Entries tagged with “advertising” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game
Mac Slocum
February 27, 2009
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Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:
According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.
The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.
Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.
Google Doesn't Have Answers for Newspapers
Peter Brantley
January 8, 2009
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Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers:
Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone?
No. They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed.
So what else can Google do?
We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn't take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free. We've tried to get newspapers to have more tightly integrated products with ours. We'd like to help them better monetize their customer base. We have tools that make that easier. I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don't. These little things help, but they don't fundamentally solve the problem.
Politico Expands Content Sharing Service
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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Here's a sliver of positivity from the gloomy news business: Politico's content sharing network has added more than 100 clients since launching in September. From Editor & Publisher:
Politico Network, which makes the political news Web site's content available in exchange for advertising placement, launched Sept. 9, according to Beth Frerking, an assistant managing editor.
Newspapers and broadcast outlets utilize the content for their Web sites in exchange for placing advertisements provided by Politico, with revenue shared by both.
Frerking says different content packages are available that provide between five and 15 Politico items per week. The more content the client uses, the less their share of the ad revenue.
"We sell ads for the entire network and the revenue is based on how much you use, either 50%, 40% or 30%," she explained. "Rather than charging you for it, it works like this."
CNN is also getting into the sharing/subscription game via its recently announced wire service, which is positioned as an alternative to the Associated Press wire.
Report: Wall Street Journal Grabbing High-End Ads from New York Times
Peter Brantley
November 21, 2008
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Silicon Alley Insider and others are reporting on Bloomberg's notice that the Wall Street Journal is grabbing high-end luxury advertising revenue from the New York Times:
As if the New York Times wasn't having enough trouble keeping up with an ad recession and the Internet crushing its print business. Now the newspaper is facing increasing competition for print ad s... from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal ...
... And then there's the stats: The WSJ has a paid circulation of 1.4 million, up 2.4% y/y. The NYT: 859,000, down 5.5%. With more readers, the WSJ can charge more for ads, $264,426 for full page color vs. $193,800 at the NYT.
Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations
Mac Slocum
November 18, 2008
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Scott Karp expands on claims that Hulu is nipping at YouTube's heels with 10 pointed observations about the future of media. Karp's full list is recommended reading, but the following points inspired a few thoughts of my own:
1 . Professional content still has A LOT more value than "user-generated content."
This bodes well for publishers, studios and other companies that have attained professional status, but there's another aspect that deserves mention: The concept of professional in the digital realm is transforming from exclusive to inclusive.
Under traditional models with limited channels, a professional was someone who achieved a certain title through luck, talent and output; the content produced by these people was deemed professional by default. But digital platforms allow consumers to choose material on their own terms, and with that comes a shift of the professional label from job association to consumer impression. If consumers deem a piece of "user-generated" content to be professional, then it is (to those particular consumers). And if enough consumers assign the same value to the same content, advertisers will eventually get on board. We're in the very early stages of this professional transition (and the ensuing debate), but I'm excited to see how a reimiagining that includes both traditional companies and upstart professionals plays out.
8. Most analogue media businesses, when fully transitioned to the web, will likely bear little resemblance to the original businesses.
Karp summarizes something that's been gnawing at me for months: the old models just don't hold up in the digital world. Distribution went from narrow and expensive to wide and cheap; audiences once limited to specific channels have dispersed across a broad landscape; Web advertising revenue will not replace traditional ad revenue; and, after 10-plus years of Web use, consumers now expect basic digital content to be free. Fighting against these changes delays the inevitable, but acceptance opens up enormous opportunity to build leaner businesses that use content, community and the Web's efficiences to sell scarce products (i.e. targeted research, consulting, education, events, experiences, and access).
What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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The similarities between the music and book industries tend to diverge when you examine the smallest possible component of each format: unlike songs, book chapters aren't usually self contained.
But recipes are a different matter. A recent story in the New York Times looks at the upcoming Web site, Cookstr, which aims to catalog recipes from top chefs:
Cookstr, which will be supported by advertising revenues, will aggregate recipes from published cookbooks. All of the authors will have their own pages, with biographies, links to recipes and books, and in the case of restaurant chefs, links to their locations on Google maps.
