When a big story breaks, editors face the challenge of trying to avoid telling readers what they already know. MALCOLM COLLESS explores the options:
THE recent devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan highlighted a critical challenge for newspaper editors: how to strike a balance between saturation coverage and the need to be different.
It’s a hard call in the immediate aftermath of something as enormous as this but the issue becomes more pertinent in ensuing days particularly with print competing against continuous electronic media updates, specifically on television.
It is not surprising that reader and viewer attention is captivated by the impact of such major calamities.
But the increasingly common decision by TV network editors to abandon normal programming for continuous coverage – sometimes over several days – may well be turning people off, particularly when much of the footage, including interviews, is being carouselled.
Newspaper response seems to display an editorial judgment that more is better (and possibly safer). Hence, the papers compete for attention with bigger and bigger sections covering these issues.
Of course, this approach is not unique to calamities. Take for example the annual coverage of the national budgets. The dailies strive to out-do each other by boasting more details, more stories, more comments and opinions and of course more pages than their competitors.
Is this what the reader really wants, or is it a run down on the key issues in the Budget and their impact on their day-to-day existence?
Politics, they say, is more about perception than reality.
And there seems to be a growing community perception that news has become a casualty in the rising tide of comment and opinion in our media outlets.
While this is a criticism of newspapers, it is not confined to print and can be seen in the way “news” is delivered on the television networks, including the ABC.
Long gone are the days when a by-line was a prized reward for a story – often preserved for scoops or major interpretive pieces.
Today, everyone gets a by-line no matter what the size or importance of the story and more often than not it is accompanied by a colour pic of the author.
And all of this is supported by a seemingly endless parade of contributing experts delivering their own, highly profiled, views on major events.
Meanwhile, the traditional definition of news is becoming even more blurred as we find television breakfast show presenters, who are not even journalists, flying in to deliver their programs from catastrophes including mining disasters, and flood and earthquake ravaged cities.
The eternal problem for print is that it is finite.
Once a newspaper is published, that is it.
The concept of a 24-hour newspaper died at birth assisted initially by the growth of the internet that extended from PCs to laptops to phones.
To survive, print has to be part of this. So far the electronic media has continued to draw heavily on the traditional print editorial pool to bolster its coverage of issues.
In other words you are more likely to hear or see a newspaper journalist on TV or radio than to see an electronic media journalist interviewed in a newspaper.
But does this reflect readership and circulation trends, or is it more a matter of convention?
Whatever the case, the print media will continue to come under growing pressure from alternative sources of information and from the increasing challenge, particularly from the younger market, to the relevance of traditional content.
It may well come to pass that what is going to rapidly confront newspapers is not just the challenge to dare to be different, but how long can they afford not to be different and from each other.
Malcolm Colless is a former senior executive at News Ltd and writes a column for The Australian’s media section.
Source: Panpa.org.au
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Readers in a dilemma: newspapers or untrustworthy Internet?
Based on a recent report of research carried out by the Center for the Digital Future at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, consumers seem not to be sure of their preferences.
Only 56% of Internet users ranked newspapers as an important source of information, with an even lower 29% viewing papers as a source of entertainment. 18% withdrew their newspaper subscriptions because "they now get the same or related content online."
When asked what they would do if the print edition of their newspaper stopped, a significant 59% said they would go with the online edition, 37% said they would move on to the print edition of another newspaper, and 22% admitted that they would not miss the print edition of their paper.
With the above statistics, it is somewhat surprising that 61% of these same users find "only half or less of online information is reliable," with 14% believing that "only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable." Only 46% have some degree trust in the Internet, with 9% having no trust whatsoever.
In a twist previously explored by Sfnblog, 49% of internet users admitted to using sites such as Twitter, with only 0% willing to pay for the service. "Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future.
"Where are people going to find news and information they trust, in a world with a dwindling number of print publications and an ever-expanding number of online publications?" Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times asked, before answering, in summary of the figures above, that "readers have not yet figured out the answer to that." Can newspapers persuade readers that their online versions are trustworthy?
Source: 2010 Digital Future Report, The New York Times
Only 56% of Internet users ranked newspapers as an important source of information, with an even lower 29% viewing papers as a source of entertainment. 18% withdrew their newspaper subscriptions because "they now get the same or related content online."
When asked what they would do if the print edition of their newspaper stopped, a significant 59% said they would go with the online edition, 37% said they would move on to the print edition of another newspaper, and 22% admitted that they would not miss the print edition of their paper.
With the above statistics, it is somewhat surprising that 61% of these same users find "only half or less of online information is reliable," with 14% believing that "only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable." Only 46% have some degree trust in the Internet, with 9% having no trust whatsoever.
In a twist previously explored by Sfnblog, 49% of internet users admitted to using sites such as Twitter, with only 0% willing to pay for the service. "Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future.
"Where are people going to find news and information they trust, in a world with a dwindling number of print publications and an ever-expanding number of online publications?" Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times asked, before answering, in summary of the figures above, that "readers have not yet figured out the answer to that." Can newspapers persuade readers that their online versions are trustworthy?
Source: 2010 Digital Future Report, The New York Times
Friday, July 16, 2010
Century-old Brazilian daily to move entirely online
The Rio de Janeiro-based Jornal do Brasil will stop circulating its 119-year-old print edition and appear only online, O Globo reports. The paper’s owner, Nelson Tanure, says he will set the date for the changeover this week.
Before deciding to end the print edition, Tanure tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the newspaper as it is mired in debt and circulation has fallen to 17,000 during the week and 22,000 on Sundays. According to Globo, the attitude among Jornal’s 180 employees – including 60 journalists – is one of sadness and anxiety.
The current paper has fallen far from its storied past, when it was known for its quality coverage of significant news issues and its memorable editions. One of its most famous is from December 14, 1968, when the military government closed Congress and Jornal do Brasil evaded censors by publishing a “weather report” on its front page, saying the temperature was “suffocating.”
Source: Knight Center for Journalism
Before deciding to end the print edition, Tanure tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the newspaper as it is mired in debt and circulation has fallen to 17,000 during the week and 22,000 on Sundays. According to Globo, the attitude among Jornal’s 180 employees – including 60 journalists – is one of sadness and anxiety.
The current paper has fallen far from its storied past, when it was known for its quality coverage of significant news issues and its memorable editions. One of its most famous is from December 14, 1968, when the military government closed Congress and Jornal do Brasil evaded censors by publishing a “weather report” on its front page, saying the temperature was “suffocating.”
Source: Knight Center for Journalism
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Pay-per-click is the new online paradigm
As the Times and Sunday Times prepare to go behind a paywall, print publishing must face up to reality – major online adjustments are needed.
One of the major shifts in the consumption of media over the past decade is the transfer of control from publishers and advertisers to the consumer. TV viewers screen commercials using DVR systems; radio listeners customise their programming using internet or satellite radio; and internet users use ad-blocking software or just train their eye to ignore display ads all together. The result is that the old paradigm, where ads are imposed on the audience, is losing its effectiveness.
Instead, a new paradigm is emerging. Since the consumer is no longer passive, advertising models are learning to take into account the interests of all stakeholders: the advertiser, the publisher and the consumer.Search advertising and its adjacent ads model fully incorporate this new thinking. From the advertiser's point of view, this pay-per-click (PPC) model shifts some of the risk to the publisher, who only gets paid if the user took action and clicked on the advertisement.
In an article published in this newspaper a few weeks ago we proposed a new online monetisation model for newspapers. The idea is that papers will learn how to use their unique advantage online – credibility – by presenting relevant advertisers next to the products, services and activities they review. Some of the reactions voiced ethical concerns. "I can see why the shift you argue for would make sense from a publishing perspective," said Jill Drew, a former business editor for the Washington Post, "but for me it crosses a line between commerce and journalism that I'm uncomfortable with."
One possible solution for these concerns is that in this model the newspapers often don't or shouldn't work directly with the vendors but rather with aggregators who represent multiple retailers. The New York Times, for instance, linked the 10 best books of 2009 it recommended on its "Holiday Gift Guide" to three possible buying venues: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and local booksellers. Another solution is using automatically generated contextual ads. Google's Adsense algorithm, for instance, knows how to fit relevant ads to such content and it works as a firewall between the newspaper and the vendors. When consumers click, the ad aggregators share the revenue with the newspaper.
Moreover, newspapers always had to handle commercial pressures that threatened to compromise their integrity. Whether it is a newspaper that publishes a negative story about a bank that is also one of its biggest advertisers, or a television network that exposes a safety issue with a car manufacturer, the ethical threat has always been there.
Other naysayers suggested that such a model will result in consumer sections being all that's left of journalism. But this won't make much sense for newspapers, as a big part of their authority is a result of their non-consumer-oriented coverage. If you search on Google for "British government", no ad appears, yet the search engine chooses to include such data in its index as part of creating its authority. The revenue is generated when searching for "London hotels". That doesn't mean that the first search is less important.
Another reaction wondered whether an article criticising a political party will click through to a page where one could contribute to a choice of rival parties. Well ... why not? The Huffington Post is running a similar concept these days in its Impact section in what can be called "inter-activism": sponsored links enable interested readers to take action. In this model, readers can be presented with a range of sponsored actionable articles, implicating different levels of involvement, such as signing a petition or donating money.
The print publishing industry can no longer afford to make only minor adjustments for the new media. The basic rules of the game are changing, calling for collaboration between advertisers, consumers and publishers. Whether the leveraging trust model is a valid solution or not, any solution to newspapers' financial crisis must consider this new stakeholder paradigm. If the consumer and the advertiser have nothing to gain, the publisher will gain nothing as well.
Source: Guardian
Instead, a new paradigm is emerging. Since the consumer is no longer passive, advertising models are learning to take into account the interests of all stakeholders: the advertiser, the publisher and the consumer.Search advertising and its adjacent ads model fully incorporate this new thinking. From the advertiser's point of view, this pay-per-click (PPC) model shifts some of the risk to the publisher, who only gets paid if the user took action and clicked on the advertisement.
In an article published in this newspaper a few weeks ago we proposed a new online monetisation model for newspapers. The idea is that papers will learn how to use their unique advantage online – credibility – by presenting relevant advertisers next to the products, services and activities they review. Some of the reactions voiced ethical concerns. "I can see why the shift you argue for would make sense from a publishing perspective," said Jill Drew, a former business editor for the Washington Post, "but for me it crosses a line between commerce and journalism that I'm uncomfortable with."
One possible solution for these concerns is that in this model the newspapers often don't or shouldn't work directly with the vendors but rather with aggregators who represent multiple retailers. The New York Times, for instance, linked the 10 best books of 2009 it recommended on its "Holiday Gift Guide" to three possible buying venues: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and local booksellers. Another solution is using automatically generated contextual ads. Google's Adsense algorithm, for instance, knows how to fit relevant ads to such content and it works as a firewall between the newspaper and the vendors. When consumers click, the ad aggregators share the revenue with the newspaper.
Moreover, newspapers always had to handle commercial pressures that threatened to compromise their integrity. Whether it is a newspaper that publishes a negative story about a bank that is also one of its biggest advertisers, or a television network that exposes a safety issue with a car manufacturer, the ethical threat has always been there.
Other naysayers suggested that such a model will result in consumer sections being all that's left of journalism. But this won't make much sense for newspapers, as a big part of their authority is a result of their non-consumer-oriented coverage. If you search on Google for "British government", no ad appears, yet the search engine chooses to include such data in its index as part of creating its authority. The revenue is generated when searching for "London hotels". That doesn't mean that the first search is less important.
