Why's no one beating up the ad side?

One them I"ve read in this so far is that sales folks 'don't know' how to sell online.

OK, all your experts out there, tell me exactly how in 100 words or less YOU sell online and turn things around. Put yourselves in the shoes of an ad person and tell me exactly how it is done. And spare me the generalities. Specifics, please.

 

Print ads are still an order of magnitude more profitable than online ads, and there's still a business to be run today.

It's not the ad salesmen's fault that they aren't throwing away real money today for a hail-mary to give us hope the business will still be here in a decade.

 

Does. Not. Compute.

 

Here's an easy one: Blogs.
Most papers have them. Some papers have loads. Targeted to a topic or geography, they're a perfect venue for small or niche advertisers who don't want or need the full range of our readership, but want to reach people who might be interested in, say, real estate or restaurants or high school sports.
Does your paper sell ads specifically against its blogs? I bet not. Mine doesn't. I was talking recently with an ad exec at my paper who said he'd never even looked at a blog. In 2009.

It feels like newsrooms are innovating and adapting and at least trying to stay relevant online. But many of the folks bringing in the money just do the same things they've always done, and the pool of customers keeps shrinking.

 

A good newspaper blog item is going to get 5,000 page views. Looking at the CPM rates there, you'd be lucky to get, I don't know, 20 dollars in advertising revenue for that blog item. A phenomenal one will get 20,000. Congratulations, you just made a hundred dollars for your newspaper! Turn one of those big puppies a day and you'll easily justify your salary, provided that it's no higher than $24,000.

Check out this sketch of CPM rates:

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/03/blog-advertising-rates-how-much-to.html

Your site receives 30,000 pageviews (or hits) every month. The 125x125 Google ad that you ran for 7 days returned an average CPM of $5.00. If your client is willing to advertise based on ad impressions, you may charge him $4 CPM. If he is interested in a monthly campaign, you can quote him 30*$4 =~ $120 per month.

Blogs don't pay. Period.

When you look at the ad numbers, that's when the depression really sets in -- because that's when you see that there really is no alternative revenue stream to the one that's disappearing every day.

 

LTI said it better than I could (because he used actual numbers and stuff). Outside of the largest papers, specialized ad sales for blogs aren't going to bring in enough revenue to be worth the time and effort of selling it.

 

I don't claim to have the answers. I'm paid to write and have worked and trained in time to do it well. I shouldn't have those answers. Ad managers should or they need to move aside and let someone else step in that can do better.

But I can think of only a handful of people I've worked with at all my shops in advertising that had any interest in selling online. It was easier to continue doing what they've always done selling print ads instead of online.

 

You're making an assumption that local advertisers would buy Web ads if only the ad salesmen tried harder to talk them into it. I think you ought to consider that maybe readers aren't the only people who think whatever's online ought to be free or close to it. I think you ought to consider that if local advertising on a newspaper Web site were getting good results for advertisers, word of mouth at the Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce would have every local business following the lead of the few local pioneers who currently buy ads on the newspaper's Web site.

 

I think the problem with that thinking is that most ad people are just salesmen. They don't have any real tie to the newspaper industry. If they weren't selling ads for a newspaper, they'd be selling something somewhere else.

On the flip side, many of us can't imagine working at anything else. Our passion is journalism. We have a vested interest in seeing it continue.

I'm not saying the responsibility falls completely on us in editorial, but I do believe we have to be a part of the solution. We have to work together with the ad people to figure out a solution.

For the editorial side to just ignore these issues because "it's not our job" doesn't solve a thing.

 

Exactly.

When's the last time any of you directly brought money into the company from our top source of revenue (an advertiser)? I know I haven't sold any ads. That's why we're ultimately expendable. At my paper, everyone who doesn't directly bring in money is being targeted. We've lost five in the past month. The next cuts will be in the newsroom.

 

Actually, you're making the assumption that I think that. I know better than to do that because of my advertising connections. (Yes, Mrs. Quagmire works in online sales.)

I've always wondered why she can sell online and her peers cannot. I think a lot of it is because her peers openly go out of their way to NOT push online sales. Part of the issue is disinterest. Never said all.

 

Sorry, Glen, I have to believe that if those ads she's selling brought in significant money, the rest of the sales people would do it. And I have to believe that if the local merchants were getting good results from online advertising, the rest of the local businesses would be clamoring to get in on it.