Critical to the evolution of journalism is the development of a new digital business model to support it. We can whinge all we like about fragmented audiences and the challenges facing conventional media, but we have to spend more time creating a sustainable form of support on the digital frontier or the effort to redevelop and strengthen journalism will fall on deaf ears.
Recently a number of experts on online publishing have confronted the basic wisdom that advertisers should be measuring effectiveness of campaigns on the basis of click-through traffic.
This is a significant development because it stands to deconstruct a model that is barely off the ground. No sooner have advertisers started spending online and measuring their reach through traffic metrics than did experts come along and say it's the wrong way to measure.
In the latest Online Publishing Insider blog, David Koretz echoes a sentiment emerging in the field that it's necessary to change the advertising experience online and develop new metrics. Mainly, though, he's suggesting clicks can hurt an advertiser or mislead one about the reach of the campaign.
In managing media, finding this new experience amounts to one more layer of challenge.
