The Solution and the Problem

Of course, ad clicks suck. No one takes an ad into a store either. It is the view that matters. I have no idea why people think that clicking on an ad is equivalent to seeing it in print. People who read a paper all their life do not notice ads either. Heck, they are even less noticeable. They don't move, have motion or attract me in anyway. At least some banner ads, can make you notice them.

The ad rates are what they are? I am sorry, but that has to be the dumbest thing I ever read on here. So i should say the print rates are what they are, no sense to raise them either even though its been 5 years???

Gradually, we have to raise the rates of online ads and do so at a rate faster than inflation. If we did this 10 percent per year versus the average 3.25 percent of average inflation, we would make up ground fast. In addition we have to find new ways to place them on our product, be it in e-mail , coupons on dining sites or through a better search function (like google).

And yes, I have to hope they change because if I listen to you, this business is dead. Wake up, people are not going to start buying the paper no matter what we do to it - hyperlocal, more content, no free internet. It is not happening. This is a free competitive marketplace and it is not changing. The Internet is not going to be a place that charges for websites unless US legislation makes it so.

Information is free now, like it or not. Perhaps we will even have to make the newspapers free to compete and drop them everywhere. Have a 90-95 percent market penetration and hike advertising rates.

People think this strategy will turn us into a shopper, but I hope that 50-100 years of having that newspaper in a community as a name brand will prove otherwise.

The internet has changed the face of information and how it is found. And it is all free. You cannot compete with free.

if you offer me a free rib-eye or I can pay 50 cents and get a fillet mignon, I will take the rib-eye most of the time.

 

God bless you, Barney ... I mean Johnny.

 

I agree w

I agree with everything you said. We cannot abandon the print product. It still has its place and will have its readers. They will just be fewer. If we put out a quality product we will see a less severe decline. The problem is we don't. We have been slashed to the bone too badly by corporate looking to make its quarter estimates.

 

Moddy, thanks for offering a solution. Just putting it out here has received reaction.

GIVE ME SOMETHING TO READ makes me think of Mel Gibson's "GIVE ME BACK MY SON!!" movie line.

 

I know I'm the dumbest poster on here, Hack, but here's another interesting read. From the AJR earlier this year. Maybe they're as dumb as me.

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4427

Here's a little snippet if you don't want to follow the link:

The problem is, an Internet visitor isn't yet as valuable as a print or broadcast consumer. The cost of reaching a thousand online readers – a metric known in advertising as CPM, or cost per thousand – remains a fraction of the print CPM. The price differential can be as much as 10-to-1, even though many newspaper Web sites now have online audiences that rival or exceed the number of print readers.

Some of this disparity is a result of the witheringly competitive nature of the Web. Unlike the print business, in which newspaper publishers generally enjoy near-monopoly status, the online news world is littered with entrants – from giants like MSNBC.com and AOL.com, to news aggregators like drudgereport.com, to blogs by the millions. This makes it tough for any online ad seller to do what newspaper publishers have done for years – keep raising their ad rates. "Ultimately, it comes down to supply and demand," observes Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers. "And there's an awful lot of supply out there."

Harvard's Patterson offers a more intriguing, and perhaps more unsettling, theory about why it's hard to squeeze more money out of online advertisers: Web ads may not be as effective as the traditional kind. "I'm not sure [advertisers] are convinced yet about how terrific a sales tool [a Web display ad] is," he says. "The evidence isn't strong yet that it can drive people into a store the way a full-page newspaper ad can. They're less confident about what they're getting online." Moreover, unlike their here-and-gone counterparts on the Internet, print subscribers still stay around long enough to see an ad. Some 80 percent of print readers say they spent 16 or more minutes per day with their newspaper, according to Scarborough Research.

 

Haha, Ira, I don't think you're dumb, and I apologize for the low blow, but I think we have to admit we have to start slowly charging more for online ads. Whether we are scared about losing revenue or not.


Also, thanks for the link.

I read that before and I think it backs up my argument too. The problem with raising ad costs on the internet is competition and people not knowing its value.

