Tag Archives: online advertising

Online audience growth: not a solution to newspapers’ problems?

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There’s an inter­est­ing look at the prob­lems of news­pa­pers online by Robert Ivan at Seek­ing Alpha, focus­ing on the New York Times. I don’t know about the assump­tions — I’ve seen the cost of the NYT’s news­gath­er­ing put at $200m — and I’ve sim­pli­fied it a little, but here it is:

Des­pite the highest read­er­ship of any news­pa­per in the United States, the New York Times only gen­er­ated $330 mil­lion in online advert­ising in 2007. Total oper­at­ing costs for that same year totaled $2.9 billion.

It is widely repor­ted that total news­pa­per oper­at­ing costs would be reduced by 35% if news­pa­pers elim­in­ated their print product [is that assump­tion really right?]. Using the NYT example … costs could be reduced to $1.9 bil­lion. Con­tinue read­ing →

Microsoft to Newspapers: You made information free. For Google.

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UK Association of Online Publishers logoMicrosoft’s top Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty chap, Tom Rubin, had some inter­est­ing points to make at the UK AOP:

Start­ing back in the early 1990s, some lead­ing Inter­net pun­dits espoused the motto “inform­a­tion wants to be free” and implored con­tent own­ers to simply give away their con­tent and mon­et­ize it through sec­ond­ary means – such as con­certs and tee-shirts for musi­cians and, in the case of media, the prom­ise of a strong income stream by adopt­ing a busi­ness model con­sist­ing of free and lib­eral dis­tri­bu­tion plus online advertising.

And that’s exactly what most news­pa­pers did. By the late 1990s, almost all news­pa­pers put their valu­able report­ing and exclus­ive com­ment­ary online and allowed it to pro­lif­er­ate, eas­ily access­ible and free.

They did just as the new model pro­fessed and sold advert­ising to mon­et­ize the increased audi­ence they were attracting.

Well, here we are ten years later bom­barded almost daily by announce­ments of news­pa­per lay­offs and closures.

The evid­ence is in, and I think we can safely say that the “inform­a­tion wants to be free” approach not only does not work, actu­ally it has been a dis­aster for almost all news­pa­pers. Con­tinue read­ing →

The News Media’s Lessons From The Obama Campaign

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Obama textMy chums — the Car­ni­vores of Journ­al­ism (read in tooth and claw) — are rip­ping apart the les­sons for the news media from the online elect­oral cam­paign­ing of President-elect Barack Obama.

Here’s my mes­sage for the old news media. You missed a rev­enue stream. Auc­tion endorsements.

Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Face­book wrap­pers. This is not the Paypal pub­lic sphere. We’re not all friends and Obama didn’t twit­ter his way to the White House. Con­tinue read­ing →