Using a social network isn’t rewarding until we invest time in it. More time, more reward.

What if social networks were TV channels circa 1948? The appearance of ABC doesn’t make me enjoy CBS or NBC less. But broadcast TV is capital intensive, so all 3 channels made money by delivering identical goods to a mass audience. Homogeny: road map to a vast wasteland.

Online social networks are built on a different type of capital — the aggregated time investments of their users. Google+, Twitter and Facebook are all trying to maximize that investment by offering identical functions to a general audience. User time investment has replaced airwave frequencies as the source of scarcity. The effect is homogeny.

“More time, more reward,” the cardinal rule of these early social media giants, is a broadcast mentality, even though the delivery system is digital.

This new ABC looks fine to me. But the next social networks that really matter — the ones that disrupt CBS and NBC rather than competing with them — will be the ones that figure out how to offer different sorts of rewards while demanding less capital from users: TNT, AMC, ESPN.

I’ve been doing my own thing for exactly 11 months. This does not make me a moneymaking expert. But I’m as certain as I get that I’m right on this one.

First, two points of information:

1. Yes, pageviews and uniques matter to advertisers. I’m saying they’re not the main decision driver.
2. Yes, a few people make money on traffic alone, or something close to it. I’m saying that for those of us at content companies, as opposed to technology companies — which includes almost everybody here at the local level — traffic for traffic’s sake is a sucker’s game.

Don’t take my word on this. Take it from Numbers Nick Denton. It’s the principle behind his ballsy, controversial Gawker redesign:

Many web advertisers, even those that buy banners, treat it as a direct marketing medium. For premium media properties such as ours, this is a contest that should be avoided at all costs. It’s a race to the bottom — for the lowest quality ads and the least valuable visitors. … Gawker Media has already put distance between our properties and those of the commodity ad networks. We booted them out from our titles five years ago; they were cheapening the sites and devaluing the brand benefits to our directly sold campaigns. … Critics say internet advertising suffers from limitless inventory, which depresses prices. These exclusive front-page sponsorships are not limitless. If HBO doesn’t move quickly enough, Showtime can buy out Gawker and Jezebel for the key fall TV season. On any individual day, there isn’t room for both of them; and that’s healthy. After falling by half from 2004 to 2008, revenue per page has now stabilized.

Is Denton’s execution crap? Maybe. But his reasons are sound and his figures don’t lie.

• The Oregonian doesn’t make money on pageviews; it makes money by being the only website in the Northwest that prints 250,000 sheafs of paper every day and distributes them to a zilliion homes and every high-traffic location in town.
• The Mercury doesn’t make money on pageviews; that’s why its writers are forbidden from seeing how popular their stories are.
• ReadWriteWeb doesn’t make money on pageviews; the house ad on its front page plays up its audience of “tech influencers,” not its 2 million monthly visitors.

These publishers make money on the strength of their brands. They make money from advertisers who have heard of them, who like their content, who want their particular slice of the audience, who have a gut feeling that being associated with them would be a good idea.

Pageviews are dandy: more chances to see an ad are always better than fewer chances. And pageviews are useful: they’re a leading indicator of brand strength. More visits mean you’re probably doing something right. This is why journalists are attracted to them. (And yes, I check mine every week.) But do more pageviews bring more money? That’s correlation, not causation.

As a news-business reporter and a two-bit publisher, I see no evidence that web traffic is the key currency in profitable journalism, especially local journalism.

And without evidence, we should make sure that our attempts to sustain local journalism aren’t built around the assumption that maximizing pageviews is the road to profit.

(Creative Commons eyeball photo by Kaptain Kobold.)

Here’s one of my four core principles for today’s media market: these days, relevance is mandatory.

I’m not talking about some of your content. I’m talking about all of your content.

If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

Yesterday, distribution costs were high, which made information scarce. The only way to distribute information was to spend lots of capital on a printing press or a broadcast tower. The only way to make this investment pay off was to make everyone interested in your content.

But the things that interest everyone, like the workings of government, don’t interest anyone very much. What does interest people a lot? Their pets. Gardening. Figure skating. But each of these only appeals a lot to a few people … and it wasn’t worth distributing content at great expense to a few. There weren’t enough figure skating fans in a single media market to pay for their content.

So publishers focused on things that interested everyone a little bit.

Today, distribution costs are low, which makes information plentiful. But that’s not all: relevant information is now plentiful. There’s now an international market online for the free distribution of figure-skating-related content, and those of us who care about figure skating can finally do what we always wanted: read about figure skating for an hour every day.

Aha! That’s the catch. Information is now plentiful, but time remains scarce. When people prioritize their time, of course they always start by consuming the available information that’s most relevant to them, gradually moving to less and less relevant information.

Here’s what’s new: things that interest everyone a little bit aren’t anywhere near the top of that list any more. Newspapers’ problem, therefore, is not that people have become less interested in City Hall. It’s that we’ve always been interested in lots of things other than City Hall, and now those other, more intense interests can be fed.

I’d love to read about City Hall, but I’ve got no time. I just spent an hour reading about figure skating.

In economic terms, less-relevant information has not fallen in absolute value. But the people who spend time consuming it are facing rising opportunity costs.

Therefore, news startups should pick a niche — a niche that a few people care about quite a lot. Or several niches, if they go together for some reason. But for God’s sake, don’t get caught out in the open, peddling a product that everybody cares about a little bit.

Newspapers already tried it.