We still believe that asking people to pay for content online is necessary but these results from INDenver Times are pretty disappointing. Full story from WestWord here. 

From WestWord:

"After the Rocky Mountain News shut down in February, Foster and a batch of fellow Rocky journalists started an online news site, INDenver Times, with the help of three investors. When that project faltered because a goal of 50,000 subscribers fell 47,000 short (and the investors decided against making up the difference), Foster and about half the survivors launched another web news operation, dubbed the Rocky Mountain Independent. But that ending isn't any happier. Today will be the last for original RMI content, and subscribers are being informed that they'll receive refunds. The total number who signed up? About 200, counting both annual and monthly deals."

I find this news personally amusing because I know some people at Newsweek who told me about the redesign relatively early on in its process. The people I know did not have intimate details on how it would all manifest itself but they spoke about the redesign in the same types of terms often saved for enormous life changing events. Like, remember what life was like before we had triplets? Maybe things will pick up in the fall. 

 Story in the New York Observer:

"Newsweek sold an average of 66,702 copies off the newsstand in its first six weeks since the redesign versus the 66,533 issues that it averaged for the previous 18 issues in 2009, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations' Rapid Report.

More troubling, in the last four weeks that numbers are available, the magazine's sales slid each week from 85,000 copies sold to 75,000 to 67,100 to 50,000. The ABC numbers are available through its June 29 issue."

Newspaper ads placed second in a Harris Interactive, AdWeekMedia, survey of most helpful ads by medium. Full story here.

Banner ads ranked last as the most ignored type of advertising.

The results of this survey are particularly surprising when you consider what a similar survey would look like if advertisers were polled. My guess would be (this is only a guess, a quick search for a similar survey didn't yield any results but I will keep looking) that advertisers would rank the effectiveness of mediums quite differently.Which means that advertisers don't really know what is really working.

Online advertising has response measurements built in- anyone can see how many clicks or views they have received. Newspapers and magazines have done a lousy job introducing similar measurement metrics. So, despite the fact that readers say newspaper ads are extremely valuable when determining future purchases, advertisers don't know it. The scary part is- neither do publications.

You want to know why newspapers' advertising revenues are down more than other mediums? Readership and competition are no doubt issues but the big one and the one that print publications can directly control is that advertisers do not see the value in the medium. If people in the print industry don't show them, who will? Please note: I said show, not tell. Print publications generate results but advertisers don't consider the tracking of results to be their job, newspapers and magazines have to do that job themselves.

At Mediabids, we have taken this approach, in many instances, for the past 3 years and it works. Advertisers still buy print when you can show them it works.

More proof that newspapers are still a valuable source of information; thus a profitable place for advertising…

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/Magazines_22/One_place_where_print_media_still_rules.asp