Another reaction wondered whether an article criticising a political party will click through to a page where one could contribute to a choice of rival parties. Well ... why not? The Huffington Post is running a similar concept these days in its Impact section in what can be called "inter-activism": sponsored links enable interested readers to take action. In this model, readers can be presented with a range of sponsored actionable articles, implicating different levels of involvement, such as signing a petition or donating money.
The print publishing industry can no longer afford to make only minor adjustments for the new media. The basic rules of the game are changing, calling for collaboration between advertisers, consumers and publishers. Whether the leveraging trust model is a valid solution or not, any solution to newspapers' financial crisis must consider this new stakeholder paradigm. If the consumer and the advertiser have nothing to gain, the publisher will gain nothing as well.
Source: Guardian
A defensive experiment: How the Times of London and the Times in New York diverge on paid content
When Rupert Murdoch arrived at The Wall Street Journal, the word on the executive floor was that WSJ.com would soon become an entirely free site. After Murdoch was given a look at the numbers by the business side, the subscriptions remained.
Remembering that, I figured Murdoch’s talk of a draconian, all-or-nothing paywalls for The Times of London and The Sunday Times was saber-rattling aimed at the likes of Google, Microsoft and his own competitors. This would be the Journal experience in reverse, I assumed: News Corp. would talk up an absolutist paywall locking its content away from casual visitors and automated spiders alike, but then look at its own property’s success with a relatively porous, search- and link-friendly paywall and implement a more-nuanced approach.
But I was wrong. (And Alan Rusbridger, you were right.) As Tim Bradshaw writes for the Financial Times’ techblog, when the paywalls go up on the Times and the Sunday Times in a few weeks, all but the homepages will become invisible unless you pay £1 a day or £2 a week. There won’t be a meter like the FT’s or the one The New York Times plans to implement next year. You’ll be in or out. (And News International’s Paul Hayes has a pungent prediction about his own fate if too many people choose “out.”)
Sneak peek in Wapping
Bradshaw was part of a group of journalists and bloggers News International invited to a sneak peek (as was the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones), and he writes that “some members of the Times team seemed as keen to know what we thought of the plans as we were to see them.” And indeed, some of the comments made to Bradshaw read as simultaneously hopeful and a tad defensive. Assistant editor Tom Whitwell praised his publication’s spare, print-like look (which I agree is elegant and quite readable) and said that the Times would throw fewer stories at people than most sites, which he portrayed as a better alternative than “Google News showing you 4,000 versions of the same thing.” (Apples to oranges, as Google News is for searching, not browsing the news.)
Comment editor Danny Finkelstein, for his part, seemed unconcerned by the possibility that his articles will no longer be part of the online conversation, retorting that news organizations without a paywall “won’t go viral, they will go out of business” and adding that “we are trying to make people pay for the journalism…I want my employer to be paid for the intellectual property they are paying me for.” When a Twitter correspondent called the redesign very nice but said he wouldn’t be paying for it, Finkelstein responded: “Sorry to hear that. Our alternative is???”
Well, a number of things — including alternatives that seem far more promising for attracting new readers, keeping news organizations and writers like Finkelstein from being sidelined, and that aren’t such big gambles on traffic and ad dollars. The Times could emulate the Journal’s own model, setting up a relatively porous paywall that has retained subscribers (and thereby boosted ad revenues) while allowing Journal content to be discovered and read through search and shared through email, blogs, and social media. Or the Times could opt for a metered model like that of the FT, in which readers can see a certain number of articles per month for free, after which they’re asked to subscribe. That model zeroes in on a news organization’s most-frequent visitors — who one would assume would be the most-loyal, engaged members of its audience — and asks them to pay. (Disclosure: Perhaps because of my WSJ.com DNA, I’ve long advocated or at least not opposed paywalls and meters, and I now consult for Journalism Online.)
Closed vs. open
Where the Times U.K.’s model is closed, the Times U.S.’s model seems as open as possible. All Things D’s Peter Kafka notes that the Times’ meter won’t count links from third-party sites such as blogs. (Well, as a Times spokeswoman notes in a comment, actually they will — but if you’re over the limit you can still read a story via an outside link. Which would seem to indicate they won’t.) As Kafka notes, it’s a bit confusing, but the aim is that bloggers won’t be deterred from linking to the Times and readers won’t be trained not to follow such links.
Can that system be gamed? Of course — just as people can bypass the Journal’s paywall by searching for headlines in Google. But worrying about gaming is looking at paid content from the absolutist point of view: Everybody pays and maybe we make some exceptions. The metered model starts from a very different place: Figure out who’s most likely to pay, try to convert them, and don’t worry about the people who won’t pay anyway.
Between iPad apps and the renewed interest in subscriptions, metered models, and paywalls, the next 12 months are going to see a lot of ferment and experimentation in paid content. That experimentation is a good thing for the news industry, and there’s no reason an absolutist paywall shouldn’t be one of those experiments. (Particularly since News Corp. can pay for it out of a sliver of “Avatar” royalties.) But there are experiments designed to explore possible successes, and experiments designed to confirm probable failures. The Times U.K.’s paywall seems likely to be one of the latter.
Source: The Nieman Journalism LabTuesday, September 15, 2009
News matters so much more than what delivers it
By Jeff Jarvis
Portable reading devices were described as offering "a glimmer of hope for the embattled industry" in these pages last week. Having spent the past two months reading two newspapers - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - primarily on my Amazon Kindle, I'd say that glimmer is dim.
The problems with the Kindle could be - and no doubt will be - solved. The reader works wonderfully for books. But it also tries to turn a newspaper into a book, starting us on the first page of the first story and nudging us through its awkward user interface to proceed a page-turn at a time through the entire product, as we used to on paper. The digital among us, however, no longer read news in this way. Online, we search and link and flit and explore. We are in control of the experience, not some editor somewhere.
Online, news has been freed from its packaging. Indeed, that is a key architectural underpinning of the web itself: content is separated from presentation. The same text and media can be fed into a web page, or into an iPhone app or an RSS feed. Substance parts company with style. All of which makes me wonder whether we will ever see the iPod moment for newspapers.
News Corp, Hearst and other publishers are reportedly working with manufacturers to develop flat electronic substitutes for their beloved paper. Their assumption is that we are pining for a familiar, nostalgic presentation of content. They hope that when electronic news reminds us of print news - that is, when editors can once more package the world for us - we'll again be loyal to and perhaps pay for their work and brands.
Sorry, but I think the opposite is occurring. We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall. News is spread in the speed of a tweet. The half-life of a scoop's value is lessened but the value of links grows.
These economics were driven home to me as I read the Journal on my Kindle. Since my days on an expense account, I've subscribed to the Journal online, paying more than $100 a year. For the last two months, I was paying an additional $9.99 a month for it on the Kindle. But in that time, I saw just how few Journal stories I read or needed to read after I'd gone through the New York Times and my RSS and Twitter feeds, which send me to a dozen sources. It's links that most often get me to read articles.
In the emotional frenzy to find a way to make us pay for news again online, the Journal is reportedly mulling the idea of micropayments, in the hope that this will attract a new audience unwilling to subscribe but wanting to get that unique Journal story - folks such as me who come in via links and search. I see unintended consequences ahead. I may end up paying cents for stories instead of dollars for a subscription. Indeed, when the Journal raised its Kindle price to $14.99, I hit my limit. I cancelled.
I will still read news on gadgets, of course. The New York Times has a brilliant iPhone app that is constantly updated and ad-subsidised and free (as I wish the Kindle were). The Times also has a new version of its PC reader that more closely mimics the experience of reading the paper; it's appealing.
But in news, neither the device nor the form matters nearly as much as the information and its timing. This requires that publishers unleash their news on every device possible. But no single gadget will be their saviour. None will bring back the good old days - if they were that - of news and the world delivered in neat little packages we paid for.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Portable reading devices were described as offering "a glimmer of hope for the embattled industry" in these pages last week. Having spent the past two months reading two newspapers - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - primarily on my Amazon Kindle, I'd say that glimmer is dim.
The problems with the Kindle could be - and no doubt will be - solved. The reader works wonderfully for books. But it also tries to turn a newspaper into a book, starting us on the first page of the first story and nudging us through its awkward user interface to proceed a page-turn at a time through the entire product, as we used to on paper. The digital among us, however, no longer read news in this way. Online, we search and link and flit and explore. We are in control of the experience, not some editor somewhere.
Online, news has been freed from its packaging. Indeed, that is a key architectural underpinning of the web itself: content is separated from presentation. The same text and media can be fed into a web page, or into an iPhone app or an RSS feed. Substance parts company with style. All of which makes me wonder whether we will ever see the iPod moment for newspapers.
News Corp, Hearst and other publishers are reportedly working with manufacturers to develop flat electronic substitutes for their beloved paper. Their assumption is that we are pining for a familiar, nostalgic presentation of content. They hope that when electronic news reminds us of print news - that is, when editors can once more package the world for us - we'll again be loyal to and perhaps pay for their work and brands.
Sorry, but I think the opposite is occurring. We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall. News is spread in the speed of a tweet. The half-life of a scoop's value is lessened but the value of links grows.
These economics were driven home to me as I read the Journal on my Kindle. Since my days on an expense account, I've subscribed to the Journal online, paying more than $100 a year. For the last two months, I was paying an additional $9.99 a month for it on the Kindle. But in that time, I saw just how few Journal stories I read or needed to read after I'd gone through the New York Times and my RSS and Twitter feeds, which send me to a dozen sources. It's links that most often get me to read articles.
In the emotional frenzy to find a way to make us pay for news again online, the Journal is reportedly mulling the idea of micropayments, in the hope that this will attract a new audience unwilling to subscribe but wanting to get that unique Journal story - folks such as me who come in via links and search. I see unintended consequences ahead. I may end up paying cents for stories instead of dollars for a subscription. Indeed, when the Journal raised its Kindle price to $14.99, I hit my limit. I cancelled.
I will still read news on gadgets, of course. The New York Times has a brilliant iPhone app that is constantly updated and ad-subsidised and free (as I wish the Kindle were). The Times also has a new version of its PC reader that more closely mimics the experience of reading the paper; it's appealing.
But in news, neither the device nor the form matters nearly as much as the information and its timing. This requires that publishers unleash their news on every device possible. But no single gadget will be their saviour. None will bring back the good old days - if they were that - of news and the world delivered in neat little packages we paid for.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Saving journalism, a farthing at a time
Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet online. The answer is not to give content away but to sell it – for peanuts
Ever since Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put his digital titles behind a paywall, claiming the "free" web was dead, the rest of the media have either pooh-poohed his proposals, or nervously wondered if they should do likewise.
A great deal of online content is profitably charged for – notably music and porn – but news struggles. With the exception of some high-value material from publications like the Wall Street Journal, news doesn't seem able to turn a buck. Experiments in charging have largely failed – and the advertising-subsidised model has reigned supreme.
However, with recession, advertising revenues, always marginal at best, have dried up. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can't see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch's retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn't so much the money, it's the usernames, passwords, subscriptions ... Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn't. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn't exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won't go away: micropayments.
The basic concept of micropayments is that you charge at a price that doesn't deter consumers at all, but will aggregate enough profit, via mass sales, to sustain a business. Classical micropayment theory (yes, there is a classical and neo theory – probably a superstring version too) states that payments should be of the order of 1/1000 of a US cent. A cent would be the minimum now. Fans claim this is beneath the mental threshold at which resistance to a purchase sets in. Critics divide into two camps – those who feel it's a dumb idea, and those who feel it's evil. Dumb because similar schemes have failed in the past. Evil because it swipes your money under the radar, and an effective scheme could easily expand to diminish the entire web by fencing off vast quantities of content. The dumb argument can be countered – we can implement a scheme today that beats previous implementations hands down – I'll explain how in a moment. I pretty much accept the evil argument, but it's the lesser of several evils – the main one being that journalism goes down the pan unless we find a way to fund mainstream media online.
