The relatively new online advertising market is bound to have its growing pains. Marketwatch features a piece on the pressure on newspapers to alter --- that is, lower --- their online rates and tie them more to results.
Ad buyers complain in the piece that newspapers continue to behave as if they hold near-monopolies on local information. Their cost-per-thousand (CPMs) reader rates are too high, given the performance of those ads in increasing business results.
As if the U.S. newspaper business needs more challenges, the buyers suggest the industry hasn't kept pace with the ways in which advertising is consumed online and are simply transferring CPMs to the digital space. In my experience, that isn't happening as widely as some suppose. CPMs are much lower online, from what I've seen across media. But the larger argument appears to be that the market doesn't accept the rate.
