The Real Problem is EVERYONE Knows Al Nahar Newspaper Doesn't Know How To Throw A Party
Posted on May 14, 2010 by Mediabids
Gleefully written by PaidContent.org, who leaps at every opportunity to stick it to print. Full story here
Salvation Will Have To Wait: Newspapers Biggest Get Together is Off
The newspaper industry has cancelled its big annual conference, citing the industry’s “economic crisis” for the second year running.
Organiser WAN-IFRA says it’s shelving the World Newspaper Congress - due to be held in Beirut, Lebanon, June 7 to 10 - “due to the failure of the Lebanese host organisation to meet its financial commitments”....
“The local host, the An-Nahar newspaper, has just informed WAN-IFRA that it was unable to provide the agreed funds to meet their obligations, in the aftermath of the 2009 financial, economic and political crisis in the region. The cost of the venue, security and other local expenses was estimated to be 1.6 million Euros and could not be covered by registration fees alone.”
The event was billed as “In Search of the New Business Model”, discussing falling circulations, insufficient web ad income and paid content models. Oh well.
WAN-IFRA says 700 people had registered for the event - tickets for which cost between €1,150 and €1,950 - and that it would have attracted 1,000 people. That would have brought in €1.15 million if all attendees were paying the minimum price.
The World Editors Forum, a separate event that’s nevertheless part of the congress, has been rescheduled for October 6 to 8 in Hamburg, during the IFRA Expo. New Independent proprietor Alexander Lebedev was due to speak amongst chiefs from ProPublica, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), Telegraph Media Group and YouTube.
Last year, WAN-IFRA postponed the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India, from March to December, citing the “impact of the global financial downturn on travel and conference budgets at newspaper companies”.
Tagged mediabids media newspapers magazines wan newspaper ads revenue advertising conference
An SNA Blog Paints a Picture of a Flawed Theory
Posted on May 13, 2010 by Mediabids
The blog post below, from the Suburban Newspaper Association of America, unintentionally offers the perfect illustration of the illogical thinking of many publications in regards to pay walls on web sites. On one hand, the author, Deb Shaw, points out that newspapers are the primary initiators of local content and that other mediums, including citizen-written efforts and blogs are ill equipped to displace newspapers in this role. On the other hand, the author ominously quotes a survey showing that most Americans want their news for free and would search elsewhere for content if it was not given away free by publications.
Search where? If local newspapers are not writing it, readers can search all they want, it won't exist. I want a new car to be free but no matter how many auto dealers I go to the darn things still cost money. Besides, am I missing something, hasn't the last 10 years taught publications that the cost of creating content and distributing it free on websites outweighs the revenue that can be generated by online ads of any form? On some level it is supply and demand- online advertisers are buying traffic and there are so many online opportunities that supply online has far outstripped demand, thereby deflating ad rates and that will make it tough for originally produced free content to be paid for entirely by paid advertising anytime in the near future.
If you disagree with me and want to read more of the "give-it-away-free-because-someday-traffic-will-result-in-revenue" philosophy go to the SNA's website, here.
Weathering The Perfect Storm
By Deb Shaw
Editor, Suburban Publisher
While the news media industry has spent the last few years reeling from the financial pitfalls of the economic meltdown, declining readership and plummeting advertising revenues, small dailies and community weeklies have proved profitable, and are, increasingly, the dominant source for local coverage.
So concludes The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2010 report, covering two areas that are of particular interest to SNA members — Newspapers and Online.
As expected, the report reveals the challenging economic state of the newspaper industry, and paints a stark picture of the woeful economic realities at many metro newspapers. However, it points out that smaller, suburban and community newspapers are faring much better economically.
“The problems are not uniform across the industry. Big-city papers continue to have the worst of it in these difficult times. Small dailies and community weeklies, with the exception of some that are badly positioned or badly managed, still do better. The latter come closer to the late-20th century position of newspapers as the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertiseAnother noteworthy finding relates to online news consumption and pay walls. Any publisher thinking of erecting a pay wall should consider that, according to the report, just 7% of Americans express any willingness to pay for news content. Instead, large majorities said they would look for content elsewhere if their favorite site put up a pay wall.