So, how could it work? Step forward Google. Many of you will be familiar with Google Ads – perhaps not with how the system works. Basically, you sign up, create a bundle of code using their site tools, wrap it into your own pages and presto, ads appear, and when your visitors click on those ads, you get paid. Not immediately. Payments – tiny payments – are tracked and added up. To reduce payment transaction costs, you're paid one sum, once a month. The code has unique identifiers, the code is smart enough to tell Google to look at your pages, providing content-targeted ads. The database in the background keeps track. You just watch the money roll in. The transfer potential of this technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They'd have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they're allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider's account for every item they read – if visitors aren't GoogleDosh members, they're re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that's what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That's my theory, at least. It's technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need. Not just news of course – anything could be paid for in the same way.
Googlephobics will no doubt hold their hands up in horror. Tough. This needs a big player – there are two: Google and Microsoft. Of the two, Google already has the infrastructure and the reputation for managing situations like this. Not only that, but they're touted as news content's No 1 enemy, via GoogleNews. They "owe" the press one. Yes, there are issues. Privacy. Exclusion, perhaps. And further entrenching a near-monopoly position. But these can be countered, technically and economically – and nothing stops parallel schemes running, once the concept is established. The fact is that in the boom years micropayments looked like a lot of fuss, and a leap into the unknown. I get the impression publishers' pride got in the way of being asked to sell for pennies. But now the boom is over, micropayments aren't an option – they may be the only way forward.
Source: Guardian.co.uk
Ever since Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put his digital titles behind a paywall, claiming the "free" web was dead, the rest of the media have either pooh-poohed his proposals, or nervously wondered if they should do likewise.
A great deal of online content is profitably charged for – notably music and porn – but news struggles. With the exception of some high-value material from publications like the Wall Street Journal, news doesn't seem able to turn a buck. Experiments in charging have largely failed – and the advertising-subsidised model has reigned supreme.
However, with recession, advertising revenues, always marginal at best, have dried up. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can't see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch's retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn't so much the money, it's the usernames, passwords, subscriptions ... Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn't. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn't exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won't go away: micropayments.
The basic concept of micropayments is that you charge at a price that doesn't deter consumers at all, but will aggregate enough profit, via mass sales, to sustain a business. Classical micropayment theory (yes, there is a classical and neo theory – probably a superstring version too) states that payments should be of the order of 1/1000 of a US cent. A cent would be the minimum now. Fans claim this is beneath the mental threshold at which resistance to a purchase sets in. Critics divide into two camps – those who feel it's a dumb idea, and those who feel it's evil. Dumb because similar schemes have failed in the past. Evil because it swipes your money under the radar, and an effective scheme could easily expand to diminish the entire web by fencing off vast quantities of content. The dumb argument can be countered – we can implement a scheme today that beats previous implementations hands down – I'll explain how in a moment. I pretty much accept the evil argument, but it's the lesser of several evils – the main one being that journalism goes down the pan unless we find a way to fund mainstream media online.
So, how could it work? Step forward Google. Many of you will be familiar with Google Ads – perhaps not with how the system works. Basically, you sign up, create a bundle of code using their site tools, wrap it into your own pages and presto, ads appear, and when your visitors click on those ads, you get paid. Not immediately. Payments – tiny payments – are tracked and added up. To reduce payment transaction costs, you're paid one sum, once a month. The code has unique identifiers, the code is smart enough to tell Google to look at your pages, providing content-targeted ads. The database in the background keeps track. You just watch the money roll in. The transfer potential of this technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They'd have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they're allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider's account for every item they read – if visitors aren't GoogleDosh members, they're re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that's what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That's my theory, at least. It's technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need. Not just news of course – anything could be paid for in the same way.
Googlephobics will no doubt hold their hands up in horror. Tough. This needs a big player – there are two: Google and Microsoft. Of the two, Google already has the infrastructure and the reputation for managing situations like this. Not only that, but they're touted as news content's No 1 enemy, via GoogleNews. They "owe" the press one. Yes, there are issues. Privacy. Exclusion, perhaps. And further entrenching a near-monopoly position. But these can be countered, technically and economically – and nothing stops parallel schemes running, once the concept is established. The fact is that in the boom years micropayments looked like a lot of fuss, and a leap into the unknown. I get the impression publishers' pride got in the way of being asked to sell for pennies. But now the boom is over, micropayments aren't an option – they may be the only way forward.
Source: Guardian.co.uk
Thursday, May 21, 2009
FT invests in new studios to boost digital offering
The Financial Times is aping a recent move by News International, by making a significant investment in multimedia studios, as it looks to refresh FT.com and incorporate more video on its homepage.
Two studios are being built that will be used by FT correspondents to provide content for FT.com's video and audio channels online.
Content will include news, analysis from across the world and head-to-head interviews, as well as special projects and reports, making full use of the opportunities video offers. The audio studio will be used for podcasts as well as round table discussions.
The Pearson-owned business newspaper will charge non-subscribers to use the online video service, if they use the service more than 10 times a month. If visitors use the site more than three times in a month, they will be asked to register.
FT.com has had more than one million video views for its current service, which was boosted by the launch of the FT mini-player in July. The paper already produces up to 170 videos every month.
The site attracts 11.4 million unique users a month, generating 83.2 million page views (ABCe figures, March 2009), and of these, 109,609 are subscribers, an increase of 8% over the same period last year.
The new video channel will continue to be supported by pre and post-roll advertising, although Jon Slade, global online and strategic advertising sales director, said it was looking at developing a less interruptive experience for users.
Slade said the sales team that worked across all media platforms would work with advertisers to give them better insight into users' online behaviour. Advertisers on the video service include Microsoft, IBM and Rolex. "We've seen a big shift in luxury brands moving in to the online video space," Slade added.
Richard Edgar, head of video, said if the FT was not involved in publishing in these new formats, it would lose its audience.
Source: mediaweek.co.uk
Two studios are being built that will be used by FT correspondents to provide content for FT.com's video and audio channels online.
Content will include news, analysis from across the world and head-to-head interviews, as well as special projects and reports, making full use of the opportunities video offers. The audio studio will be used for podcasts as well as round table discussions.
The Pearson-owned business newspaper will charge non-subscribers to use the online video service, if they use the service more than 10 times a month. If visitors use the site more than three times in a month, they will be asked to register.
FT.com has had more than one million video views for its current service, which was boosted by the launch of the FT mini-player in July. The paper already produces up to 170 videos every month.
The site attracts 11.4 million unique users a month, generating 83.2 million page views (ABCe figures, March 2009), and of these, 109,609 are subscribers, an increase of 8% over the same period last year.
The new video channel will continue to be supported by pre and post-roll advertising, although Jon Slade, global online and strategic advertising sales director, said it was looking at developing a less interruptive experience for users.
Slade said the sales team that worked across all media platforms would work with advertisers to give them better insight into users' online behaviour. Advertisers on the video service include Microsoft, IBM and Rolex. "We've seen a big shift in luxury brands moving in to the online video space," Slade added.
Richard Edgar, head of video, said if the FT was not involved in publishing in these new formats, it would lose its audience.
Source: mediaweek.co.uk
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Online Newspaper Readership Up Sharply in Toronto
NEARLY one in five adults in Toronto are reading newspapers online now more than they did a year ago, according to new data from the 2008 NADbank Readership study released Thursday.
Of the 19% of adults in Toronto who said that they spent more time with an online daily newspaper than in the previous year, 63% are male and 48% are between the ages of 18 to 34.
These adults who spend more time with online newspapers are also more likely to read a printed version of a daily newspaper, according to the study.
The Toronto findings are taken from the Newspaper Audience Databank's study of product, retail shopping and lifestyle data. The study includes readership data from 80 Canadian daily newspapers in 54 markets plus the two Detroit dailies . It also includes readership data from 58 community papers in 33 Canadian markets.
As part of the study more than 28,300 Canadian adults 18 years and older were surveyed in 22 urban markets.
The study includes data on 27 different product categories ranging from alcoholic beverage consumption to pleasure and business travel.
The Toronto results, released publicly Thursday, document the popularity of online social networks. Some 41% of online users -- or more than 1.4 million adults in Toronto -- accessed a social network site in the past month. Among those between 18 and 24 years old, the percentage spikes to 75%.
Source: editorandpublisher.com
Of the 19% of adults in Toronto who said that they spent more time with an online daily newspaper than in the previous year, 63% are male and 48% are between the ages of 18 to 34.
These adults who spend more time with online newspapers are also more likely to read a printed version of a daily newspaper, according to the study.
The Toronto findings are taken from the Newspaper Audience Databank's study of product, retail shopping and lifestyle data. The study includes readership data from 80 Canadian daily newspapers in 54 markets plus the two Detroit dailies . It also includes readership data from 58 community papers in 33 Canadian markets.
As part of the study more than 28,300 Canadian adults 18 years and older were surveyed in 22 urban markets.
The study includes data on 27 different product categories ranging from alcoholic beverage consumption to pleasure and business travel.
The Toronto results, released publicly Thursday, document the popularity of online social networks. Some 41% of online users -- or more than 1.4 million adults in Toronto -- accessed a social network site in the past month. Among those between 18 and 24 years old, the percentage spikes to 75%.
Source: editorandpublisher.com
Charging for Online Content, the 'Financial Times' Way
THIS week brings even more details about several newspaper companies - MediaNews Group, The New York Times, News Corp. - that are planning to apply some kind of paid content model to their Web sites.
As such we thought it would be a good time to check in with a newspaper that has been charging for online content since 2002 - The Financial Times.
Like its rival The Wall Street Journal, FT.com requires a subscription in order to access premium content. And like WSJ.com, the FT.com sets some content free in order to attract more people to the site.
However, over the past six months, FT.com has been tweaking its sampling strategy, a strategy, which was confusing at best. In the past, people could access up to 30 articles for free during a period of a month but would bump up against a pay wall once that trial expired.
Now the FT.com is trying different sampling strategies and in the words of Managing Director Rob Grimshaw, "bringing those barriers down a bit."
Users can access up to three stories for free per month. If a reader wants more but isn't willing to pay, they can register. That gets them 10 articles per month. Someone willing to shell out money can do so under one of two packages: $179 a year for the standard subscription or $299 for the premium subscription, which allows access to the FT's popular Lex column.
"The great thing about the model we now have is that we have our cake and we can eat it a bit," Grimshaw said. "On the one hand we have valuable content -- we should be making money from it. On the other hand, in order to bring in the audience we need to expose the content and show a little bit of that to the world."
Of course, the FT.com offers bundled subscriptions that include print and online depending. But Grimshaw points out that access to the FT.com is not free just because someone is a print subscriber. The FT charges an additional fee to access the site.
In 2008, FT.com reported 109,609 paid subscribers, up 8% year-over-year. It's a mix of pure online readers, corporate accounts, and print subscribers but Grimshaw said online-only subs are the largest chunk. He declined to specify the percentage.
Overall FT.com attracts 11.4 million unique users -- up 60% from 2007 and currently has 1.3 million register users.
The registration information is valuable, explained Grimshaw, letting advertisers know more about readers and their demographics. FT.com has the ability to target geographically and contextually and is able to charge a premium for doing so.
Grimshaw's ideal ratio of adverting to subscription revenue is 60:40. "We are not quite there yet," he said. "We're not far off though."
FT.com is trying to emphasize the quality of audience over the size: "The most important number is not this big headline number of unique users. The really important number are the users who are engaged in the proposition, who love it so much, they can't live without it."
