Perfect Market, an analytics firm that examines traffic for publishers, has released its Vault Index to suggest that many hard-news topics fare better in delivering higher-priced advertising impressions as they garner audience.
In assuming that hard-news stories are charging more for ad impressions than many celebrity features, Perfect Market suggests that the yield is better when the subjective issues of quality are applied to news --- in other words, the more "serious" the journalism, the more it delivers economically.
Perfect Market suggests, though, that publishers aren't setting themselves up to capitalize by attaching higher advertising rates on those more serious stories and topics.