What most do not see in the lines of competition, of course, is that we can sell more local ads to locals. www.wwtdd.com (a celeb site) can not do it. 1/10 the cost of a print ad is pretty low for value and it will take time to correct this problem. The question is can we survive that long?

The article does not say the print ad is actually worth more, just that it is perceived to be worth more. A lot of people perceived that invading Iraq was not a bad idea at first, but it was. Eventually, people like myself (the under 30 crowd) will know the value and we will be willing to pay more for online ads. After all, why would one ad in the newspaper dive more people to a store than an online ad if they are viewed by the same amount of people?

 

DING DING DING, we have a winner. There is no way we can charge for our content to keep pace. It doesn't work. You can't give away something for free and then charge for it.

You would have to have all the newspapers agree to charge, and then shutdown all the news portals sites (google news, drudge report etc.).

That ship sailed long ago. The consumer likes his news a certain way and delivered a certain. The abject failure that was times select should teach us people don't like to pay for online.

Heck,people don't like to pay for the hard paper. How many times does a paper get passed around in one day in a city?

Edit: What's going to happen is that people are going to be under informed and eventually you would think they would get upset about it (especially at a local level). Maybe that brings us back.

People love our product but don't want to pay for it. There is a dissonance here. The business model that made this profitable is obsolete. So,either people pay for it or it goes away.

The market has spoken. We are dead despite a built in customer base that loves the product. What does that tell you about how bad management messed up tis industry?

 

I work at a smaller paper, and my vision, if king of the world, would be to have the Web and print product piggy back on each other and be intertwined as one "multi-dimensional" media outlet. "We are the Podunk Times — print and Web; stories, photos, audio, video, blogs, etc."

The content would be different, for the most part, in each outlet, with each building on the other and teasing back to the other.

The Web would have the breaking news type stuff in between print cycles (we are three times a week). Maybe a short 300 word game wrap-up on Friday night's football game, filed an hour after the game, with a photo or two -- that then teases Monday's more detailed coverage in the Podunk Times print edition. The paper would then follow suit on Monday with a more in-depth story(stories) on the game, the best photos, box scores, standings, sidebar if there is one, etc. -- all the stuff you would expect from a good newspaper.

The print edition then teases back to the Web where readers on Monday morning can find a 20-picture photo gallery, maybe audio from the post-game interviews, maybe a blog post of notebook/tidbit items that didn't make it into the paper or special behind the scenes stuff like what went into your photographer getting that great picture of the winning touchdown, etc. But not everything that made the paper!!

Tuesday could feature a "daily briefing" of sports headlines since there is no print edition that day -- scores from volleyball or soccer the night before, breaking news that Joe Smith got picked player of the week by the conference for catching the winning TD, etc. -- again teasing the Wednesday print product for more details and more indepth stories.

Rinse and repeat. One should tease the other, which should tease the other back. With different content that makes both essential in the eyes of the reader and advertiser.

Of course, here is my problem with this grand plan: THERE AREN'T ENOUGH PEOPLE TO PULL IT OFF at my shop or most others... And therein lies the rub when you lay off or choose not to hire the very professionals who could build the "new look" media into a real force... And I think people would love it and love us for a long time to come...

 

Isn't it Salon that tells you up front: "You WILL have to watch a 30 second ad before viewing this article."

Sure, I could end-around it, but by the time I've chosen my end-around, I'm might as well just sit there for 30 seconds. And ya make the ad so that you can't "click out of it."

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Here's part of the answer, though, folks. The most valuable thing an advertiser can have is information about YOU.

In the future, you will click an article on a newspaper's website.

The newspaper will grab your IP address and start a database file on you which will contain everything you've clicked and an approximation of where you live.

Your file will be sold to advertisers.

Cha-ching.

 

Make people pay for premium content.
Put stories on the web, for free, and then everything else the paper does — blogs, message boards, expanded coverage, and whatever else. You have to either subscribe to the paper, or pay for the online coverage.
People will pay a premium for content. You have all kinds of newsletters and things where people pay. Put them online and charge.