Source: editorandpublisher.com
As such we thought it would be a good time to check in with a newspaper that has been charging for online content since 2002 - The Financial Times.
Like its rival The Wall Street Journal, FT.com requires a subscription in order to access premium content. And like WSJ.com, the FT.com sets some content free in order to attract more people to the site.
However, over the past six months, FT.com has been tweaking its sampling strategy, a strategy, which was confusing at best. In the past, people could access up to 30 articles for free during a period of a month but would bump up against a pay wall once that trial expired.
Now the FT.com is trying different sampling strategies and in the words of Managing Director Rob Grimshaw, "bringing those barriers down a bit."
Users can access up to three stories for free per month. If a reader wants more but isn't willing to pay, they can register. That gets them 10 articles per month. Someone willing to shell out money can do so under one of two packages: $179 a year for the standard subscription or $299 for the premium subscription, which allows access to the FT's popular Lex column.
"The great thing about the model we now have is that we have our cake and we can eat it a bit," Grimshaw said. "On the one hand we have valuable content -- we should be making money from it. On the other hand, in order to bring in the audience we need to expose the content and show a little bit of that to the world."
Of course, the FT.com offers bundled subscriptions that include print and online depending. But Grimshaw points out that access to the FT.com is not free just because someone is a print subscriber. The FT charges an additional fee to access the site.
In 2008, FT.com reported 109,609 paid subscribers, up 8% year-over-year. It's a mix of pure online readers, corporate accounts, and print subscribers but Grimshaw said online-only subs are the largest chunk. He declined to specify the percentage.
Overall FT.com attracts 11.4 million unique users -- up 60% from 2007 and currently has 1.3 million register users.
The registration information is valuable, explained Grimshaw, letting advertisers know more about readers and their demographics. FT.com has the ability to target geographically and contextually and is able to charge a premium for doing so.
Grimshaw's ideal ratio of adverting to subscription revenue is 60:40. "We are not quite there yet," he said. "We're not far off though."
FT.com is trying to emphasize the quality of audience over the size: "The most important number is not this big headline number of unique users. The really important number are the users who are engaged in the proposition, who love it so much, they can't live without it."
Source: editorandpublisher.com
Thursday, May 14, 2009
NY Times unveils 'Times Wire' online news feed
THE New York Times on Tuesday unveiled "Times Wire," a constantly updated live feed of articles and blog posts from the newspaper as they are published online.
The headline and first paragraph of the stories and blog posts are presented in reverse chronological order on a Web page with the latest appearing at the top of the page along with a link to the particular item on NYTimes.com.
Readers of nytimes.com/timeswire can choose to view all of the content published online by the Times in real-time or select specific topics such as business or sports.
Times Wire also features a photo gallery with the latest pictures.
Denise Warren, the general manager of NYTimes.com, said the free service was an attempt to "meet our audiences' desire for quality news and information on demand" and to give users "a more personalized news experience."
NYTimes.com is the leading US newspaper website with 20.1 million unique visitors in the United States in March 2009, according to Nielsen Online.
The launch of Times Wire came one day after the newspaper unveiled Times Reader 2.0, the latest version of an application that downloads the day's newspaper and presents it in a more attractive fashion than on NYTimes.com.
After downloading the content, a user can still the browse and read the newspaper even without an Internet connection.
Times Reader 2.0 also allows users to interact with the newspaper in ways they cannot with the website, filling in the daily crossword on the screen, for example.
Source: AFP
The headline and first paragraph of the stories and blog posts are presented in reverse chronological order on a Web page with the latest appearing at the top of the page along with a link to the particular item on NYTimes.com.
Readers of nytimes.com/timeswire can choose to view all of the content published online by the Times in real-time or select specific topics such as business or sports.
Times Wire also features a photo gallery with the latest pictures.
Denise Warren, the general manager of NYTimes.com, said the free service was an attempt to "meet our audiences' desire for quality news and information on demand" and to give users "a more personalized news experience."
NYTimes.com is the leading US newspaper website with 20.1 million unique visitors in the United States in March 2009, according to Nielsen Online.
The launch of Times Wire came one day after the newspaper unveiled Times Reader 2.0, the latest version of an application that downloads the day's newspaper and presents it in a more attractive fashion than on NYTimes.com.
After downloading the content, a user can still the browse and read the newspaper even without an Internet connection.
Times Reader 2.0 also allows users to interact with the newspaper in ways they cannot with the website, filling in the daily crossword on the screen, for example.
Source: AFP
Mobile ad spend up 99% in 12 months
UK mobile ad spend increased 99.2% year on year to £28.6m in 2008, despite a declining ad market, according to the first UK figures produced by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Bauer, Orange, BSkyB, The Sun, The Guardian, Yahoo and Microsoft are seven of the 21 companies that participated in the survey, representing hundreds of websites.
Mobile display ads, which include banners, text links, tenancies pre and post-roll and in-game, accounted for £14.2m in 2008 - just under half of all mobile ad spend.
Banners accounted for 82% of display ad expenditure, helped by the growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, which achieved mobile growth of 180% year on year. Pre and post-rolls and in-game ads only accounted for 2% of the display market.
Paid-for search advertising on mobile was estimated to account for £14.4m, 50.2% of all mobile spend.
A spike in mobile internet usage was a key driver of growth, from 8.6 million people in December 2007 to more than 11 million in December 2008.
Better handsets also contributed, with iPhone users seven times more likely than average to browse daily for news and information. More UK media agencies have also appointed dedicated heads of mobile.
Jon Mew, head of mobile at the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: "This is a landmark moment for mobile media. The study is a UK first and makes mobile a credible media channel. The advertising industry is taking mobile more seriously because advertising opportunities are starting to mature. Content on mobile has got better and more publishers are driving individuals to look at content via their mobiles."
Source: mediaweek.co.uk
Bauer, Orange, BSkyB, The Sun, The Guardian, Yahoo and Microsoft are seven of the 21 companies that participated in the survey, representing hundreds of websites.
Mobile display ads, which include banners, text links, tenancies pre and post-roll and in-game, accounted for £14.2m in 2008 - just under half of all mobile ad spend.
Banners accounted for 82% of display ad expenditure, helped by the growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, which achieved mobile growth of 180% year on year. Pre and post-rolls and in-game ads only accounted for 2% of the display market.
Paid-for search advertising on mobile was estimated to account for £14.4m, 50.2% of all mobile spend.
A spike in mobile internet usage was a key driver of growth, from 8.6 million people in December 2007 to more than 11 million in December 2008.
Better handsets also contributed, with iPhone users seven times more likely than average to browse daily for news and information. More UK media agencies have also appointed dedicated heads of mobile.
Jon Mew, head of mobile at the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: "This is a landmark moment for mobile media. The study is a UK first and makes mobile a credible media channel. The advertising industry is taking mobile more seriously because advertising opportunities are starting to mature. Content on mobile has got better and more publishers are driving individuals to look at content via their mobiles."
Source: mediaweek.co.uk
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Nielsen: Future Looks Bright for Online Media
DISCUSSING the trajectory of the online medium in the midst of an historic economic downturn is a perilous business. Assaulted every day with downward-facing red arrows, many of the indicators concerning all things digital veer to the negative:
* Online media's "favorite child" status (i.e., a long track record of outstripping the growth of every other medium by a wide margin) appears to have diminished over the past few months.
* Online advertising by the financial services, retail and auto industries has shrunk at a dizzying pace over the past six months.
* Online display advertising's share of revenue has plateaued at 20 percent of the total online ad spend in the U.S., and no panacea appears to be on the horizon.
* Despite online video's persistent positive buzz, actual usage is averaging around six minutes per day in the U.S.
* The social media trend is today's industry darling, but a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers.
Opportunities Abound
But even the most cynical observer has to be swayed by positive developments that define the longer-term opportunities for the online medium and the e-commerce channel. Around the globe, the online population is looking more and more like the overall population -- meaning that in a few short years, online access has moved from being a luxury or something cool to an essential, basic requirement. In addition, packaged-goods manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications firms -- historically three of the largest spenders on traditional media -- are moving online at a pace not seen before, even as the recession continues to deepen.
The audience growth and engagement quotient of online video is forcing marketers to positively reassess the value of the online experience. Adoption of social networking capabilities, by both consumers and corporations, has crossed the chasm in what appears to be the blink of an eye.
In the age of Twitter, feedback barriers have all but disappeared, creating a near friction-free environment for playing back brand experience, campaign reactions or brand events.
Search continues to be an indispensable tool for all online denizens and opportunities for additional growth continue to emerge. Search across social media networks is likely to be the next opportunity for search engines. And as consumers increasingly turn to their phones for a wide range of online content -- improved network speeds and rising smart phone penetration helped to grow the mobile Web in the U.S. -- prospects continue to improve.
Bright Future
While 2009 will not be a banner year for online advertising revenues, online will once again outperform all other media in terms of growth. China will likely be flat to down, partially due to the global slowdown, but more importantly, because it will be hard to match the Olympics-related surge during 2008. The U.S. and Japan will be flat to slightly up. There will be pockets of significant (+25 percent) growth, but it will be limited to small to midsize advertising countries such as Brazil and throughout Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
The longer-term prospects for the global online medium continue to be bright. Led by social media, search, video and the continued online ramp up of the leading marketers, online's share of total advertising spend will continue its steady upward trend as we emerge from the current recession. And given the increased focus on all things digital by the leading packaged-goods companies, online's share of commerce will continue to rise as well.
When all is said and done, brands see tremendous opportunity to increasingly exploit the digital environment to maximize brand-favorable media impressions, but they are starting to look at the mix more holistically. Consumer-generated content has gained inclusion into the "earned media" club of marketing preferences, and the big question going forward will be how paid and earned media share the marketing expenditure pie.
Growth Leaders
Today, online video and social media lead the way in terms of growth. It is rare to see segments significantly grow from both an audience and an engagement standpoint, but there has been exceptional growth over the past couple of years in both video and social media sites. While member communities (i.e., social networking sites) have been garnering impressive audience numbers for the past five years, video audiences have been growing at meteoric rates, surpassing personal e-mail audiences in November 2007. And from a time-spent perspective, member communities surpassed personal e-mail for the first time in February 2009.
The growth in social media is the single most significant story in the online media space today. Social networking sites eclipsed personal e-mail in global reach at 68.4 percent vs. 64.8 percent in February 2009. And even more significant -- in only the first few months of 2009 -- the reach of these sites is growing at a brisk pace, faster than any other online sector.
Mobile Moves
Any discussion about online audience behavior would be incomplete without understanding the mobile dynamic. In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via mobile devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74 percent between February 2007 and February 2009. Internationally, the U.S. is one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18 percent of subscribers accessing the mobile Web. This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets for which Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption, followed by the U.K., where nearly 17 percent of subscribers used mobile Web in Q1 2008.
There's an increasingly broad range of content consumed over mobile Web, too. While many initially expected the platform to be dominated by e-mail, news and weather, Nielsen's latest U.S. mobile Internet research reveals a long tail of content interest. Portals, e-mail, weather and news do garner audiences of more than 20 million unique mobile users each, but categories such as food and dining, travel and health and fitness also attract millions of mobile Internet users each month.
Recessionary Impact
From an advertising perspective, it seems funeral dirges for online display advertising were heard throughout 2008, and things went from bad to worse in the fourth quarter, when the bottom fell out of the economy and all forms of advertising were hammered. As the dreary holiday season came to a close and 2008 ended with a whimper, many were wondering if the days of online advertising's favorite-child status were at an end.
