I've been trying to decipher the meaning of the click-through difficulties (AP story) for Google, because the impact on the media economy has enormous potential.
What's clear is that comScore is tabulating weakness in Google's click-through rate --- and has been for two months now --- which in turn guides the advertising revenue stream for the online advertising behemoth.
What's also clear is that Google is doing much to crack down on fraudulent and accidental clicks, a painful short-term move that could have long-term benefits in creating an advertising model with greater integrity.
The real concern, though, is that users are getting ad fatigue online and that Google's rapier targeting of paid search ads might be losing its appeal to the targeted.
The next few months in a downturned U.S. advertising market will tell an important tale.
It's possible that the relative excitement of clicking through to a product site or a service provider has waned. Some of the more dynamic, interactive ad models have been appealing, but it doesn't feel like we've entered an era of Ad 2.0.
Content providers are already scratching their heads about the digital business model. What if advertisers start doing the same?
The new BBC site is no longer under wraps and it's highly impressive. David Pogue has gone through what I'm starting to go through: Traffic is growing for the blog, but the writing has to loosen up to encourage comments. (I walk a very difficult line as a manager in expressing any views about media change, I might note, so I am inherently a lot less provocative.) When Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought Dow Jones, one expected result (of many) was that the Wall Street Journal 's subscriber-supported online model was going to be liberated to become a free service. Even relative geezers like me understand there is something afoot in the way media are being dissembled and reconstructed by consumers --- find a piece here, get a search result there, a send-to-a-friend, get-from-a-friend couple of clicks, and you've got an adequate fill of information to form a view. The journalism adage on investigations --- follow the money --- is also a necessity in media management in times of great change. In this digital age, where is the money going? Last week's State of the News Media report concluded there was a dangerous decoupling of news and advertising emerging in the transition to greater digital presences by the conventional media organizations. Jupiter Research's Barry Parr has outlined some best practices for news organizations in the Web 2.0 environment. His report is proprietary, but the David Card blog from Jupiter pointed to three elements of it this week: Eric Alterman's scholarly piece today in The New Yorker examines the tension of the newspaper in the digital age. It is a sympathetic, somewhat nostalgic look at print, but it also pokes into the viability of digital news media and offers a slightly hopeful take on the print future. Like many New Yorker articles, it seeks definitiveness. A critical challenge for newspapers is to engage non-newspaper readers now online. It is never easy bringing about meaningful change at the best of times, but what happens when it's actually some of the worst of times? |