Cookstr isn't blazing new trails here: All Recipes, Epicurious, Big Oven, FoodNetwork.com and other Web outlets have built their sites around aggregation of individual recipes. But there's still a silo-based mentality in play because recipes are only free to roam within the boundaries of each site. This is equivalent to a record company only making songs available through its own proprietary service. As we've seen with the success of iTunes, YouTube and most recently through Hulu, users flock to platforms that replace traditional boundaries with massive catalogues of material. Shoehorning content and users into a specific channel rarely works on the Web (iTunes is the exception), so the record labels eventually moved toward wide distribution across multiple platforms.
There are key differences between songs and recipes -- paid downloads vs. free text content most notable among them -- but a variation on the song model might work for recipes: sell advertising against publisher-owned recipe pages; allow standalone recipes to disperse with attached branding and pull-back opportunities; and use increased attention from wider distribution to deliver related products with built-in scarcity, such as traditional cookbooks, custom books, curated collections, cooking classes and events.
The Economic Value of Trust
Mac Slocum
October 21, 2008
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Philip Meyer looks at the connection between consumer trust and publishers' viability. From the American Journalism Review:
The best publishers have always known that trust has economic value. In "The Vanishing Newspaper," I reported that advertising rates increased by $3.25 per Standard Advertising Unit (SAU) for each one percentage point increase in the persons who said they believed what they read in the paper. And papers with higher trust were more successful in resisting the long-term decline in household penetration.
Watch the YouTube Video, Buy the Product
Mac Slocum
October 8, 2008
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YouTube's Content ID service, something we've covered in the past, gives publishers two options for handling unauthorized videos: the material can be removed from YouTube or it can be turned into advertising/revenue opportunities.
An article in today's New York Times shows which option Google prefers -- Content ID can now be used to associate "click-to-buy" links with video clips:
Music labels could choose to place the e-commerce links next to their own videos or on videos uploaded by users, whose images or soundtrack they identified using YouTube's Content ID system, which allows content owners to find unauthorized material on the site.
Click-to-buy links are shown below the video player on YouTube pages. It's unclear if this functionality will be integrated into videos embedded on external sites since this would require some sort of revenue share between the content owner, YouTube, the retailer and Web sites that publish embedded clips.
Links are currently limited to iTunes and Amazon products and are only viewable by U.S. visitors. YouTube says expansion plans are in the works.
Finding Balance Between User Experience and Web Ads
Mac Slocum
September 24, 2008
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In a post at Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp compares the advertising value propositions of Google and Facebook:
With Google, the value to users and the value to advertisers is perfectly aligned. Everybody wins.
With Facebook, if you read between the lines, it's really the same value proposition as traditional advertising -- advertisers forcing themselves on users, in a way that creates little or no value for the users.
As Karp notes, Google found a way to automatically "opt in" users by serving contextually-relevant advertising with organic search queries and individual Web pages. Value is automatically established because readers are seeing ads connected to their chosen topic.
Expanding on Karp's point, there are two aspects of Google's text ads that have always struck me as innovative:
- Simplicity -- On the Web, a short and relevant message delivered at precisely the right moment holds far more power than a flashy ad banner.
- Lineage -- The DNA of AdSense and AdWords is closer to editor-picked related links than the broad brand campaigns of traditional advertising.
Google used algorithms to establish advertising dominance, but the fundamental advertisement-user balance Google employs is a mechanism all content creators should keep in mind as they develop their own ad-based projects. Ultimately, effective Web advertising boils down to one simple question: How can ads enhance the user experience?
Politico Expanding Staff, Circulation and Ad Space
Mac Slocum
September 22, 2008
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Looking for a new revenue source, it recently created Politico Network, working with a handful of newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Politico provides some articles to the papers, which turn over some of their online advertising space to Politico to sell ...
... Political pages can be an especially tough sell for papers, whose consumer advertisers dislike controversy. But Politico hopes to aggregate political pages from multiple newspapers, sell them to advertisers, and return to the papers significantly more than they would receive from standard ad networks.