While many other metrics registered all-time worst numbers in 2008, Nielsen reports that online advertising overall did a bit better than the doomsayers thought. Quarter four showed a 4.5 percent uptick from Q3, and a 2.6 percent increase from Q4 2007. And for the full year, online ad revenues grew more than 10 percent. Despite the slightly-better-than-expected year-end performance of online advertising, the true impact of the deep recession will be told in the 2009 numbers.
Global Roundup
When scanning the globe, the country-by-country online advertising experience is a true patchwork quilt. The Scandinavian countries, Australia and China are clearly in the fast lane, while the U.K., France, Spain and Japan are moving ahead, but at a slower pace. Germany, Switzerland and Italy are barely growing, and the Benelux countries appear to be moving backwards.
It's clear that the global economic downturn is having an effect on all markets. And while online ad volumes appear to be brisk in some quarters, online ad rates are under such pressure that many advertisers are finding that rates from publishers are essentially the same rates they're receiving from ad networks. As many of these international markets are starting from a significantly lower base of online advertising, their growth rates will outstrip the U.S. in many cases as the global economy picks up again.
Source: adweek.com
* Online media's "favorite child" status (i.e., a long track record of outstripping the growth of every other medium by a wide margin) appears to have diminished over the past few months.
* Online advertising by the financial services, retail and auto industries has shrunk at a dizzying pace over the past six months.
* Online display advertising's share of revenue has plateaued at 20 percent of the total online ad spend in the U.S., and no panacea appears to be on the horizon.
* Despite online video's persistent positive buzz, actual usage is averaging around six minutes per day in the U.S.
* The social media trend is today's industry darling, but a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers.
Opportunities Abound
But even the most cynical observer has to be swayed by positive developments that define the longer-term opportunities for the online medium and the e-commerce channel. Around the globe, the online population is looking more and more like the overall population -- meaning that in a few short years, online access has moved from being a luxury or something cool to an essential, basic requirement. In addition, packaged-goods manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications firms -- historically three of the largest spenders on traditional media -- are moving online at a pace not seen before, even as the recession continues to deepen.The audience growth and engagement quotient of online video is forcing marketers to positively reassess the value of the online experience. Adoption of social networking capabilities, by both consumers and corporations, has crossed the chasm in what appears to be the blink of an eye.
In the age of Twitter, feedback barriers have all but disappeared, creating a near friction-free environment for playing back brand experience, campaign reactions or brand events.
Search continues to be an indispensable tool for all online denizens and opportunities for additional growth continue to emerge. Search across social media networks is likely to be the next opportunity for search engines. And as consumers increasingly turn to their phones for a wide range of online content -- improved network speeds and rising smart phone penetration helped to grow the mobile Web in the U.S. -- prospects continue to improve.
Bright Future
While 2009 will not be a banner year for online advertising revenues, online will once again outperform all other media in terms of growth. China will likely be flat to down, partially due to the global slowdown, but more importantly, because it will be hard to match the Olympics-related surge during 2008. The U.S. and Japan will be flat to slightly up. There will be pockets of significant (+25 percent) growth, but it will be limited to small to midsize advertising countries such as Brazil and throughout Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
The longer-term prospects for the global online medium continue to be bright. Led by social media, search, video and the continued online ramp up of the leading marketers, online's share of total advertising spend will continue its steady upward trend as we emerge from the current recession. And given the increased focus on all things digital by the leading packaged-goods companies, online's share of commerce will continue to rise as well.
When all is said and done, brands see tremendous opportunity to increasingly exploit the digital environment to maximize brand-favorable media impressions, but they are starting to look at the mix more holistically. Consumer-generated content has gained inclusion into the "earned media" club of marketing preferences, and the big question going forward will be how paid and earned media share the marketing expenditure pie.
Growth Leaders
Today, online video and social media lead the way in terms of growth. It is rare to see segments significantly grow from both an audience and an engagement standpoint, but there has been exceptional growth over the past couple of years in both video and social media sites. While member communities (i.e., social networking sites) have been garnering impressive audience numbers for the past five years, video audiences have been growing at meteoric rates, surpassing personal e-mail audiences in November 2007. And from a time-spent perspective, member communities surpassed personal e-mail for the first time in February 2009.
The growth in social media is the single most significant story in the online media space today. Social networking sites eclipsed personal e-mail in global reach at 68.4 percent vs. 64.8 percent in February 2009. And even more significant -- in only the first few months of 2009 -- the reach of these sites is growing at a brisk pace, faster than any other online sector.
Mobile Moves
Any discussion about online audience behavior would be incomplete without understanding the mobile dynamic. In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via mobile devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74 percent between February 2007 and February 2009. Internationally, the U.S. is one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18 percent of subscribers accessing the mobile Web. This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets for which Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption, followed by the U.K., where nearly 17 percent of subscribers used mobile Web in Q1 2008.
There's an increasingly broad range of content consumed over mobile Web, too. While many initially expected the platform to be dominated by e-mail, news and weather, Nielsen's latest U.S. mobile Internet research reveals a long tail of content interest. Portals, e-mail, weather and news do garner audiences of more than 20 million unique mobile users each, but categories such as food and dining, travel and health and fitness also attract millions of mobile Internet users each month.
Recessionary Impact
From an advertising perspective, it seems funeral dirges for online display advertising were heard throughout 2008, and things went from bad to worse in the fourth quarter, when the bottom fell out of the economy and all forms of advertising were hammered. As the dreary holiday season came to a close and 2008 ended with a whimper, many were wondering if the days of online advertising's favorite-child status were at an end.
While many other metrics registered all-time worst numbers in 2008, Nielsen reports that online advertising overall did a bit better than the doomsayers thought. Quarter four showed a 4.5 percent uptick from Q3, and a 2.6 percent increase from Q4 2007. And for the full year, online ad revenues grew more than 10 percent. Despite the slightly-better-than-expected year-end performance of online advertising, the true impact of the deep recession will be told in the 2009 numbers.
Global Roundup
When scanning the globe, the country-by-country online advertising experience is a true patchwork quilt. The Scandinavian countries, Australia and China are clearly in the fast lane, while the U.K., France, Spain and Japan are moving ahead, but at a slower pace. Germany, Switzerland and Italy are barely growing, and the Benelux countries appear to be moving backwards.It's clear that the global economic downturn is having an effect on all markets. And while online ad volumes appear to be brisk in some quarters, online ad rates are under such pressure that many advertisers are finding that rates from publishers are essentially the same rates they're receiving from ad networks. As many of these international markets are starting from a significantly lower base of online advertising, their growth rates will outstrip the U.S. in many cases as the global economy picks up again.
Source: adweek.com
Friday, May 1, 2009
Breaking news online: How two Pulitzer finalists used the web
AS we noted yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news went to The New York Times for its coverage of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. But since breaking news is perhaps the one area where Internet journalism most outshines print, we wanted to take a look at the two other finalists in the category and tease out a few lessons and strategies for when big news breaks.
THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The Houston Chronicle was cited “for taking full advantage of online technology and its newsroom expertise to become a lifeline to the city when Hurricane Ike struck, providing vital minute-by-minute updates on the storm, its flood surge and its aftermath.”
Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler noted that the Chronicle’s entry was all-online — not a print clip in the lot. Editor Jeff Cohen credited the Chronicle’s “fully integrated” newsroom. “We cover news any way people need news. We cover it online, analog, digital, straight media — any way you can serve it up our staff is serving it up.”
From a planning perspective, a hurricane offers the advantage of several days’ advance notice, and the Chronicle began to ramp up its Hurricane Central page well before Ike reached Texas shores. The site mixed traditional news stories about Ike’s approach with service pieces on storm preparation.
But perhaps the key figure in the Chronicle’s pre-storm coverage was Eric Berger, who blogs about science issues as SciGuy. He began writing about the storm when it was still a distant Atlantic threat, and that both activated the online community Berger had built over his blog’s lifespan and brought in new readers.
“During a storm, he really acts like a weatherman for the paper,” said Scott Clark, vice president in charge of Chron.com. “We present him to readers as a trusted voice you can pay attention to.” Berger blogged around the clock, posting new storm models as they were available and predicting the path of Ike.
Berger held several live chats leading up to the storm that attracted an audience that, at any given moment, reached up to 14,000 people. “The idea that a science writer could be speaking live to an audience that would fill a basketball arena” was remarkable, Clark said.
As it became more apparent the storm would hit, the Chronicle website was building up other aspects of coverage, Clark said. “We used two kinds of things. The first was the traditional kind of updated story that gives continuity and applies news judgment, for people who want to come in and see what’s new. But the problem is in this type of situation is there’s so much material. So that was paired up with a live blog that included dozens and dozens of reporters and photographers.” About 150 posts a day went up, he said, and many were dedicated to exposing and clearing up the Ike-related rumors that were sweeping through town. During the storm, staffers produced 90 videos that were collectively viewed more than 1 million times.
One of their most ingenious moves was launching the Ike Answers blog. Instead of burying answers to reader questions in a traditional news story, the Answers blog made the process transparent — on questions ranging from where all those fallen tree branches end up to whether charging a cell phone in your car will run down the battery. (That last one was answered with help from NPR’s “Car Talk” guys.)
And the Chronicle was creative in compiling and using the knowledge in its audience. It created crowdsourced databases tracking which gas stations were open for business, where power was still out, where storm damage was worst, and which area residents were still missing. In all, Clark said, the databases held about 12,000 reports from readers.
In all — between buildup, the storm itself, and the aftermath — Chron.com generated 18 million page views and thanks from its community. “There has been a recognition that certain types of stories are really online stories,” Clark said.
THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
One of those stories came on Feb. 8, 2008, when a man named Charles Thornton walked into the city hall of Kirkwood, Mo., and began shooting.
In the Post-Dispatch newsroom, the paper had only recently shifted to what managing editor Pam Maples called an “online first” approach. The paper had only recently integrated its online and print staffs so that “we didn’t have one of those online units sitting over in the corner.”
While the Kirkwood shootings were not an event on the same scale as Hurricane Ike, they also did not offer the preparation time Ike afforded the Chronicle. The first shots were fired in Kirkwood moments after 7 p.m., as the city council completed the Pledge of Allegiance; the Post-Dispatch’s first online post moved at about 7:20.
The site’s pageview count climbed through the night as Post-Dispatch staff continued to report. A stringer for the paper had been covering the council meeting and witnessed the first shootings, but by the end of the night “virtually everyone” on staff had participated in some way. In short order, the Post-Dispatch’s site had posted videos, slideshows, audio interviews, a condolences blog, and an interactive graphic — along with five main stories and four sidebars. Much more followed in the coming days.
The Pulitzer Board cited the Post-Dispatch’s combination of “speed and rigor” in its coverage; Maples said “we were aggressive, pushing the limits of where you go.” That included identifying the dead before officials were willing to. But it also meant holding back when a local TV station falsely announced Mayor Mike Swoboda was dead. (Swoboda died months later from complications from the shooting.)
Source: niemanlab.org
THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The Houston Chronicle was cited “for taking full advantage of online technology and its newsroom expertise to become a lifeline to the city when Hurricane Ike struck, providing vital minute-by-minute updates on the storm, its flood surge and its aftermath.”
Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler noted that the Chronicle’s entry was all-online — not a print clip in the lot. Editor Jeff Cohen credited the Chronicle’s “fully integrated” newsroom. “We cover news any way people need news. We cover it online, analog, digital, straight media — any way you can serve it up our staff is serving it up.”
From a planning perspective, a hurricane offers the advantage of several days’ advance notice, and the Chronicle began to ramp up its Hurricane Central page well before Ike reached Texas shores. The site mixed traditional news stories about Ike’s approach with service pieces on storm preparation.
