Is media Outreach over?

[2MSens]

Last week was the "anti-AdBlock" week for every media in France. They started adding pop-ups asking to disable AdBlock.

Their business model based on advertisement is suffering from it. But did they ask their audience what they wanted? I would have told them: ask me questions to know more about myself and personalize my experience instead of pushing more and more ads, until my computer dies from too many scripts!

What they decided? Protect their content. Now you have to log-in to access articles. The result? They delete all their links. Actually they still exist, but Google doesn't see it anymore.... So it's like they don't exist.

So I'm asking you, what do you think will be the future of medias? What will happen for us as SEO guys? Do we have to focus on the ones that have non-protected contents?...
I'll be more than happy to get your vision.
Have a nice day,

Benoit.

[2MSens]

Hi, thanks a lot for your inputs.

I'm an external SEO for couple of companies and elaborate their SEO strategies.
Most of my clients are small software editors, they're struggling to get media attention and building high quality content is a huge investment. Loosing a 50 Domain Authority link because the media changed its business model is a huge loss for them.

I was wondering how other SEO guys were handling that. If you continue to target those medias? They still have a huge audience, but we loose the linking benefit.

[Highland]

It's not over, it's just changing. Whenever a business model changes (i.e. selling newspapers) you'll have people who try to hold onto the old ways. In the US (where the government won't step into that fight) the news publishers have either gone to a paywall/loginwall or they try to track how many visits you've made (i.e. You've read X of X free articles, please pay to read more). Google requires some content to be free so it's becoming a crap shoot as to whether or not you can read an article for free. The place that's suffered the most is social linking, where I'll see a link on a blog or in social media and click it, only to hit a pay/loginwall.

The EU is going a different route with government regulation. I remember when Germany tried to make Google pay for linking to news content and Google opted to drop them from the SERPs if they didn't opt in. The publishers couldn't opt in fast enough. Google shut down their news feed in Spain rather than pay for linking to content. There are rumblings of trying to make Google expand "right to be forgotten" takedowns to all Google sites (which has pushed Google to force users to use only localized search). How far they get remains to be seen. If they declare Google a public utility there will be legal wrangling and if Google loses they may pull out of those markets.

So where does that leave you as an EU SEO? It depends on what you're trying to do. News outlets don't need a lot of SEO because they are high quality content generators, which is what Google feeds on naturally. I wouldn't worry about Google dropping markets anytime soon (legal stuff will take years and we're not to that point yet). If you could elaborate on what you do I could comment better on that last part of your question.