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- Should you offer your print newspaper subscription for free?
- Things that were Not Invented Here are OK. Really.
- Small town classifieds: San Angelo
- Wall Street Journal reports: the AP is hurting newspapers
- Why Cost Per Click ads are unfair to publishers
- 2008 to be the worst year for newspaper advertising? Surprise!
- Deck chairs
- Knowledge is worth money, information is not
- Aggregators vs Producers: Introducing findingDulcinea, Mahalo, and others to come
- New York Times introduces their own social network: TimesPeople
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- Ben A says: In all fairness, I also don’t know enough about... ( more )
- Ben A says: Maybe I’m just daft, but why in the world would... ( more )
- Matt Hanson says: Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added... ( more )
- Curt M. says: Will people pay for content on the internet? Maybe,... ( more )
- Curt M. says: This is a very good post. Lots to ponder here.... ( more )
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Why Cost Per Click ads are unfair to publishers
In February of 1998 Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, launched a new search site called GoTo.com.
The basic idea behind GoTo.com was fairly simple: Gross figured that if he could buy generic web traffic (around 5 cents per visitor) and then resell that traffic as targeted traffic (which is inherently worth more), he could play the traffic market and make a killing.
He further reasoned that the best way to turn random web traffic into structured, goal-seeking web traffic was search.
Removing the risk
Gross knew that launching a new search engine where the results pages where made up of paid listings would only work if he had paying customers. So Gross had a dilemma: he had to convince people that search keywords were worth paying for.
In his book The Search, John Battelle explains how Gross approached the issue:
Gross solved his problem by adopting the time-honored approach of dumping—or perhaps drug dealing is a better comparison: the first one’s free (or nearly so). Gross built not one but two entirely audacious ideas into GoTo’s initial business proposition for advertisers: first was the concept of a performance-based model—one in which advertisers paid for a visitor only when a visitor clicked through an ad and onto the advertisers’ sites. Instead of demanding upfront money from advertisers, the way AOL or Yahoo did, GoTo.com’s model guaranteed that advertisers had to pay only when their ads were clicked upon. Of course, this is now the standard model for the multibillion-dollar paid search market.
What can be replaced in a newspaper? It’s the paper, not the news
“Newspapers still do some things that can’t be replaced”
That’s a juicy looking headline on Romenesko today. I jumped into that hoping for a good fight.
But it turns out that I mostly agree with Jon Fine, who finishes off his Media Centric column with that take-away quote:
For one thing, city media ecosystems have proven to be vibrant things that constantly spawn new local and niche blogs. The best—never underestimate the voltage one energetic reporter can generate—match or even outdo their traditional rivals in many respects. But not all of them. Newspapers still do some things that can’t be replaced. Unfortunately, we’re about to find out exactly what those things are.
What I think he means (and what I agree with), is that newspapers as an organization spend time and money doing the kind of reporting that is central to the value that journalism brings to our society. If newspapers as companies really disappeared in the next ten years, I think we’d feel the effects.
Local-local journalism is not a dead-end
Jon Talton, a journalist of 27 years, writes that local-local journalism is an exercise in stupidity. I’ve already made my case for hyper-local news coverage here, but Jon makes some good points and I think it’s worth clarifying why he’s wrong.
He uses the Washington Post’s ill-fated LoudounExtra.com as an example of why local-local is not worth your time (I could just hold up MySeattlePets as a counter-example, of course, but what fun would that be?).
If you really see hyper-local journalism the way the WSJ describes it:
It embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. And it promises to let visitors to the site shape the news through blogs and photo and video submissions.
then yes, you’re going to run into a few problems. The fundamentals of what is interesting to people and what is important to a community have not significantly changed. What has changed is that as a newspaper you need to find a community to engage with.
Hyper-local coverage, to me, means that you cover what matters to your local audience, which may or may not be the same thing as what score the high school football team got.