But perhaps the key figure in the Chronicle’s pre-storm coverage was Eric Berger, who blogs about science issues as SciGuy. He began writing about the storm when it was still a distant Atlantic threat, and that both activated the online community Berger had built over his blog’s lifespan and brought in new readers.
“During a storm, he really acts like a weatherman for the paper,” said Scott Clark, vice president in charge of Chron.com. “We present him to readers as a trusted voice you can pay attention to.” Berger blogged around the clock, posting new storm models as they were available and predicting the path of Ike.
Berger held several live chats leading up to the storm that attracted an audience that, at any given moment, reached up to 14,000 people. “The idea that a science writer could be speaking live to an audience that would fill a basketball arena” was remarkable, Clark said.
As it became more apparent the storm would hit, the Chronicle website was building up other aspects of coverage, Clark said. “We used two kinds of things. The first was the traditional kind of updated story that gives continuity and applies news judgment, for people who want to come in and see what’s new. But the problem is in this type of situation is there’s so much material. So that was paired up with a live blog that included dozens and dozens of reporters and photographers.” About 150 posts a day went up, he said, and many were dedicated to exposing and clearing up the Ike-related rumors that were sweeping through town. During the storm, staffers produced 90 videos that were collectively viewed more than 1 million times.
One of their most ingenious moves was launching the Ike Answers blog. Instead of burying answers to reader questions in a traditional news story, the Answers blog made the process transparent — on questions ranging from where all those fallen tree branches end up to whether charging a cell phone in your car will run down the battery. (That last one was answered with help from NPR’s “Car Talk” guys.)
And the Chronicle was creative in compiling and using the knowledge in its audience. It created crowdsourced databases tracking which gas stations were open for business, where power was still out, where storm damage was worst, and which area residents were still missing. In all, Clark said, the databases held about 12,000 reports from readers.
In all — between buildup, the storm itself, and the aftermath — Chron.com generated 18 million page views and thanks from its community. “There has been a recognition that certain types of stories are really online stories,” Clark said.
THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
One of those stories came on Feb. 8, 2008, when a man named Charles Thornton walked into the city hall of Kirkwood, Mo., and began shooting.
In the Post-Dispatch newsroom, the paper had only recently shifted to what managing editor Pam Maples called an “online first” approach. The paper had only recently integrated its online and print staffs so that “we didn’t have one of those online units sitting over in the corner.”
While the Kirkwood shootings were not an event on the same scale as Hurricane Ike, they also did not offer the preparation time Ike afforded the Chronicle. The first shots were fired in Kirkwood moments after 7 p.m., as the city council completed the Pledge of Allegiance; the Post-Dispatch’s first online post moved at about 7:20.
The site’s pageview count climbed through the night as Post-Dispatch staff continued to report. A stringer for the paper had been covering the council meeting and witnessed the first shootings, but by the end of the night “virtually everyone” on staff had participated in some way. In short order, the Post-Dispatch’s site had posted videos, slideshows, audio interviews, a condolences blog, and an interactive graphic — along with five main stories and four sidebars. Much more followed in the coming days.
The Pulitzer Board cited the Post-Dispatch’s combination of “speed and rigor” in its coverage; Maples said “we were aggressive, pushing the limits of where you go.” That included identifying the dead before officials were willing to. But it also meant holding back when a local TV station falsely announced Mayor Mike Swoboda was dead. (Swoboda died months later from complications from the shooting.)
Source: niemanlab.org
Thursday, April 23, 2009
80 percent of newspapers gone in 18 months? Not likely.
THE soundbite that will circulate in the journoblogosphere for the next 24 hours, from columnist and Newser founder Michael Wolff on a panel discussion with Craig Newmark and Bennett Zier:
"About 18 months from now, 80 percent of newspapers will be gone. The Washington Post is supported by Kaplan’s testing business. The testing business will still be around in 18 months, and they will probably continue to support the newspaper. But that’ll be an exception.
Now, I have a bunch of predictions hanging out there myself — some have come true already, some have already turned out to be off the mark, the rest are wait-and-see — but this one is a real doozy. There are still about 1,430 daily papers in the U.S., so what Wolff’s prediction means that we can expect the extinction of 1,144 of them. Which works out to, let’s see, a little over two per day, every day, for 18 months. Sorry, that’s not happening."
To be sure, the industry is in deep, deep trouble. Most of the top 10 or 15 newspaper owners are bankrupt or close to it, and are in or near penny-stock territory. They don’t have two cents worth of credit left, and couldn’t raise the money for the most lucrative acquisition imaginable. Which (aside to Matt Ingram) is why there’s not much creativity coming from them. (Amazingly, most newspaper firms are slogging on under the leadership of the same CEOs, which is part of the problem.)
And, to be sure, ad revenue has been heading downward not just for a few years, but in truth, when measured in relation to all other media, for more than 60 years (that dark blue line):
Data from Universal-McCann via the Television Bureau of Advertising; also from Internet Advertising Bureau, National Cable and Telecommunications Association.)
Yes, 60 years ago, newspapers took in 37 percent of all ad dollars in the U.S., and it’s been steadily downhill ever since. (A century ago, it was probably 75 percent or more, but nobody was measuring.) In 2008, preliminarily (some figures are still estimated), they’re looking at 13 percent, down from 18 percent five years ago. In a year or two, internet advertising (that’s the upwardly mobile line of light blue diamonds) will have a bigger slice than newspapers. We know the reasons: loss of national advertising to TV, loss of monopolistic ad pricing power, loss of classifieds to Craigslist, etc.
Moreover, circulation is dropping like a stone (down 4.8 percent for the six months ending last September 30, and we’ll get a similar stat for the October-March period any day now). As the print audience is lost, it disperses online and is not retained on newspaper web sites.
This doesn’t look like a formula for survival, so why is Michael Wolff wrong in predicting an 80 percent shutdown rate? Because 73 percent of America’s newspapers have a circulation of 25,000 or less. Another 13 percent were in the 25,000-50,000 bracket. So 86 percent of the daily newspapers in America are in small towns and cities. And yes, some of them lose money, because things are not good in those towns right now. But the vast majority of those papers are profitable. Not as profitable as they once were, but they were profitable during the Depression (I’ve seen some of the old P&Ls), they’re profitable now, and they’ll be profitable 18 months from now.
The problem is that newspaper owners have leveraged their cash flow to the hilt to make risky, ill-considered acquisitions that have now put many of them at, or over, the brink of bankruptcy. Their larger assets — most of the top 100 or so papers (those over 90,000 or so in circulation) — are probably in the red on an operating revenue basis, because they lack the grass-roots small-business advertising support the small dailies have, and are saddled with expensive real estate, distribution arrangements and union contracts. Hence threats to close papers like the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle. But even if all the chains go bankrupt, operationally profitable assets like small-town dailies will be sold off intact, not shut down.
Even those metro-sized papers will, for the most part, survive the next 18 months, although most of them will cut further their distribution, their contents, and if they’re smart, their publishing frequency down to 1, 2 or 2 days a week. In fact, I would agree with Wolff to this extent: 80 percent of the top 100 papers will not be seven-day papers 18 months from now (make that my first 2010 prediction).
In the hinterlands, 18 months from now, we’ll still find most of those 1200 or so small-town, small-city dailies — many with cuts in publishing schedules (to five or six days a week), paging, features, staffing or format, but carrying on as the voices of their communities. Those small dailies have the biggest opportunity, capacity and flexibility to innovate and find new models that can survive beyond the next year or two. What they need is some leeway from headquarters to experiment so that some of them can discover the models that others can emulate. They need to be digital enterprises 18 months from now. If they don’t make that transition, plenty of new enterprises, including many with print components, will arise to show the way.
I just acquired a wood stove to cut down on my heating bills next winter. I expect to be starting the fires, for quite a few years, with newsprint delivered by my local small-town daily newspaper.
Source: niemanlab.com
"About 18 months from now, 80 percent of newspapers will be gone. The Washington Post is supported by Kaplan’s testing business. The testing business will still be around in 18 months, and they will probably continue to support the newspaper. But that’ll be an exception.
Now, I have a bunch of predictions hanging out there myself — some have come true already, some have already turned out to be off the mark, the rest are wait-and-see — but this one is a real doozy. There are still about 1,430 daily papers in the U.S., so what Wolff’s prediction means that we can expect the extinction of 1,144 of them. Which works out to, let’s see, a little over two per day, every day, for 18 months. Sorry, that’s not happening."
To be sure, the industry is in deep, deep trouble. Most of the top 10 or 15 newspaper owners are bankrupt or close to it, and are in or near penny-stock territory. They don’t have two cents worth of credit left, and couldn’t raise the money for the most lucrative acquisition imaginable. Which (aside to Matt Ingram) is why there’s not much creativity coming from them. (Amazingly, most newspaper firms are slogging on under the leadership of the same CEOs, which is part of the problem.)
And, to be sure, ad revenue has been heading downward not just for a few years, but in truth, when measured in relation to all other media, for more than 60 years (that dark blue line):
Data from Universal-McCann via the Television Bureau of Advertising; also from Internet Advertising Bureau, National Cable and Telecommunications Association.)
Yes, 60 years ago, newspapers took in 37 percent of all ad dollars in the U.S., and it’s been steadily downhill ever since. (A century ago, it was probably 75 percent or more, but nobody was measuring.) In 2008, preliminarily (some figures are still estimated), they’re looking at 13 percent, down from 18 percent five years ago. In a year or two, internet advertising (that’s the upwardly mobile line of light blue diamonds) will have a bigger slice than newspapers. We know the reasons: loss of national advertising to TV, loss of monopolistic ad pricing power, loss of classifieds to Craigslist, etc.
Moreover, circulation is dropping like a stone (down 4.8 percent for the six months ending last September 30, and we’ll get a similar stat for the October-March period any day now). As the print audience is lost, it disperses online and is not retained on newspaper web sites.
This doesn’t look like a formula for survival, so why is Michael Wolff wrong in predicting an 80 percent shutdown rate? Because 73 percent of America’s newspapers have a circulation of 25,000 or less. Another 13 percent were in the 25,000-50,000 bracket. So 86 percent of the daily newspapers in America are in small towns and cities. And yes, some of them lose money, because things are not good in those towns right now. But the vast majority of those papers are profitable. Not as profitable as they once were, but they were profitable during the Depression (I’ve seen some of the old P&Ls), they’re profitable now, and they’ll be profitable 18 months from now.
The problem is that newspaper owners have leveraged their cash flow to the hilt to make risky, ill-considered acquisitions that have now put many of them at, or over, the brink of bankruptcy. Their larger assets — most of the top 100 or so papers (those over 90,000 or so in circulation) — are probably in the red on an operating revenue basis, because they lack the grass-roots small-business advertising support the small dailies have, and are saddled with expensive real estate, distribution arrangements and union contracts. Hence threats to close papers like the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle. But even if all the chains go bankrupt, operationally profitable assets like small-town dailies will be sold off intact, not shut down.
Even those metro-sized papers will, for the most part, survive the next 18 months, although most of them will cut further their distribution, their contents, and if they’re smart, their publishing frequency down to 1, 2 or 2 days a week. In fact, I would agree with Wolff to this extent: 80 percent of the top 100 papers will not be seven-day papers 18 months from now (make that my first 2010 prediction).
In the hinterlands, 18 months from now, we’ll still find most of those 1200 or so small-town, small-city dailies — many with cuts in publishing schedules (to five or six days a week), paging, features, staffing or format, but carrying on as the voices of their communities. Those small dailies have the biggest opportunity, capacity and flexibility to innovate and find new models that can survive beyond the next year or two. What they need is some leeway from headquarters to experiment so that some of them can discover the models that others can emulate. They need to be digital enterprises 18 months from now. If they don’t make that transition, plenty of new enterprises, including many with print components, will arise to show the way.