Levels of Quality and Revenue Streams
Mac Slocum
September 3, 2008
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In a New York Times piece looking at a new batch of Web shows, Mike Hale writes:
Oddly enough, waiting through the commercials at the beginning of each snippet didn't bother me. I could have avoided them by going to YouTube, but the lower video quality and ugly viewing environment there -- still insulting after all these years -- made the ads at the CBS site seem palatable.
Last month, experts at the RBC Capital conference said advertisers were still wary of associating their brands with user-generated videos, but there's a demand for professional content. From News.com:
Video ad executives said that while YouTube has a lot of inventory that's hard to monetize, sites with professional content such as Hulu.com don't have enough inventory to serve demand from brand advertisers.
Consumers are also interested in professionally produced material. A 2007 report (pdf) from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found:
Overall, 62% of online video viewers say that their favorite videos are those that are "professionally produced," while 19% of online video viewers express a preference for content "produced by amateurs." Another 11% say they enjoy both professionally-produced video and amateur online video equally.
Connecting the dots, it seems there's an opportunity for publishers to link ad-based revenue streams, levels of download quality, and audience experience. For example:
- A studio could post low-fi versions of its Web shows to YouTube, social networks and other Web destinations. The free videos would include branding and links to higher-quality versions of the same material on different sites. These low-quality videos would act as a brand campaign for the show, reaching out across a broad base of users to increase awareness and (hopefully) motivate a percentage of the viewing audience to access the high-quality videos. This is the same technique TV networks use when they advertise upcoming shows during popular broadcasts (e.g. anyone watching Fox lately knows the network is hedging its bets on "Fringe.").
- High-quality downloads would be available through a studio's own site or through upper-tier services like Hulu. These videos would include pre- and post-roll advertising from sponsors. If the show proves successful, studios could take a note from Joss Whedon's recent Web effort, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and sell related downloads, soundtracks and merchandise.
This process extends to other media areas. On the print side, publishers could push basic material out to a wide audience through Scribd and other text-centric services, while also driving a percentage of the audience toward high-quality digital and print editions available through established retail channels (Web-based and otherwise). Earlier this year, Trent Reznor employed a similar tiered strategy with the Nine Inch Nails album "Ghosts I-IV" and the results were positive.
I realize this is back-of-the-envelope analysis, but this emerging mix of low-fi brand building and consumer/advertiser demand for professional-level content bodes well for publishers experimenting with digital delivery.
Piracy and Advertising: An Unlikely Union that Just Might Work
Mac Slocum
August 25, 2008
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In a surprisingly progressive move, a number of major publishers are using YouTube's Video ID tool to monetize pirated content. The tool flags questionable material and presents copyright owners with a choice:
Copyright holders can choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even--if a copyright holder chooses to partner with us--create revenue from them, with minimal friction. [Emphasis added.] -- (From YouTube's Video ID about page.)
YouTube's phrasing seems overly optimistic, but the New York Times says some publishers are choosing the partnership option:
David King, a product manager at YouTube, said in an interview that 90 percent of the copyright claims made using the identification tool remain on the site and are converted to advertising inventory. The other 10 percent are either removed from the site or tracked by the content owner.
The Times article notes that at this point advertising revenue from Web video is miniscule and publishers using the tool are still skeptical. Nonetheless, it's encouraging to see a piracy approach that doesn't default to heavy-handed tactics.
Report: Pre-Roll Video Ads Not all that Bad
Peter Brantley
August 20, 2008
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Given how "unacceptable" we were told this would be to viewers, it's rather remarkable how many people are now obviously accommodated to pre-roll ads in videos. From Beet.TV:
The vast majority of online video viewers are watching pre-roll and overlay ads, a study released today by Break Media and Panache shows. Completion rates for 15-second pre-roll ads were 87 percent, and 77 percent viewed campaigns with overlay ads for at least 15 seconds.
Sports Illustrated Offers Ad Space through Web Bids
Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008
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Sports Illustrated is using a Web-based bidding system to sell advertising across its online and offline properties. From Advertising Age
Executives at the Time Inc. title, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to recruit those advertisers that aren't in close touch with the sales force anyway.
"There are many advertisers out there that would like the opportunity to understand what the Sports Illustrated brand is about, what those offerings are, that we just physically can't get to," said Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated Group.