In addition, the report addresses social media (now firmly established as part of the media ecosystem), citizen news sites (most are not in a position to take on the job of traditional news outlets), blogging (it’s declining) and user habits relative to news consumption (we’ve become grazers — on a typical day, nearly half of Americans now get news from four to six different platforms).
The entire report is available, free of charge, at www.stateofthemedia.org
Tagged content newspaper websites association suburban newspapers of magazines america sna paywalls advertising pay revenue free publications
Washington Post Advertising Revenue Up 17% in Q1
Posted on May 10, 2010 by Mediabids
From PaidContent.org:
For the most part, The Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO) had a pretty good Q1—except, of course, for the magazine division (i.e., Newsweek), which saw revenue plunge 36 percent to $29.4 million. While Newsweek had a for sale sign hung on it this week, the newspaper division’s troubles have sharply abated. In Q1, newspaper revs declined 3 percent, a vast improvement over last year’s deep 22 percent drop. But the good news on the newspaper publishing side, which is primarily represented by WaPo’s flagship, came from the web, as display revs jumped 17 percent. (For more details on Newsweek’s dismal Q1, see Staci D. Kramer’s piece here.)
Earlier this week, the WaPo’s online-only Slate Group said that its ad revenues were up 52 percent. The positive results at Slate, which is part of the newspaper division, weren’t able to obscure the continued struggles for its print-based sibling as the washingtonpost.com’s classified sales were down 22 percent, hardly better than Q109’s 23 percent fall.
Here’s a snapshot of the newspaper division’s during Q1:
—Print ad revenue at The Washington Post fell 8 percent to $68.7 million, largely due to pullback in general and retail advertising.
—The paper’s daily circ dropped 12.5 percent, while Sunday circulation slid 10.4 percent. The company blamed it on the abnormally higher circ surrounding the news around last year’s presidential inauguration.
—The division posted an operating loss of $13.8 million, considerable improvement over last year’s $53.8 million loss.
Overall, net income was $45.4 million ($4.91 per share) versus the $19.2 million ($2.04 loss per share) net loss in Q109. As usual, the company’s strength came from its cable and education units.
Tagged advertising post mediabids newspaper washington bids 2010 revenue first media quarter
Mediabids Speech to the SNPA and SNA's Strategic Revenue Summit
Posted on March 05, 2010 by Mediabids
This speech was given by Jedd Gould, of Mediabids, to the Suburban Newspaper Association and Southern Newspaper Publishers Association's Strategic Revenue Summit yesterday.
Advertiser's Expectations Have Changed, So Should You
10 years ago
Mediabids launched and we have been doing per-response advertising in addition
to our conventional online marketplace sales for the past 4 years.
I have been
asked to speak a little bit about response-based advertising and there are
specific methods that we have developed at Mediabids to handle the demand we
have for per-response advertising in print. Not all of these may be right for
your publication but here is how we do it:
-
We
typically work with advertisers who are willing to pay for an unlimited amount
of response.
-
Response
is typically defined as a call, a web visit or a text.
-
Response
based advertising is heavily reliant upon tracking of the response generated by
an ad. At Mediabids we got into charging advertisers on a per response basis because
we saw the need for tracking and better understanding the results that print
ads were generating.
-
Every
ad that we place has a unique identifier, so we know what each publication is
generating.
o
In
2009 we placed 66,350 per response ads for more than 500,000 total insertions.
o
Every
single ad we placed had a unique phone number.
o
We then track using the data generated from
800 numbers to determine what a publication is owed.
o
Advertisers
typically pay based on either a per-call or per-sale basis and the amounts vary
depending on the type of product and the anticipated volume.
-
We
give publications the choice of which advertisers they want to run, we resize
the ad to their specifications, insert the unique phone number or url, upload
it to the website where the publication can download it and then track the
response.
-
As
some of you may know, most 800#s are really transparent pass-throughs, allowing
you to get the information on the caller and then point the call to wherever
the advertiser wants the phone to ring.
-
Because
we are not depending on the advertiser to provide us data on tracking, we know
that the information we use to measure results and then pay publications is
accurate.
