From Monday Note byFrédéric Filloux: The Publisher’s Dilemma
Let’s face it: the online advertising business model, when applied to the transformation of the newspaper industry, is largely failure. The reasons are well known:
– The profusion of free, news-related contents diluted the perceived value of editorial-rich “trusted brands”.
– More agile competitors, quite adept at using sophisticated audience-catching techniques (that are implemented at a fraction of the cost of a modern printing plant).
– The endless stream of pages with hundreds of URLs added each day ended up destroying any balance in the supply vs. demand mechanism.
– The resulting pressure on prices, as “premium” ad formats slowly yielded to bulk fire sales.
– An unreliable audience measurement system that rewards cheating instead of editorial quality or relevance.
– The advertising community’s inability to base their purchases on solid market analyses.
And on GigaOm by Mathew Ingram: Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change is Not Helping, which buils on Filloux’s article:
That should keep both journalists and the business side of newspapers awake at night.