Ad auctions are already commonplace in Web-based advertising, most notably through Google's AdWords program.
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
August 14, 2008
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Could the iPhone be a Kindle Killer? (Bill Trippe, Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog)
Here's a project I would love to do if I had the time--a face-off between Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Reader, an eBook Technologies ETI-1, and a few other devices. Take a few book types--novel, textbook, graphical book, business document to begin with--and create a feature matrix and evaluation criteria.
Random Ebook Thoughts From A Jetlagged Mind (Kassia Krozser, Booksquare)
Here's a truth: ebooks sell far better than numbers from traditional publishers indicate. This is because there's a huge market for erotica out there. Women buy erotic ebooks instead of purchasing physical books because, well, if you're female and over thirty, you've been taught that good girls don't go there. Actually, good girls do. They just do it under the radar.
Why blog publishing 'failed' in the UK (Ashley Norris, TechCrunch UK)
... many brands and their agency planers have chosen to play it safe and will work with established media brands or mega portals like MSN, even when the ads themselves will be seen by a less focussed and often an inappropriate audience
Smithsonian Advertises Via Bluetooth
Peter Brantley
August 13, 2008
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The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are sending out Bluetooth tethers to passers-by. From a Smithsonian press release:
... this new medium of advertising prompts Bluetooth phone users to opt-in to receive a free downloadable message ... Bluetooth-enabled bus shelters, located in Washington, D.C.'s major pedestrian areas, will deploy a silent prompt to mobile users with Bluetooth within a 30-foot radius.
Ad Downturn Forces Fashion Mags to Drop Pages
Mac Slocum
August 11, 2008
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The shaky economy is hitting the normally strong fashion magazine industry. From the Wall Street Journal:
As September issues begin hitting the newsstands, two-thirds of the 16 top fashion and beauty magazines by number of ad pages are smaller than a year ago. W magazine, also published by Condé Nast Publications, a unit of Advance Publications, has 18% fewer advertising pages. Vogue has 674 pages of ads this year, down 7%, while Hearst's Cosmopolitan is six pages, or 3.2%, lighter.
Web Video Advertising Stuck on Pause
Mac Slocum
August 8, 2008
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Users are flocking to Web videos and video companies are serving millions of streams, but video executives speaking at the RBC Capital conference noted that advertisers -- the final variable in this equation -- have not fully embraced the format. From News.com:
So when and for whom will the money start rolling in? Video ad executives said that while YouTube has a lot of inventory that's hard to monetize, sites with professional content such as Hulu.com don't have enough inventory to serve demand from brand advertisers.
News Roundup: New Kindles Rumored, Free Ebooks with Embedded Google Ads, Web Publicity and Giveaways Boost Author's Profile
Mac Slocum
July 18, 2008
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Rumor: Two New Kindles Coming This Fall
Citing an inside source, CrunchGear says Amazon will release two new Kindles in time for the holiday season:
The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface ... The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model. (Continue reading)
Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership
Scribd and Lulu have joined forces to combine Scribd's iPaper format, a Flash-derived viewing technology optimized for bandwidth and speed, with Lulu content. From ReadWriteWeb:
Beginning this month on the self-publishing site Lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format ... And thanks to iPaper's ability to embed [Google] AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.
Web Publicity + Free = A Fighting Chance
Sci-fi author Scott Sigler uses podcasts, giveaways and grassroots Web marketing to build interest in his work. We've covered Sigler in the past, but his recent interview with The Independent illustrates the value lesser-known writers can derive from Web-based brand building and free distribution:
Sigler's thinking -- and this is the revolutionary bit -- is that it's worth making commercial sacrifices to secure a fan base, because fans will always want physical copies of the books, even if they've already heard an audio version for free. (Continue reading)
Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership
Peter Brantley
July 16, 2008
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Scribd and Lulu have joined forces to combine Scribd's iPaper format, a Flash-derived viewing technology optimized for bandwidth and speed, with Lulu content. From ReadWriteWeb:
Beginning this month on the self-publishing site Lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format ... And thanks to iPaper's ability to embed [Google] AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.
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