Per-response advertising accounts for
a small portion of what Mediabids does. We are primarily a marketplace for
print in which advertising is bought and sold conventionally, in that
advertisers pay for space.
However, what we have learned through
per-response has influenced everything we do.
From what
has gone on in the marketplace over the past 10 years, it is pretty clear that
advertiser’s expectations have shifted faster than publications. However,
despite what you may read or even hear at times at a conference like this,
there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future because fundamentally
print works. It is important to keep in mind that advertisers don’t love Google
or Yahoo because they have some affinity to search based advertising. They
spend billions with these two companies because they deliver measurable
response.
At Mediabids
we have about 17,000 advertisers who use our website to buy ads and in most
cases they are spending more in print today than they did 10 years ago. They
are not spending more because we are particularly good at selling (as evidenced
by my dynamic speaking style), they are spending more because print delivers
results and we can prove it.
Suggestion #1: If you are going to talk
to advertisers about response you have to have confidence in your product.
Advertisers never
tell publications that their advertising works. Your sales reps, people with
years of experience, could probably count on one hand the number of times they
have walked into an advertiser’s business or called them on the phone and had
that advertiser tell them their ad was working well. The problem is that
advertisers might be right, they might be wrong. But no one really knows. The
tracking methods that advertisers use are weak. The person answering the phone
who is supposed to remember to ask – how did you hear about us? Is not a
tracking mechanism.
This
constant state of rejection and negotiation creates a type of institutional
insecurity. The result is that many people who work at publications seem to
have a sneaking suspicion that their product just does not work because, in
most cases, that is what their advertisers are telling them- not showing them
mind you, telling them.
If you are
going to compete with products like Google and Yahoo, you have to believe your publication
can generate results and work to make that happen. You have to understand your
readers, their demographics and how that overlays on your advertisers’
products, goods or services.
Suggestion #2: acknowledge that
advertisers have changed the rules
Google and
Yahoo have let the genie out of the bottle. Advertising is no longer about a real
estate style approach to a page –
getting an ad on a good page where people will see it – advertising for most companies
is now about response, advertising for the sake of a brand is increasingly
obsolete for large and small companies and everyday that goes by it becomes
more obsolete. This is true in all mediums. Radio, television and the internet
are all mediums which have adopted per-response based models and succeeded with
them.
If print continues
to suffer, it won’t be because of circulation or because publications cannot
figure out a way to monetize content or their websites or deliver the product
electronically in a compelling way. If print continues to decline it will be
because publications still think they are selling real estate in an age when no
one wants to buy. Google and Yahoo do not sell real estate, they sell response
and results. Selling space against response to a group of advertisers who do
not know how to track their own response is a very difficult thing to do.
I am not
suggesting that per response is the only hope, in the sense that advertisers
should only pay for the response that is generated. Advertisers have changed
the rules, because they have changed their expectations.
Whether you
use a per call, per sale or charge for space in a conventional manner, you are
selling space to advertisers who now care more about the response they are
generating than the benefits of branding. Every time someone buys an ad, there
is an expectation of response and, unfortunately, most publications don’t have
the tools in place to show advertisers how their ads are working. When advertising works and you can prove it,
how you charge is irrelevant. The method of the monetization is academic.
Suggestion #3: Own your data
If
publications are going to thrive in the future they must take ownership of the
results generated by their product. This is the biggest difference between
newspapers and online offerings like Google and Yahoo.
Compare for
a moment two mediums - online and print:
With
Google’s Adwords an advertiser has real time access to how much money they have
spent, how many clicks they have generated and with a simple software install,
how many sales the clicks have resulted in. A quick calculation can determine
definitively whether those ads are paying for themselves.
Now think
about what an advertiser in a daily newspaper does to try to figure out how an
ad is working. A shocking number of
advertisers, who are incredibly sophisticated in measuring other mediums,
depend on the same devices that were available to them in the 1950s – coupons… or worse, asking the customer why they called.
If you have ever had the misfortune to listen to phone calls, you know that the
average American consumer either is uncomfortable answering this question or
has an astonishingly short memory, because few people know. In fact, an
advertiser we work with did a test where they asked their operator to give the
caller 5 choices of where an advertiser heard about a print ad– 4 real
publications where their ad appeared and 1 completely fictitious publication.
