From The Economist - full story here

Newspapers have escaped cataclysm by becoming leaner and more focused

Jun 10th 2010

“PRINT is going to live longer than people think,” asserts Mathias Döpfner, the boss of Axel Springer. Perhaps it will in central Europe. The publisher of Bild and Die Welt recently recorded the most profitable first quarter in its history. The profit margin on its German national newspapers is a startling 27%. The firm is expanding into Poland. If newspapers are in crisis, Mr Döpfner says, he likes crisis.

A year ago the mere survival of many newspapers seemed doubtful. It had become clear that the young, in particular, were getting much of their news online. Readers were flitting from story to story, rarely paying. Advertising too was moving online, but not to newspapers’ websites. Rather, it was being swallowed by search engines. The classified-ad market was ravaged by free listings websites such as Craigslist. A deep recession, received wisdom had it, would surely finish off newspapers, which have high fixed costs in the form of journalists and printing presses.

In some ways the pain proved even greater than analysts expected. The Newspaper Association of America reports that print and online advertising has fallen by 35% since the first quarter of 2008. Circulation has dropped alarmingly too. Yet almost all newspapers have survived, albeit with occasional help from the bankruptcy courts. American newspaper firms like McClatchy stayed mostly profitable even as revenues plunged (see chart). Some companies are now worth ten times as much as in the spring of 2009, although they remain far from pre-recession heights.

Steep cover-price rises have helped. But for the most part newspapers have cut their way out of crisis. In the past year McClatchy reduced payroll costs by 25%. Many publications closed bureaus and forced journalists to take unpaid leave. There have been clever adaptations, too. At Gannett, another American firm, 46 local titles now carry national and international news from USA Today, the firm’s national paper. A group of New Jersey newspapers jointly produces features and editorials. Bob Dickey, who runs Gannett’s community papers, says they have realised there is no need to work out what to say about the Gulf oil leak seven times.

Despite the lukewarm reviews (see below), Wired's IPad app appears to be doing well:

Wired magazine sold 24,000 copies of its $4.99 app in the first 24 hours of its release, according to a tweet by John Abel, the mag’s NY bureau chief. With the 70 percent revenue split, that means that Conde Nast took away $83,832. It helps that Wired’s tech audience tends to be early adopters, so it remains to be seen if other Conde Nast titles will enjoy that same immediate sales jump.

Not surprising, the Wired app has already shot up to number one among the paid apps, way ahead of Vanity Fair, whose $4.99 app was released two weeks ago and is at number 90. The Wired app number is impressive, especially since Conde Nast has already counted about 63,000 paid app downloads across both the iPhone and iPad since November, all of which go toward its total circ, under the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The publisher is planning a few additions to drive paid downloads further.  For example, unlike Conde Nast’s GQ app, there’s no automatic subscription notice for the Wired app yet, but execs told paidContent earlier this week that this feature is coming soon.

From paidcontent.org. Full story here

From Editor and Publisher and MediaPost

Newspapers First Ad Rep Firm To Close
Erik Sass

Newspapers First, one of the leading national advertising sales rep firms, is going out of business June 4, according to Editor & Publisher. The demise of Newspapers First is a sign that despite signs of a broader economic turnaround and some glimmers of hope at big newspaper publishers, the newspaper business is still in dire straits.

The firm represents newspapers with a total audience of 21 million during the week and 29 million on Sundays, covering the top 125 DMAs, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press & News, Cincinnati Enquirer, Houston Chronicle, Phoenix Republic, and Denver Post.

Newspapers First offered advertisers customized, geotargeted campaigns, taking advantage of just-in-time delivery to execute ad placements in contextually relevant editorial environments. It specialized in targeting lifestyle segments and niche demographics, as well as database marketing, product sampling and online advertising. (NF reached an aggregate Web audience generating more than 1 billion page views per month.)

Created by a consortium of newspaper publishers, which came together to combine their national sales forces over a number of decades, Newspapers First can be viewed as a bellwether for falling national print ad demand.

Last July, the company downsized its staff by almost half, according to E&P. CEO Bob Termotto said the decision to close the company was prompted by the adverse business environment, adding that the newspaper business "needs a new direction," especially in "how they're going to handle national advertising."

According to the Newspaper Association of America, total national advertising spending has plunged 46% from a peak of $8.1 billion in 2004 to just $4.4 billion in 2009. The last ad spending forecasts from Magna have total newspaper ad revenues continuing to decline through 2015.

Click to read this article on the MediaPostPublications.com website.

Mediabids works with Marchex on a few per-inquiry advertising campaigns, so if you are a publication who runs PI ads, you may have contributed to their success. 

Marchex Harnesses the Power of the Call

Written on

May 13, 2010 

Author

Gavin Dunaway  |

ADOTAS – So I’m walking along, minding my own business, when suddenly my iPhone starts making a weird sound — kinda like a marimba. It’s not the sound for a text message, Facebook update or a new email, so I’m a little frightened. After I slink it out of my pocket, I’m confused when the screen says, “Incoming call.”

A phone call? Wha? People still make them in the age of clicks and texts?

They certainly do, and Marchex has found that inbound phone calls convert at five times the rate of clicks. No wonder the company has launched a pay-for-call exchange, a performance-based call advertising service.

Marchex believes the pay-for-call market is about to explode due to the huge digital supply on a wealth of platforms and innovations in technology that cost-effectively serve, track, optimize and filter phone calls. In addition, advertisers can now glean far more user information from calls including geographic and demographic data.

The pay-for-call exchange — which spreads across 50 offline, online and mobile publisher partnerships — provides both campaign creation tools and call-filtering technologies. In beta testing, average call conversions ranged from 20% to 30% while consumer engagement on the phone averaged more than eight minutes.

If the last decade of digital marketing revolved around online conversions via clicks, Marchex believes the next 10 will revolve around driving conversions through calls.

“Pay-for-call advertising is the natural next step in the evolution of performance media,” said Marchex Chief Operating Officer Pete Christothoulou. “It is the last mile for advertisers, literally connecting them to their prospective customers through the phone. Each iteration of advertising products and business models — from pay-per-view to pay-per-click to pay-per-conversation — brings advertisers closer to customers and the actual transaction while increasing efficiency and ROI.”

Synapse will begin selling magazine subscriptions for magazines through Facebook and associated article links in Facebooks' news feed. Good idea but will people pay for a subscription when they can read the articles they are most interested in at no cost via Facebook already? Until publications restrict access to content, seems likely efforts like this will fall flat.

Magazines to Sell Subscriptions Within Facebook's News Feed

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The magazine business may soon have a way to do more with Facebook than engage fans and promote its brands. A mockup of an expanded article running in Facebook's news feed, using InStyle as an example. A mockup of an expanded article running in Facebook's news feed, using InStyle as an example. Synapse, a Time Inc. division that sells subscriptions for many publishers, is collaborating with Alvenda, a company that builds e-commerce applications, to introduce a system letting Facebook users buy print magazine subscriptions without leaving the site or even the Facebook news feed. The system, which Alvenda expects to make live in July or August, will also allow Facebook users to expand those blurbs of magazine content that are now common in the news feed into full articles, complete with advertising -- again without leaving the news feed, much less Facebook itself.

Full story here