Politico plans beyond the election and launches an ad network

The news from PaidContent yesterday is that Politico is launching an ad network.

That’s a smart move for Politico, because it’s going to keep them alive after the election cycle is done this year. It’s also a web-native survival strategy: they’re going for volume not margins.

The internet is splitting the publishing business in the middle – it makes it hardest for the mid-size paper. Small news businesses (like the neighborhood bloggers) are finding success because they have low overhead and they know how to fill online inventory.

Large newspapers are not yet finding success, but pretty soon they’re going to start dumping their existing ad sales teams and hiring people who understand how to sell online inventory. When that happens, the papers with enough scale to draw on will be doing fine.

Reprinting is only valuable on paper

One of the benefits for a newspaper joining the Politico network is that they get access to Politico’s election coverage for reproduction.

The implication is that for those papers dropping the AP (or thinking about dropping the AP), picking up a little Politico content for reproduction would be a nice way to replace some of that lost content.

But it’s important to remember that republishing is only valuable on paper, because it presents the reader with something they would otherwise not have access to (on paper). If the reader is online, a link will do just as well. That’s why Politico isn’t asking newspapers to pay for the right to reprint its content.

Instead, Politico will take the free marketing (“This article is great! It’s from Politico? I should go check that site out!”) and the help in Google placement from inbound links.

Reaching for scale

A while ago Jeff Jarvis gave a speech where he encouraged newspapers to follow the model of Google and become an ad network to support its content creation efforts. I think this is a great option for newspapers, especially when you realize that papers could sell the ads for local bloggers, eliminating the pseudo-competition going on between them currently.

But every day they wait another ad network is born, and sooner or later the opportunity is going to close.

Politico is planning for the future. Their up-to-the-minute election coverage is going to take a huge hit once the election is over in November, and they know it. People will care a lot less about politics six months from now, and Politico needs to prepare itself for that market.

They’re using their current market position (read: huge audience) to build a network by offering free content reproduction and this sweet little ad deal on the side.

When their readership drops precipitously, and I think it will, they’ll already have an affiliate ad network in place, where their network members content will help pay for Politico during the years between now and the next election cycle.

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