A simple solution to online newspaper advertising
by James on Feb.08, 2010, under Technology
Unless you’ve been living in a hole (and therefore probably not reading this) for the last several years, the death knell for traditional newspapers has been ringing. Advertising revenue is down, paper subscriptions are down, and the comics page really, really sucks.
In an attempt to prop up revenue, some newspapers are trying to wall off free-loading internet users (with hilarious results). The reason for this is that internet advertising doesn’t pay on the same scale print advertising. Pay per impression (page view) for ads are very low. Part of this is because internet ads tend to be very scattershot. Even if you are dealing with a local or regional paper, the adds tend to be for national brands, questionable weight loss products and teeth whiteners.
The key to success with online advertising, as Google has demonstrated, is targeted advertising. Surprisingly enough, advertising what people would like to buy works better than the one-size-fits-all approach that is currently used.
The solution is rather simple. Instead of a paywall, there is mandatory registration, much like what is required to post a comment on an article. With that you can get the three pieces of information most sought after by advertisers: age, gender, and region.
Now, when the newspaper is selling ad space, they can say precisely what demographic is views their pages and how often. Very simple scripts could then be written that would tailor the ads that you see to your location and demographic.
By making the advertising more effective, they would also make it more valuable and therefore be able to get better rates for the ad space.
Additionally, this is also a system that would work exceptionally well for Hulu, not only for the targeted advertising, but also to have the numbers of episode views and who is watching them where. I’d be willing to bet that is the kind of data that network executives would be willing to pay money for.
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3 Comments for this entry
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February 9th, 2010 on 00:23
The Internet is a tsunami that is sweeping over many industries. What will be left when we have completed the transition will be seen but I personally don’t have a lot of faith that traditional client-server news reporting styles will remain. What I see emerging from network effects is decentralized news. Your blog for example. It is a datum and that datum is aggregated together with others to become a feed. Others can then filter those feeds to pull out noteworthy stories and further categorize them by interest. Even others can subscribe to these “meta” feeds of better refined information then categorize anew and the network can grow however deep as you like in that pattern. You as a consumer and simultaneously a producer of news point your feed reading software to the sources you trust and each of us together provide blocks to the whole. In this model, there is no need for mega-corporations to tell you what to think, instead it is neighbor to neighbor with lots and lots of invisible markup, and a big chunk of artificial intelligence for spam removal, in between.
February 10th, 2010 on 16:47
Yes, but there will still be a need for full time journalists. Who else will sit around the White House or Capitol Hill. Who else will do the interviews and the investigations. We all have jobs and so there is fairly limited time for news gathering.
February 10th, 2010 on 18:18
The issue is that the people who still care will cover the news. The White House in a desperate bid to stay relevant will send their news to those bloggers who seed stories ;) From there it is network effects. There are many reasons to not cry for the demise of traditional reporting methods, one of those reasons is the control implicit in the relationship. I’m not impressed with it, but that’s another topic! :D