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.
Sites spend significant resources on tagging and trying to understand the algorithms that yield search results so they rank more highly, have more of what we know as Googlejuice, even have more value as companies. Paid search is still coveted as icing on that cake.
But in a geo-targeted world with vastly more information on the user, what value will there be in building search engine optimization for a site? If you're not relevant, will there be any value at all in SEO?
In his latest post at Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis rolls this notion around and raises a point: Our searches yield the same results at the moment. But with more data on our patterns and practices bound to be stored --- the definition of our so-called personal relevance --- might that be the more valuable commodity? If so, when will that happen?
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.
Since its earlier warning to Drudge Retort, and since the pushback from the blogging community, little has been heard from The Associated Press about its demands that bloggers not crib its reports for their reports.
The closest anyone seems to be getting to an understanding of the situation in this media blackout is the New York Times, which has interviewed (and been refused interviews by) the interested parties in the dispute.
Essentially it appears The AP wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its reports (these also being significant traffic drivers because Google and other search engines tend to crawl the headlines and the first words more aggressively). The battle is, it seems, not just about fair use, but about the traffic those words can drive in search.
But it's also clear (in The AP's non-comment) that there is much more to come in this dispute. And, as goes The AP, so could go many other media.
We are nearing the end of the book on the partnership possibilities involving Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google with the announcement of a 10-year (250 years in conventional media years) deal on advertising between Yahoo and Google. This comes just after the collapse of the Yahoo!-Microsoft dalliance that threatened to consume Yahoo in a $45-billion-plus purchase, then possibly just consume part of it in a possible advertising deal.
In essence Yahoo! will run Google ads alongside its search results. But the arrangement is non-exclusive, which should help smooth considerations with U.S. antitrust authorities.
The arrangements calls for an expensive penalty for Yahoo if Microsoft resurfaces successfully as a suitor for business.
The last chapter likely isn't ready for publication in this saga. Yahoo's annual meeting Aug. 1 could be a nasty one, with Carl Icahn leading the charge for better shareholder value. The market hasn't so far taken a shine to the deal from Yahoo's perspective, although Google's stock is up.
Newspapers send people to research further online and buy products. And seeing a product in the newspaper makes it more trustworthy.
Those are some of the findings of a new Google-commissioned study on online and newspaper ad dynamics.
Of those who view the newspaper, two-thirds then use the Internet for more research, and of those, 70 per cent will actually then go about purchasing. An interesting chain of events.
This is almost like a daily Eric Schmidt blog. There the Google CEO was yesterday with The New Yorker's Ken Auletta onstage in a discussion about Google's do-no-evil strategy.
But his words are heartening for media strapped by advertising challenges: It's Google's "moral imperative" to help fix the business. Google depends on high-quality content and it is not in its interests to watch good media go down the drain, he said.
Google hopes its acquisition of DoubleClick ($3-billion-plus) will revive some of the flagging U.S. newspaper advertising, but Schmidt makes clear there won't be a return to the same profit levels in any event.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, is getting around more and more these days. His latest speech to the Economic Club of Washington indicates a different form of computing is on its way: Cloud computing, with information housed away from your desktop, but portably available.
And he notes that newspapers have great opportunities in an online lifestyle, but have been slow to change.
Only a few months ago there were severe concerns about the Internet economy. The click-through rate on advertising associated with Google's AdSense was in some decline, and while the digital behemoth was asserting the figures were more of an adjustment due to some of its own tinkering with the technology, the skeptics were posing dire predictions.
Another month or so later and there is a restoration of optimism. Google's results from the measurement firm comScore indicate the click-through rate was up 20 per cent in April over the same month last year.
Microsoft and Yahoo! were off somewhat.
Eric Schmidt has given an extensive interview to Frankfurter Allgemaigne organization and the Google CEO makes news in the process:
1. Web 2.0 advertising isn't working and won't work until a new invention comes along.
2. Mobile advertising is the next big advertising thing. Everyone has a phone, companies are producing phone-based browsers that are getting speedy, and you can personalize the content.
3. Widgets are important because they speak to the personal, portable qualities people are seeking.
4. Search marketing is still a major deal and hasn't yet reached its potential.
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