Thinking beyond text and images
When the motion picture camera was first invented in the late 1800’s (Louis Le Prince’s design in 1888 was probably the first), people were instantly fascinated with its ability to capture and reproduce exactly the scenes of reality.
It wasn’t until Georges Méliès kicked off Science-Fiction films with A Trip to the Moon that people began to really explore the idea of representing things in film that were not reality. Before 1902, filmmakers had failed to recognize that this new medium could be used to create a completely convincing alternate reality.
Once again we are encountering an entirely new medium, and we have yet to figure out the possibilities it creates. The internet is ideal for displaying text and pictures. It’s also ideal for displaying video. It’s also ideal for interactive, user-prompted interfaces.
Classically, a newspaper has confined itself to what paper as a medium will support: text and images. There’s not much sense in a newspaper putting together an audio program because you can’t just plug headphones into the print edition that shows up on your doorstep.
Crowding the page
Even though I do a good amount it myself in professional web design, I constantly wonder about the wisdom of crowding the page with too much junk.
Study after study seems to confirm that the more crap you shove on the front page and above the fold, the more clicks you get. Which seems like a pretty good idea to build a site that’s incredibly top-heavy and all squished together.
The problem for me is that it’s ugly, and it makes it really hard for me to digest what I’m looking at. One of the things I like the most about a physical newspaper is how easy it is for me to cherry-pick my reading. I can skim a headline, read half of a paragraph, and move on, almost in the same eye movement.
Link Lessons: Stop licensing AP content
Iam calling this sporadic, as-it-pleases-me to write it series “Link Lessons” because I think that with very few exceptions, newspapers have largely ignored the power of the web’s biggest currency: the link.
I think smart linking goes hand in hand with an emphasis on local coverage in the quest for newspaper survival.
This is going to sounds like a complete contradiction, but here goes: When are newspapers going to realize that they are competing with the AP, and stop paying for AP content when they could simply link to it?
Here’s why this is actually a good idea:
[ read more >> ]
Information advertising
Last week Scott Karp ruminated on the future of online advertising: will it be driven by entertainment or will it be driven by information?
He presents two good examples that represent each technique in the world of car advertising. If you want to get a handle on what I’m talking about when I refer to one or the other, you should go read his post.
Got it? OK. Here’s why I think that information advertising has a much bigger future on the web: it fits the nature of the medium.
How can newspapers, books, and magazines thrive in the internet age?
When William Randolph Hearst bought his second newspaper in 1895—The New York Morning Journal—he also shelled out big salaries to poach excellent talent like Stephen Crane and Richard F. Outcault. He knew then what is still true today: good content is worth good money.
The problem is that nobody’s paying for it anymore.
Eat Sleep Publish is a blog dedicated to exploring and understanding the challenges (and no doubt opportunities) facing newspapers, books, and magazines as they strive to understand the new medium and find ways to support themselves in the digital age.
Almost every newspaper now offers its content online for free, relying on dwindling subscription and print ad revenues to underwrite the salaries in the newsroom. Even though online ad spending is on the rise, the format of the internet doesn’t provide the same revenue opportunities for publishers that print media have supplied for decades.
Dear newspapers: Please innovate while you still have money
When you look at how many layoffs are happening in newsrooms around the country, and you listen to so many people in the news industry talking about how screwed newspapers are, it’s easy to think that newspapers are hemorrhaging money left and right.
That is not the case. Take, for example, this snippet from a recent article in Fortune magazine:
So far this year, News Corp (NWS, Fortune 500). shares are down 25% against a 6% decline in the S&P 500, although it’s probably unfair to hang that entirely on newspapers, which accounted for just 17% of the company’s US$15.7 billion in revenues in the six months ended December 31, and 12% of its operating profits of US$2.5 billion. Operating margins for what the company calls its newspaper and information division were 11% during the six months, better than many rivals but down from 14% in the year-earlier period.
Yep, the newspaper division of News Corp has an 11% profit margin.
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Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. [ read more >> ] -
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