The fake publication outperformed 2 of the real ones.
Advertisers
need to be provided the tools to understand how their ads are performing,
regardless of whether they are paying per-response, per-sale, or for space.
Tracking for
print should not be something left to the advertiser.
1) Data is valuable. It can be used in
so many ways.
2) Conventional ad selling is, in large
part, a negotiation and data is a very compelling selling tool.
3) Advertisers are bad at collecting
this response data themselves and should not be entrusted with this job. Left
to their own devices they rarely track results effectively. Mediabids works
with more than 17,000 advertisers and there might be 1% who track effectively
on their own.
The problem
is that when advertisers don’t track, they suspect the worst. We see this first
hand – I started Mediabids 10 years ago because I wanted to figure out a way to
sell print ads using the tools available through the internet. Thousands of
advertisers use our site to buy print ads and four years ago we started to look
into why many of these advertisers were increasing their budgets online and
decreasing them in print.
The answer
was very clear. Our advertisers were not making any effort to track on their
own, we were not providing them with any tools and therefore most of the objections
to spending we heard centered around the “my ad is not working” argument. Nothing to back
it up, no data, no proof – just a gut feel, the ad isn’t working.
Mediabids
got into per-response advertising because we got into tracking.
Like everyone
in this room, at Mediabids we knew- on some level - that print worked but we
didn’t have any data, we couldn’t back it up, we were as insecure as our
publication clients about results. The problem was.. that we really didn’t have
a choice – we were really already selling response based advertising without
any way of validating the response.
I say that
we were selling response based advertising because that is what our advertisers
thought they were buying – we were just doing a bad job selling. Because we
were selling space, not results. Advertisers were spending money- paying for
space - with little concern on our part (Mediabids) or the publicaations’ about
the response that was being generated.
Today we
track everything in both response-based ads and conventional ads.
What we have
learned presents a much different picture than what you have heard about print
recently. Here are a few common denominators of the results across advertisers:
-
Print
is working
-
The
leads generated by print are almost always more valuable than any other medium.
More valuable than radio, television or the internet.
-
The
ROI of print is almost always higher than other mediums.
-
The
close rate on leads generated by print is better than other mediums.
-
The
customer retention rate is better: The customers acquired via print tend to be
better educated about the products they are buying and therefore are
longer-lasting customers.
But
Mediabids’ advertisers only know this because we show them and showing them has
been worthwhile. In 2009 our revenue nearly tripled after doubling in 2008.
Most of our advertisers, who represent a wide cross-section of business types
and geographical focuses, spend more today on print than they did 10 years ago
because we can show them it works.
Please know,
I am happy to get into greater detail of the mechanics of how this is done
later.
As I said
earlier, Google and Yahoo let the genie out of the bottle and recalibrated
advertisers’ expectations but that does not mean that print cannot adapt and
succeed by incorporating some basic tracking and measurement devices. In some
cases that may lead to a per-response deal. In other cases, a conventional ad
sale. But in all cases, we have found at Mediabids, the more data a company has
on the response generated by its ad, the more likely they are to feel like
their money is being spent wisely.
Google Wave and the NAA: Explain again how this helps anyone except Google?
Posted on January 30, 2010 by Mediabids
In this excerpt from an article on Google Wave by the Newspaper Association of America, the NAA gives us just another example of how the organization continues to misunderstand how its members make the money they use to pay its dues. Google Wave does not offer any sustainable revenue stream for publications. If everyone would give away their content for free, a lot of people could come up with a cool way of displaying it too. But Wave does nothing for the publications who actually have to pay people to go out and write stories. Hard to believe that the NAA consistently misses this point, maybe they believe, as Google does, that as long as your motto says you intend to do no harm, it is ok to wrip off print publications.
Here is what they said. Full story here, if you have the stomach to read it.
As Google Wave ends its first year of existence, we have learned two things:
First, there’s no shortage of critics who are happy to argue that the Google product, which combines threaded conversations with collaborative document editing and a host of embedded interactive gadgets, may be a technology searching for a purpose.
