Why Most Newspapers Will Fail: Deep Inertia

Newspapers as a a whole are not making a transition to the new media landscape:

A Harsh Reality for Newspapers - Brain Stelter via NY Times

Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded six companies that own 121 newspapers to share private data about the financial performance of many of their papers. And the findings were grim.

On average, for every new dollar the newspapers were earning in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. The papers seemed not to be diversifying their revenue streams or coming up with innovative products at a fast enough clip.

[…]

“Only 40 percent of papers say targeted advertising is a major part of their sales efforts,” the report states. “Most papers are not putting major effort into selling ‘smart’ or customized digital ads, the category expected to soon dominate local advertising.”

I don’t think that the NY Times — where I read this story — is pushing personalized ads to me. If they were, I wouldn’t be seeing Fashion Week all over the page.

DVRs and Streaming Prompt a Shift in the Top-Rated TV Shows - Bill Carter and Brian Stelter via NYTimes.com

We are living in a time-shifted world — at least on TV — and networks are now counting DVR data in calculating what are the most popular shows. But advertisers are still not willing to pay for anything after the first three days:

DVRs and Streaming Prompt a Shift in the Top-Rated TV Shows - Bill Carter and Brian Stelter via NYTimes.com

Total popularity does not perfectly correlate with profitability, however, since the networks all agree to sell ad time based on a metric called “C3.” It measures the average viewing of the commercials within a show within three days of the first broadcast, so it excludes people who wait to watch Wednesday’s “Modern Family” until Sunday or Monday.

Still, advertisers are paying, happily so, for the three days that are counted.

“We do like viewing in the playback mode,” said Tim Spengler, the global chief executive of the media-buying firm Magna Global. “We’re finding that the viewers are more attentive. They are less distracted. They have picked a time when they have the opportunity for more engagement than they would have if their kids were bugging them or they had three things to do at once.”

Mr. Spengler said many advertisers, like fast food restaurants, movie companies and some retailers, do not want to pay for ads beyond three days because what they have offered might be out of date. But, he said, other advertisers recognize there is “some value” to the four additional days of viewing that are not counted by C3 — even among fast-forwarders, because they do see glimpses of messages here and there.

The networks would eventually like to sell ad time based on seven days of viewership, but most viewership happens in the three-day window; Paul Lee, the president of ABC Entertainment, said ABC is able to “capture about 93 percent” of the value of the “Modern Family” audience with the C3 ratings.

Ultimately, the long tail for shows — and ads — will stretch out past three days, and advertisers will be paying for what they get, although DVR data might prove to be less important than second screen data, since an ad going by on the TV has no impact on someone who is actively typing in a chat about the game he is watching.

WordPress.com Partners with Federated Media for WordAds

Jon Burke

If you’re going to have advertising on your site, it darn well better be good, and beginning with our partnership with Federated Media we’re ready to start rolling out WordAds here on WordPress.com.

I was working with Federated Media a few years ago, but got dumb ads — Chevrolet? — and dropped out of the program. Maybe Wordpress will do it better.

I think that Tumblr should invent some sort of ad program, too. Please?

(via tacanderson)

(Source: newcommbiz)

The enemy is not the innovators. The enemy is the idea of not doing anything, and thinking that change is not going to happen.

- Nate Weiner,  cited by Lois Beckett in Instapaper, Read It Later, Byliner: Platform founders on the pageview economics of time-shifted reading. Weiner is also the guy who calls time-shifted reading ‘Tivo for the web’.

How to balance the desire of readers to filter ads with the desire of publishers to have embedded ads in works?

Weiner, the founder of Read It Later, tries to make the point that the innovators — like Weiner, Marco Arment of Instapaper, and John Tayman of Byliner — are just doing what readers want. The trick will be figuring out a way to make the publishers happy.

In a fluid world, the notion of web pages (except as an archival mechanism) is changing rapidly. A URL is a unique ID referencing an object, most importantly, a handle that can be used to dereference: to access the object being referenced, and pulling its contents into some context.

The issue is, then: Are the ads associated with works part of the work or an additional bit of stuff? 

From the viewpoint of the reader, the ads are extraneous, and not inviolably part of the work, because filtering them in no way degrades the experience of the article, photo, video, or audio. 

I believe that a new sense of ‘fair use’ will have to evolve, and it will be somewhere to the left of what publishers like. For example, something like the reverse of the model for online newspapers, where I can access the NY Times without fee for up to 20 times per month. Perhaps a model would evolve where I can skip NY Times ads in Read It Later for 20 times per month, after which I have to see at least one of their ads in subsequent viewings?

Flipboard Big Ad Push

parislemon:

One of the things I’ve always hated about ads on the web is just how little attention is paid to the way they actually look. Instead, ads are shoved in any and all available white space. This makes both the ads and the content look like shit.

Flipboard will take a different approach. Ads will only be full-screen, and will reside in between stories, like a traditional magazine. 

Will that work? I don’t know, but I certainly appreciate Flipboard’s firm stance to keep the reading experience as pleasant and as beautiful as possible. 

It’s at least better than some alternatives, like making ads look like stories.

Bizo Switchboard: Another Ad URL Shortener

Stumbled across Bizo Switchboard today, which seems to be another ad URL shortener, like Bre.ad that I wrote about recently (here’s a bre.ad link to the post about them). However, instead of an interstitial ad model, Bizo is based around a StumbleUpon-like bar at the top of the window framing in the target page, and showing some branding about the sender and a text link, which is the advertisement.

Switchboard is organized around a analytics solution already being used by enterprises (although I haven’t heard of them before). However they have some very serious investors, so they must have a good story.

The sorts of analytics seem a bit patchy, like the missing gender and education info in this example:

Clearly, some media companies might be willing to pay to frame in ads, especially when they are pointed out to competitors websites, but I wonder what the click through rates are like?

I recall that Jason Calacanis once said that the best single ad he ever dreamed up at Weblogs Inc was a one line text ad that ran at the top of every page. And that is more or less what Switchboard offers, except it is placed on the top of every page you point people too.