I just acquired a wood stove to cut down on my heating bills next winter. I expect to be starting the fires, for quite a few years, with newsprint delivered by my local small-town daily newspaper.
Source: niemanlab.com
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Online Only Edition: 10 Tips To Start Thinking About It
THE Christian Science Monitor and The Seattle-Post Intelligencer both publish online only editions. The Monitor prints a weekend edition as well.
It is Friday, end of an intensely busy week. Don’t know why, but on Fridays thoughts turn to the weekend (for some), and the week that was (for others), and for a few of us to the months ahead.
It has been a week of work with L’Equipe Magazine in Paris, as we worked feverishly with the team, under the leadership of editors in chief Jean-Philippe Leclaire and Jean-Denis Walter, and art director Francois Lollichon. The Mag, as everyone calls it, has now gone to press, and we will sample the first printed issues today, and readers will see it as the weekend supplement to L’Equipe newspaper tomorrow Saturday all over France.
We hope the readers like it as much as we have enjoyed producing it. We promise a full report on the new L’Equipe Mag in this blog this weekend. Rodrigo Fino, who has worked with me on the project, will cover the launch in his blog in Spanish.
Online only editions: some thoughts
Back to Friday thoughts: ironically as it may appear, I read a piece this week in the German daily, Die Welt, titled The great extinction of the American newspaper,
which went in-depth into the dangerous state of financial affairs plaguing so many American newspapers. In fact, the author of the piece, Uwe Schmitt, used the term “plague” in his report. I say ironic, because it has taken this German newspaper to mention a couple of things that I think about often: first, newspapers getting some type of “stimulus” package from the government, the local communities, whoever, to help them get over the hump. I say this is unlikely, as I know well that we Americans like to keep government and the press as separate entities. In that sense, the press is like religion.
Of course, many believe that the current difficulties newspapers face is not just a temporary kind of thing.
There is no hump, a colleague told me recently in Florida. It is more like a vast ocean, deep and dark, he said. Fall into it, and you are done. The second thought: is it possible that there will be a sort of readers’ protest. Or, as the Die Welt article puts it: “if the newspaper readers feel a growing sense of emptiness, then there is hope. Hope that more and more Americans will ask themselves if a life without newspaper would be the same, if that would be any good for them, their children or their country.“
Will an online only edition of a newspaper fill the gap?
For the youngest readers, 20-40, I am afraid to say, that may be the case. Older readers will still cling to a printed product, but don’t be so sure. I remember, when working with the 2007 rethinking of The Wall Street Journal, to be totally surprised by focus groups and internal research showing that many older readers of the Journal—-ages 55 to 70—-confessed that they checked news online several times a day. It is a mistaken notion to relate age to print versus online consumption and preference. The universality of online news, of the Internet as a medium, and its time advantage in terms of breaking news, is a reality.
On this Friday, my thoughts turn more towards how we in this business can apply all that we know about storytelling to this new medium, to study it, to dissect it, and to come up with ways in which we can make it better, more efficient,and give it a lot of the journalistic advantages and privileges that we associate to the printed press. Not to mention that all of this will have to be accompanied by a good dose of advertising innovation, to bring in the revenues.
When online edition is the only edition
Nobody is an expert at this, but we can learn from the successful websites and from what we know about the new medium:
1. Nobody should attempt to recreate the disappearing printed newspaper into its online only edition.
2. Remember that newspapers are something you read, but the web is something you do. Make sure that the online edition incorporates tons of interactivity. Allow the readers to get engaged, because they will, in ways they never could or did with their printed newspaper.
3. Emphasize the cult of personality: the Internet is a highly personal medium. Bring in your best columnists. Develop new ones, with varied views and perspectives, but, preferably, who are very much tuned in to what happens with the new media.
4. Learn from social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. and their sense of the “instantaneous” moment.
5. Redefine news, to extend it to the personal: we have never been more interested in the minutiae of life—-that which appears insignificant to some may be highly significant to others.
6. Do the daily garage sale: yes, garage sales are centers of curiosity. Someone else’s trash becomes another person’s new possession. Online editions need to provide samplings in the style of garage sales, news from here and there, the highly personal, the not so significant rising to the top of the heap.
7. Go all out to sell advertising packages in a variety of configurations. Nothing wrong with ads that embrace editorial content, the way it was never allowed in print
8. Pursue highly local people coverage, down to the Little League games. Remember, nobody else will do that.
9. Use the fantastic storytelling capabilities of online to guide users thru events in the city; show me a video clip of that exhibit opening at the museum this weekend, or the local high school musical that opens tonight.
10. Finally, don’t neglect the investigative journalism that has made your newspaper a pillar of the community—-investigate, expose, and continue to fight for the rights of the people in your town. Nothing says that investigative pieces belong ONLY on a printed page. In fact, everything that belongs on the printed page can be enhanced and made better online, if you try. Multi media packages give investigative journalism added value. Readers appreciate it. The message is presented more effectively and completely.
That’s a good menu of ideas to get us thinking this weekend.
And, tip #11 might be just down below: allow users to move blocks around the site to give priority to whatever they wish on the screen!
Source: garciamedia.com
Monday, April 20, 2009
Online News Organizations Compete For Pulitzers
IT used to be that online news organizations were out of the running when it came to the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. In 2007, Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, an online news and opinion site, was the first person to identify and reveal the full scope of the politicization of the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Though Marshall won a George Polk Award for his work on the story, some people said he should have won a Pulitzer — perhaps the highest honor in American print journalism. But back then, because of where he works and because of the medium in which he works, Marshall wasn't eligible.
But Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says times have changed.
"We expanded the online aspect of the competition and made it open to online-only news organizations, provided they were primarily dedicated to original news reporting and the coverage of ongoing events," explains Gissler.
Those are important stipulations. To be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize, a site must show that original news reporting outweighs aggregated content from other news sites — and Gissler says the onus is on the news organization to make the case that it meets the standard.
Joan Walsh, the editor-in-chief of Salon, applauds the Pulitzer Board for recognizing the contributions of online news organizations, but she adds that she doesn't think the guidelines were clear enough.
"I felt like somebody had a formula some place that they weren't entirely sharing with me, and it just felt like more trouble than it was worth at that point," says Walsh.
Ultimately, Salon didn't apply for a Pulitzer. Neither did Slate — the chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group wasn't sure it qualified. And Marshall says Talking Points Memo didn't submit anything either.
But at least two nonprofit sites — the St. Louis Beacon and MinnPost — did submit stories.
Susan Albright, an editor of the Minnesota-based MinnPost who has served as a Pulitzer juror twice, says that her site covers national and international stories, usually from a Minnesota angle.
"We sent, for example, John Camp to Iraq last January, along with a photographer and videographer, and they spent a good bit of time there, writing news about Minnesotans who are there," says Albright. "So we do news, but we do it in a different way."
Albright submitted that series for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She says the prize would mean a lot to her small staff of reporters and freelancers: "I think it would be terrific. I mean for an online news site to win something like that would be great."
Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says that the Pulitzer Board will continue to "monitor the impact of the Internet. ... The Pulitzer Prizes are a living organism, and we take into account what's happening in the world of journalism, in the world of the news media, and we'll, I'm sure, continue to do that."
Walsh says she spoke with Gissler two weeks ago, and he addressed some of her questions. She says Salon will "absolutely" apply next year.
Source: npr.org
Though Marshall won a George Polk Award for his work on the story, some people said he should have won a Pulitzer — perhaps the highest honor in American print journalism. But back then, because of where he works and because of the medium in which he works, Marshall wasn't eligible.
But Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says times have changed.
"We expanded the online aspect of the competition and made it open to online-only news organizations, provided they were primarily dedicated to original news reporting and the coverage of ongoing events," explains Gissler.
Those are important stipulations. To be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize, a site must show that original news reporting outweighs aggregated content from other news sites — and Gissler says the onus is on the news organization to make the case that it meets the standard.
Joan Walsh, the editor-in-chief of Salon, applauds the Pulitzer Board for recognizing the contributions of online news organizations, but she adds that she doesn't think the guidelines were clear enough.
"I felt like somebody had a formula some place that they weren't entirely sharing with me, and it just felt like more trouble than it was worth at that point," says Walsh.
Ultimately, Salon didn't apply for a Pulitzer. Neither did Slate — the chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group wasn't sure it qualified. And Marshall says Talking Points Memo didn't submit anything either.
But at least two nonprofit sites — the St. Louis Beacon and MinnPost — did submit stories.
Susan Albright, an editor of the Minnesota-based MinnPost who has served as a Pulitzer juror twice, says that her site covers national and international stories, usually from a Minnesota angle.
"We sent, for example, John Camp to Iraq last January, along with a photographer and videographer, and they spent a good bit of time there, writing news about Minnesotans who are there," says Albright. "So we do news, but we do it in a different way."
Albright submitted that series for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She says the prize would mean a lot to her small staff of reporters and freelancers: "I think it would be terrific. I mean for an online news site to win something like that would be great."
Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says that the Pulitzer Board will continue to "monitor the impact of the Internet. ... The Pulitzer Prizes are a living organism, and we take into account what's happening in the world of journalism, in the world of the news media, and we'll, I'm sure, continue to do that."
Walsh says she spoke with Gissler two weeks ago, and he addressed some of her questions. She says Salon will "absolutely" apply next year.
Source: npr.org
Online-only newspapers 'may lose more than they gain'
NEWSPAPERS that ditch their print editions to go online-only may be jumping the gun unless they are in dire financial straits, according to a study published today.
Researchers from City University in London suggest that many newspaper publishers are likely to lose more than they gain if they cease distributing their printed products in favour of the web.
Their study focused on the fate of Finnish financial newspaper Taloussanomat, which axed its printed version and went online-only in December 2007. The decision was made after the title suffered severe losses – but even going online-only failed to lift it out of the doldrums.
After the move was made, the Finnish title's costs fell by 50% – but its online readership declined by 22% and revenues dropped by more than 75%.
The net result was that the publication's owners were no better off after dropping print than they had been previously.
According to calculations based on the Finnish case, a publication would need its costs to significantly outstrip its income to make online-only an attractive option.
"Only if your income is 31% or more lower than your costs, based on this case at least, would you be better off going online-only," said Neil Thurman, senior lecturer in electronic publishing at City and one of the study's authors.
"I don't think it can be dismissed as an aberration," added Thurman. "What we're saying is that unique users were down and page impressions were down ... You can definitely say they underperformed."
A number of factors were apparent in the Finnish title's failure to capitalise on its move to the web, Thurman said.
"Just having the print product out there on news stands does promote the website. They also cut their newsroom staff, and so the quality of content did suffer.
"But probably the most important factor is that it's a different medium that is used in a different way. You might spend one and a half minutes a day with the brand online, instead of half an hour a day with a printed product."
In recent months, a number of high-profile titles around the world have announced their decision to drop print editions as they struggle.
In America major newspapers including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor have gone web-only, while in Britain, Maxim and the Ecologist are among the magazines that have followed the trend.
Evidence about those changes has yet to prove conclusive, but Thurman said he doubted that many titles were doing so badly that going web-only would be a solution.
"If you look across the board, US newspapers are still reaping profits in the mid teens," he said. "Sometimes it's spin because they are in dire straits – it's often dressed up as a strategy when it's actually the only option you've got left."
The study, Taking the Paper Out of News, is being published in Journalism Studies and is also available on the City University website.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Researchers from City University in London suggest that many newspaper publishers are likely to lose more than they gain if they cease distributing their printed products in favour of the web.
