominates.
There are already concerns in the media that the online platforms are riding on the greate efforts of print media to thrive without acknowledging the source(s) of their stories. An online media platform recently acknowledged plagiarising, citing ignorance but apologised with a promise to attribute the source of its stories.
In Nigeria, it has not been much of legal battle between the online platforms and print media organisations whose published materials are taken and re-published online, but the media organisations may adopt strategies that would make it difficult to assess their online materials without paying for it.