Second, the term “beta” applied to a Google product means just that for a change—until a recent round of bug fixes, the service slowed to a crawl or crashed as soon as the number of visitors participating in a “wave” reached the kind of critical mass a media site would draw.
Does that mean newspapers should wait to begin experimenting with Wave? Not at all – especially given its potential to shape conversations both within and beyond news organizations, argue early industry dabblers in the technology.
“Think about how many newsrooms would have killed to be on top of a social media tool like Twitter four years ago, before it became as popular,” says Chris Taylor, online editor of TBO.com, who oversees converged Web operations for The Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV. “We want to make sure our newsroom is familiar with Wave so if it becomes the next great tool for media consumption, we know how to be there for our audience.”
Tagged newspapers bids mediabids google wave media america advertising technology naa of newspaper magazines association
From the AFCP: How Print Helps the Internet
Posted on November 13, 2009 by Mediabids
From the Association of Free Community Papers (AFCP:
How Print Helps the Internet
Telegraph.co.uk became the first British
newspaper website when it was launched 15 years ago.
When I took over the editorship of the
fledgling Telegraph internet site early in 1995, two questions were constantly
being posed to me. The first was: how can you make money out of something you
give away free? The second was: does this mean the end of newspapers? The first
of these questions was always the most tricky, because, in reality, no one had
a clue how we were going to make money. The Telegraph's internet operation was
essentially a marketing initiative with a brief to explore this new medium and
report back. No one said anything about making money, although reader offers
were always part of the mix from the start, so there was a token nod in the
direction of commerce.
I recall a rather a rather scary meeting
with the then proprietor Conrad Black, who asked me the same question. I
pointed out to him that he was always complaining that city analysists
undervalued the share price of Hollinger (which owned the Telegraph) and that
one of the reasons they gave was that the company did not have an internet
strategy. By backing an internet newspaper, I reasoned, he would show them that
he did have a strategy and his share price would rise accordingly - so at least
he would make some money that way. The answer seemed to satisfy him and we were
allowed to keep going.
The longer term answer remains elusive.
Short of charging for content, no one really is completely sure 15 years later.
And although the telegraph's internet operations do attract many millions of
advertising revenue now, these revenues are still smaller than the sales and
advertising revenue of the print titles.
As to the second question, my answer
remains the same as it was then: of course the internet doesn't spell the end
of newspapers. No new medium has ever sunk an older one without trace. Contrary
to popular musical mythology, video didn't kill the radio star (although DVD
and Blu Ray have certainly given video a kicking) and TV didn't kill radio - in
fact, radio is going from strength to strength, while a lot of TV is struggling
to survive.
And the longer time goes on, the more
convinced I am that that the internet needs newspapers. The reason is simple:
people like reading, and whilst reading from a screen is bearable for short
items, it gets tedious for anything more than a few hundred words. I'm prepared
to bet that the majority of people, young and old alike, when they find
something online they want to give detailed study to - whether its an article
or the terms and conditions of their holiday booking - the first thing they do is
hit the 'print' button so they can sit down with a bit of paper in their hands.
I think there's something deeply ingrained
in the DNA of post Gutenberg culture concerning typography and design - and
nowhere do you find more exciting an innovative typeography and design than in
mass ciculation newspapers and the plethora of magazine and supplements they
bring in their wake. And whilst the design of websites has advanced from the
rather sparse minimalism that characterised our efforts 15 years ago, they still
have a long way to go before they can replicate the best that newspapers have
to offer.
But beyond the aesthetic argument, there's
a more profound argument about the centrality of newspapers, and this is to do
with the business of telling stories, and creating compelling narratives. If
you examine the world's great online sources of news and opinion, for example,
the vast majority of them have sprung from newspapers or from broadcast
organisations with strong roots in newspaper journalism culture.
So, in a curious way, things have come full
circle. Fifteen years ago, the Telegraph newspapers needed an internet site to
help transform the brand image of the paper, to make it seem more modern and
relevant. Now, I think, when our internet presence has made us a global brand,
we need the newspaper even more to remind those readers why they value what
they are reading.
Tagged internet readership community free www.mediabids.com newspaper mediabids of papers telegraph e-editions magazines money association advertising
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