kirk lapointe's themediamanager.com: how the news business is changing

While I'm taking a break, I tripped on Eric Alterman's latest column for The Nation and how it mourns the tone and disposition of those in the newspaper business as the wide-ranging media industry attempts to predict the future of news.
The dearth of decent ideas to save the business is "curious and depressing."

The rush is on to develop a new advertising model for newspapers. The dire results of the U.S. newspaper industry serve as a warning to other countries about how advertising is migrating, splintering and in some cases vaporizing.
Len Kubas has been a consultant on news media for as long as anyone can remember, and he reinvents his thinking routinely to provide some fresh ideas on the future state of affairs. His company's executive vice president, Ed Strapagiel, has produced a useful new set of prescriptions on how newspapers should approach the advertising environment in the digital age.
Largely it comes down to tearing down silos to create a common pricing and sales approach, developing a self-serve model to reduce the troop allotment, and investing in technology.
It's not my conclusion but theirs: Do it like Google.

Ad-supported widgets and social media will boom in the coming year.
Search is slowing, but will still experience strong growth.
Traditional online display advertising will grow, but not at the same clip.
Traditional media will grow at a much smaller rate.
Those are the highlights of a new forecast out today from Interpublic's Magna Global unit. Universal McCann, a unit of Interpublic, also released an outlook on traditional media.
The forecast suggests the "hyper-acceleration" of many online media forms will slow in the year ahead ---- still in healthy numbers (31.1 per cent for emerging media), but not quite at the same clip as this and last year.
Traditional media, much larger but much slower to grow, will experience only a four-per-cent increase in 2009, Universal McCann predicts.
Internet display will grow 12 per cent, but it's a fast-fading growth. Search will grow 24 per cent, but that's down from 26 per cent this year and 29.5 per cent last year.
The social media spend will increase more than 30 per cent in 2009. But that, too, is down from the more than 60-per-cent growth in the last year (albeit on a much, much smaller base).

When I examine our Web traffic at vancouversun.com, it's obvious we're part of the experience of many people's workdays. How else to explain how our traffic soars around 9 a.m. and seems to subside around 5 p.m.?
Now a study is wondering why Web sites aren't more actively trying to capture the captive audience at work and advertising to them directly.
The U.S. workplace is "the most lucrative channel" for directing ads that will generate sales, a marketing executive comments on the BIGresearch study in a story by the Center for Media Research.
The study found that Americans scout products, troll online and look for electronics, groceries and other consumer goods while at work. They are looking to consolidate drives, what with gas prices soaring, so they look for nearby shopping offers.
The study has a clever directive to it: Get the shopper at work, not necessarily at home.

Hitwise, the online tabulator, is reporting that one of the largest growth areas in Web advertising is the lovely coupon.
Coupon site visits grew 56 per cent in the week ending June 6 over the same period a year earlier. Coupons.com, with the most accessible URL of the bunch, has a 29-per-cent share of the market, up 190 per cent from a year earlier. Search engines drive about 20 per cent of the traffic to coupons, and about 60 per cent of searches were for a specific product or brand.

The rise of Internet advertising at some point had to overtake another medium, so radio is the next rung on the ladder. According to the Publicis advertising group, online will surpass radio this year. Magazines are next. Cinema and outdoors already were passed.
Internet advertising will grow 28 per cent this year. The overall advertising market will grow about 4.7 per cent.

For some time now it was expected Google, the largest ad server, would create a new service to try to be the largest ad measurer.
Today it has rolled out Google Ad Planner. It measures Internet use by largely drawing upon activity from servers, unlike the comScore and Nielsen Media measurement tools, which use panels to determine activity. Ad Planner will permit advertisers to enter their targeted audience and find sites most likely to match up with those targets.
The optimistic prospect for the service would marry it to Google's ad server to ideally place content in front of the right audience. Last week a more generic version of this traffic monitor was released.
Naturally it strikes fear in both the incumbents and the overall industry, which already has a fairly significant connection to Google and may not like the idea of further dependence. Until something more accurate comes along, though, advertisers are bound to want to spend more precisely.

An analysis by AdvertisingAge of the top 100 U.S. advertisers (or about 41 per cent of the market) indicates that about $1 billion of their advertising shifted into the digital space in 2007. The shift came at the expense of newspapers, which lost nearly $650 million, and television, which lost more than $400 million.
The slowing U.S. economy was also reflected in the figures: a mere 1.7-per-cent increase in the year, the most sluggish since 2001.

The Internet Advertising Bureau says Internet advertising reached $5.8 billion in the first quarter of 2008, more than 18 per cent ahead of the same quarter in 2007. It's the second-best quarter ever, behind only the previous one, which would have reflected the ad-flurry of Christmas season.

The New York Times summarizes the problems for the U.S. newspaper industry in a fairly succinct, bleak way today.
Ad revenue is down, the economy's overall malaise is compounding the troubles, and many of the more leveraged media firms are facing challenges meeting their financial obligations (although no one is at bankruptcy's door). Online revenue is growing, but not at the rate it was a year ago, and not nearly quickly enough to replace the loss in print revenue.
The speculation is that there will be further takeovers and assimilations to deal with some of the problems.
One analyst tells the Times the bottoming out may not take place for another three to four years, by which time that industry may bear little resemblance to today's.