Making the Case for Portable Content
What does online content have in common with an extreme hot-dog eating competition?
Read It Later’s Mark Armstrong writes about how time-shifting is changing not just when we read articles and watch videos, but it’s also changing the way publishers can think about what they create for the web.
We’re already seeing it with the renewed attention on long-form journalism, but there are many other ways we can make the case for quality vs. quantity. And in turn we can create an ecosystem that extends the lifespan of content:
The simple logic is this: Give a user the opportunity to save something, and they will have access to it for a longer period of time, increasing the odds over time that they will eventually consume it. This will occur at the time and place of their choosing.
Not only that, but once they consume it, they will share it at the time they complete it, and they will have effectively extended the half-life of that particular URL on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s a new long tail for the post-SEO world.
(Illustration by Ian Marsden)
