Why's no one beating up the ad side?

Speaking of the loss of Circuit City, etc.

The internet has killed us in another way, too.

Big business and box stores DO NOT NEED US to advertise. Click on any company, go ahead, pick Wal-Mart or Sears or anyone else, and seek out their "eFlyer" or "online flyer" or "circular in PDF format" or whatever else they call them.

There is no need to circulate those ads and flyers when you can log on at any moment of the day or night and find the ads - for free; without needing us to circulate it; without the consumer needing to buy our product.

 

A big difference between print and online sales is that with print, you can dazzle people with bullshit about your circulation, readership scores and pass-on rates. An online ad is very easily measured. Either people click on it or don't. Or either people are viewing the page it's on, or they're not. You can measure that very easily. On top of that, the one thing you can measure more accurately for print is the demographics of your readership. Online readership is far more expensive at this point, and a lot of places are waiting for more online ads to roll in to pay for it -- except that online advertisers are waiting for the demographic numbers to come out before they pay for the space.

You also still have a lot of local merchants who don't get the online world at all. You have to have someone pretty savvy at this point -- someone who is using social media and SEO and other means beyond straight-up advertising -- to see an online newspaper site as part of the branding strategy. To me, I would think an easy start would be something that not only sells to locals, but also something geared toward people who've moved away and are probably still following the local nupe online. For example, local flower delivery (for your mom on Mother's Day!). If I'm the Louisville Courier-Journal or the Indianapolis Star, I'm hard-selling campaigns for local businesses taking advantage of all the tourists and ex-locals coming back for the Derby and the 500.

The way the media market is breaking up, ad salespeople have to be creative and have to accept that you can't rely on the same few car advertisers forever. If you're an ad salesperson relying on a few big accounts for most of your money, yesterday was the time to start thinking creatively on how to sell ad space. It's going to be a lot of smaller accounts instead of a few big ones, but you get enough smaller accounts and it starts to add up.

 

Good point, Pete.

I had to go into the morgue to look up something last week at our shop. Pulled out a paper from the mid-1970s. What stood out the most? How many more "R.O.P." ads for things like grocery stores and Kmart were in the paper. Unbelievable.

These days? We're lucky to get occasional half-page ads from the area grocery store chains around Thanksgiving, Easter, advertising hams, the bakery, etc.

The key question for me coming out of this thread: For those few local retailers still in business, where the hell are they going to be able to advertise in 10 years??? The Internet is way, way too widespread of an audience (even our shop's web site, which gets many of its pageviews from outside our area). And local TV and radio is an overpriced quagmire (sorry, Glen!) completely owned by out-of-area corporations.

 

Two things will happen Coco

1) Those places will either a) not advertise or b) not exist at all.

2) Newspapers will not exist. All news will be online and paid for.

There will still be a need for reporters. There will be no need for printed products. And, because overhead will be next to nil, reporters/editors/photogs will be paid with the money generated from the pay model online.

 

Unfortunately, unless something about the way the World Wide Web works changes between now and then, that's not going to be much.

 

Pay for content. End of story.

We've beat this horse before. If newspapers force people to pay for content, the radio can't rip us off. If newspapers force people to pay for content, the blogs can't rip us off.

If people don't want to pay for online content, so what? We're already losing money.

 

The million-dollar question is whether you can make more money with having people pay for content, or whether you can make more through advertising. You can't have both. Once you put that copy up behind a pay wall, the views sink drastically. Perhaps you can do both IF you can show that the demographic you want is still paying, and that what you're losing are the people coming through a random search or whatnot and never to come back to your site. But for now, advertisers are going to look at those low traffic numbers and say, no thanks.

 

You make more money with advertising for general interest content.
You make more money with subscriptions for highly specialized niche content.

You don't make much with either.

 

There are not enough incentives or enough help to make online sales worth it at her shop. You have to have a team to be successful. She's pushed online and packaged it with print and has had great results. Others sell just print because the incentives aren't there to do more. That's where management needs to make changes to reflect the importance of online..

It would be like one guy covering sports for a 100k newspaper. (I know. It might happen.)

 

In print, there's no way to eliminate ads arranged around editorial content.

Online, there are many ways to have ads and targeted links scrubbed from content:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tidyread_deals_blow_to_display_ads.php

 

There's another model -- have readers choose which ads they want to receive. Granted, this still isn't near in the same monetary ballpark. But at least you can assure advertisers that they are reaching people who are truly interested in their product. You won't have the number of impressions, but you also won't have people actively running away from your ad, or having it wasted in front of someone with no interest.

FWIW, I know my 11-year-old would like it. He kvetches about any ad on IGN.com that is NOT a video game ad. He'll look at game ads all day, but anything else -- GET OUTTA MY FACE!

 

Here's a link with a thought on the revolution we're in...
The guy proposes.advertising by "engagement" rather than "interruption"....in short, re-invent the concept of advertising online as well as in newspapers....


http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=131&aid=161330