Their study focused on the fate of Finnish financial newspaper Taloussanomat, which axed its printed version and went online-only in December 2007. The decision was made after the title suffered severe losses – but even going online-only failed to lift it out of the doldrums.
After the move was made, the Finnish title's costs fell by 50% – but its online readership declined by 22% and revenues dropped by more than 75%.
The net result was that the publication's owners were no better off after dropping print than they had been previously.
According to calculations based on the Finnish case, a publication would need its costs to significantly outstrip its income to make online-only an attractive option.
"Only if your income is 31% or more lower than your costs, based on this case at least, would you be better off going online-only," said Neil Thurman, senior lecturer in electronic publishing at City and one of the study's authors.
"I don't think it can be dismissed as an aberration," added Thurman. "What we're saying is that unique users were down and page impressions were down ... You can definitely say they underperformed."
A number of factors were apparent in the Finnish title's failure to capitalise on its move to the web, Thurman said.
"Just having the print product out there on news stands does promote the website. They also cut their newsroom staff, and so the quality of content did suffer.
"But probably the most important factor is that it's a different medium that is used in a different way. You might spend one and a half minutes a day with the brand online, instead of half an hour a day with a printed product."
In recent months, a number of high-profile titles around the world have announced their decision to drop print editions as they struggle.
In America major newspapers including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor have gone web-only, while in Britain, Maxim and the Ecologist are among the magazines that have followed the trend.
Evidence about those changes has yet to prove conclusive, but Thurman said he doubted that many titles were doing so badly that going web-only would be a solution.
"If you look across the board, US newspapers are still reaping profits in the mid teens," he said. "Sometimes it's spin because they are in dire straits – it's often dressed up as a strategy when it's actually the only option you've got left."
The study, Taking the Paper Out of News, is being published in Journalism Studies and is also available on the City University website.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Facebook now accounts for one third of all online social networking time
THE latest comScore data is good news for Facebook, ranking the site as the sixth most popular website in the world with 275 million unique users each month. That exceeds the 200 million user mark that Facebook recently made public, but regardless of different metrics the trends are interesting here.
Facebook now accounts for 4.1 minutes of every 100 minutes we spend online, which is a sign that we are using the site more deeply - or just getting lost because of that new design. The site accounts for more than 30% of all time spend on social networking sites, up from just over 12% a year earlier.
Facebook has seen very strong growth in Europe over the past 12 months, ranked as the most popular social networking site in 11 of the 17 countries comScore monitors. The UK is the biggest of those, rising from 12.96 million unique users in February last year to 22.66 million in February 2009.
Italy saw the biggest growth, up 2,721% year on year to 10.77 million users, while Spain grew 999% to 5.66 million. Facebook noticeably lags behind in Russia, where it ranks seventh among the most visited social networking sites and where clone sites including VKontakte, Moikrug and Odnoklassniki are very established.
Facebook Russia launched in June last year but, as has been the experience of western companies trying to break into the Chinese market, the sector is dominated by established domestic firms.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Facebook now accounts for 4.1 minutes of every 100 minutes we spend online, which is a sign that we are using the site more deeply - or just getting lost because of that new design. The site accounts for more than 30% of all time spend on social networking sites, up from just over 12% a year earlier.
Facebook has seen very strong growth in Europe over the past 12 months, ranked as the most popular social networking site in 11 of the 17 countries comScore monitors. The UK is the biggest of those, rising from 12.96 million unique users in February last year to 22.66 million in February 2009.
Italy saw the biggest growth, up 2,721% year on year to 10.77 million users, while Spain grew 999% to 5.66 million. Facebook noticeably lags behind in Russia, where it ranks seventh among the most visited social networking sites and where clone sites including VKontakte, Moikrug and Odnoklassniki are very established.
Facebook Russia launched in June last year but, as has been the experience of western companies trying to break into the Chinese market, the sector is dominated by established domestic firms.
Source: guardian.co.uk
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online
Surprise.
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.
This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers.
Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.)
We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable.
Now the online side, where we have a more accurate measurement: NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month. (There’s no readers per copy multiplier there, on the assumption that nearly always, there’s just one pair of eyeballs per online page view.)
So, US daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent — 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print.
Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA’s Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month.
How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn’t offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I’m going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. ** Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers.
So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the pageview split.
So whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. I’ve made a few estimates along the way to reach that conclusion, but only a drastic and unwarranted change in my few guestimates would change that result signficantly.
Is it any wonder then, that online revenue is stuck at less than 10 percent of the print revenue? Given the online share of audience attention, 10 percent looks high, actually. Let’s explore that revenue dimension further by comparing print and online CPMs.
Online, in 2008, NAA reports total newspaper site revenue of $3.109 billion; total page views of 38.726 billion. Online revenue per 1000 page views (CPM): $80.28. (That should raise your eyebrows, because if there are maybe three ads on the average page, it means the average ad is selling for more than $25 per 1000 views, which would be off the charts for most sites. I don’t buy that number, but that question is the subject for more research and hopefully a future post.)
On the print side, NAA reports 2008 revenue of $34.74 billion. Dividing that by 12 months and 83.6 billion printed pages per month, we get a print CPM of $34.62.
Does this make sense? Is it possible that newspapers are managing to demand and obtain an online pageview CPM that’s 2.3 times their printed page CPM? Are the online sales teams that much better than their print colleagues? Or, dare I say it, is it possible that newspapers assigning, by accounting maneuvers, a disproportionate share of their revenue to their online divisions, for example when they arbitrarily assign to online a percentage of the revenue in combination print/web ad packages, or credit a revenue share to online revenue in instances where advertisers are merely bonused online exposure as added value to a print buy?
The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession. Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention. While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to. In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.
POSTSCRIPT, Tuesday April 14, 7:30 a.m.: Dan Thornton at The Way of the Web, has posted some very relevant cautions and caveats to this analysis (but calls it “a good reality check”) and some of the commenters have raised fair questions about the legitimacy of the data. I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, “I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.” I too, know many reporters and editors who don’t read their own paper in print, but of all the data I used, the Scarborough research on readers per copy is the longest-running, most consistent survey, and its results cross-check with “read yesterday” survey data.
As I’ve noted in the comments, I’ve made two assumptions based on scanty information (minutes spent reading print, and number of print pages read). But even if I’ve overestimated those by 100 percent or 200 percent, the analysis still reaches the same conclusion, which is that within the limits of newspaper readership in print and online, the public still reads newspaper content in print by an overwhelming margin. The attention drift is toward online reading, but it’s not as rapid a drift as most of us have been assuming. Is this good news? No, because as pointed out by in the comments, the print-side problem is not readership, it’s advertising, particularly the loss of monopoly pricing power in most categories. And of course, non-newspaper sites are grabbing a big slice of the migration of attention online.
I want to emphasize that this analysis was limited to newspapers and newspaper sites as input to that industry’s ongoing search for business models that work. Any individual newspaper or newspaper group has at their command internal data to repeat this analysis more accurately for themselves, and I’d encourage them to do so. There has been a tendency in the industry to inflate the significance of unique visitors. As noted by Josh Benton in the comments, 100,000 monthly unique visitors on the site is not nearly the same as 100,000 print subscribers, but you can find such statistics conflated into equivalence on everything from ad sales materials to 10-K reports. What the industry really needs to do is to develop a valid, independently-audited measure of audience attention. Who knows, it might even help them sell some print advertising.
________
*Method: Multiplying daily readers times 313, Sunday readers times 52, adding the results, multiplying by 24 pages read, dividing by 12 months.
**According a print newspaper “engagement” study presented a few years ago, on weekdays 45 percent of readers spent more than 30 minutes, 34 percent between 16 and 30 minutes, 21 percent under 15 minutes. Sunday time is higher.
Source: niemanlab.org
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.
This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers.
Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.)
We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable.
Now the online side, where we have a more accurate measurement: NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month. (There’s no readers per copy multiplier there, on the assumption that nearly always, there’s just one pair of eyeballs per online page view.)
So, US daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent — 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print.
Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA’s Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month.
How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn’t offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I’m going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. ** Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers.
So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the pageview split.
So whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. I’ve made a few estimates along the way to reach that conclusion, but only a drastic and unwarranted change in my few guestimates would change that result signficantly.
Is it any wonder then, that online revenue is stuck at less than 10 percent of the print revenue? Given the online share of audience attention, 10 percent looks high, actually. Let’s explore that revenue dimension further by comparing print and online CPMs.
Online, in 2008, NAA reports total newspaper site revenue of $3.109 billion; total page views of 38.726 billion. Online revenue per 1000 page views (CPM): $80.28. (That should raise your eyebrows, because if there are maybe three ads on the average page, it means the average ad is selling for more than $25 per 1000 views, which would be off the charts for most sites. I don’t buy that number, but that question is the subject for more research and hopefully a future post.)
On the print side, NAA reports 2008 revenue of $34.74 billion. Dividing that by 12 months and 83.6 billion printed pages per month, we get a print CPM of $34.62.
Does this make sense? Is it possible that newspapers are managing to demand and obtain an online pageview CPM that’s 2.3 times their printed page CPM? Are the online sales teams that much better than their print colleagues? Or, dare I say it, is it possible that newspapers assigning, by accounting maneuvers, a disproportionate share of their revenue to their online divisions, for example when they arbitrarily assign to online a percentage of the revenue in combination print/web ad packages, or credit a revenue share to online revenue in instances where advertisers are merely bonused online exposure as added value to a print buy?
The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession. Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention. While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to. In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.
POSTSCRIPT, Tuesday April 14, 7:30 a.m.: Dan Thornton at The Way of the Web, has posted some very relevant cautions and caveats to this analysis (but calls it “a good reality check”) and some of the commenters have raised fair questions about the legitimacy of the data. I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, “I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.” I too, know many reporters and editors who don’t read their own paper in print, but of all the data I used, the Scarborough research on readers per copy is the longest-running, most consistent survey, and its results cross-check with “read yesterday” survey data.
As I’ve noted in the comments, I’ve made two assumptions based on scanty information (minutes spent reading print, and number of print pages read). But even if I’ve overestimated those by 100 percent or 200 percent, the analysis still reaches the same conclusion, which is that within the limits of newspaper readership in print and online, the public still reads newspaper content in print by an overwhelming margin. The attention drift is toward online reading, but it’s not as rapid a drift as most of us have been assuming. Is this good news? No, because as pointed out by in the comments, the print-side problem is not readership, it’s advertising, particularly the loss of monopoly pricing power in most categories. And of course, non-newspaper sites are grabbing a big slice of the migration of attention online.
I want to emphasize that this analysis was limited to newspapers and newspaper sites as input to that industry’s ongoing search for business models that work. Any individual newspaper or newspaper group has at their command internal data to repeat this analysis more accurately for themselves, and I’d encourage them to do so. There has been a tendency in the industry to inflate the significance of unique visitors. As noted by Josh Benton in the comments, 100,000 monthly unique visitors on the site is not nearly the same as 100,000 print subscribers, but you can find such statistics conflated into equivalence on everything from ad sales materials to 10-K reports. What the industry really needs to do is to develop a valid, independently-audited measure of audience attention. Who knows, it might even help them sell some print advertising.
________
*Method: Multiplying daily readers times 313, Sunday readers times 52, adding the results, multiplying by 24 pages read, dividing by 12 months.
**According a print newspaper “engagement” study presented a few years ago, on weekdays 45 percent of readers spent more than 30 minutes, 34 percent between 16 and 30 minutes, 21 percent under 15 minutes. Sunday time is higher.
Source: niemanlab.org
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