Newspaper brands like the NEW YORK Times, WASHINGTON Post, BOSTON Globe, etc. face a unique challenge in the online media age — how to value non-local readers.

I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times:

As I observed previously with my critique of the Washington Post’s circulation marketing, this marketing […]

There are two principal ways advertisers are trying to create value for consumers on the web — and they must create value because, you know, consumers are in control. On the web, advertisers can provide entertainment or information.

How effective is advertising as information on the web? See Google’s $15B in ad revenue — an $5.19 […]

Tech bloggers and analysts had a collective cow yesterday over the news that January 2008 comScore data suggest clicks on Google’s paid search ads have stopped growing, which implies that Google may be vulnerable to a US recession already underway. Fred Wilson had a sober reflection on why he stands behind his (albeit ill-timed) […]

Microsoft announced today that they are going after the holy grail of advertising: integrated ROI measurement and tracking. The big problem with online ROI measurement that Microsoft is targeting is the inability to assign quantifiable value to brand advertising, e.g. banner ads, and which results in disproportionate value being assigned to search advertising — the […]

Of all the reasons given why Rupert Murdoch decided to keep the WSJ.com paid subscriber wall in place, the one that I find most interesting is that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for WSJ.com’s audience. If the WSJ went free, it would undoubtedly increase its audience substantially, but how valuable would those new […]

I somehow got logged out of my NYTimes.com registration and just hit the registration wall when I tried to read an article — I almost forgot it was there. Which made me wonder, now that the TimesSelect pay wall is gone, what the real ROI of this registration wall is for the New York Times […]

I can’t count the number of times I’ve listened to print publishers debate whether to use a dedicated online sales staff or use what Borrell Associates calls “convergence sales,” in the report 2008 Local Online Outlook: Convergence Era Ends, Stand-Alone Sales Skyrocket. “Convergence” means, in the worst (all too common case), print sales reps tacking […]

It seems that everything that can command consumer attention — websites, software applications, social networking, video games, reality TV — is being monetized through advertising. So why not books? Especially in dynamic digital formats? Tim O’Reilly argues no:

A new McKinsey & Co. report called ” How Companies Are Marketing Online” draws the astonishing conclusion that many advertisers are reluctant to shift dollars online — despite the massive shift of consumer attention online — because of the “absence of meaningful metrics and adequate capabilities.”

The new YouTube InVideo ad format is big news not because the format is new — Google has been testing the format for a while, and other sites like VideoEgg have used it. It’s big news because the ad format is being rolled out on YouTube’s massively scaled video site — kind of reminiscent of […]

Nielsen asked 1,000 consumers on its new “engagement” panel if they could recall any TV commercials they had seen — only one third of them could. In contrast, 79% could recall at least one TV show. This is not the least bit surprising because traditional TV advertising creates NO value for consumers in the moment […]

Kudos to Publicis Groupe and Digitas for imagining an all-digital advertising future, for planning to solve the deep structural problems of advertising 2.0, and for not sitting still while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft take over the advertising industry.

The most provocative idea to emerge from the New York Times profile of Publicis/Digitas’ digital advertising strategy is […]

Small publishers shouldn’t envy large publishers like MSNBC.com — the portals are selling out of their best inventory and losing out to ad networks that can mint more premium inventory by signing up more publishers. But MSNBC.com is betting it can beat ad networks at their own game by launching its own vertical ad networks […]

I wrote a long post trying to explain why the page view/CPM model for valuing online media is so problematic, particularly for traditional media companies like newspapers that are trying to transition their business models online. But Jordan Bitterman of Digitas summed it up in two sentences (in a Fortune piece about future of the […]

I’m picking on the New York Times because they are the 11th largest “audience aggregator” on the Web, but many newspapers and other traditional media companies are similarly using strength in their digital operations to conceal weakness in their legacy businesses. Here’s an example of the consequences of such “obfuscation” from MediaPost’s coverage of the […]

The page view may be dead, but page views are still the currency for online display advertising, with most display ads still being bought on the basis of CPM, or cost per thousand ad impressions — and impressions are a function of page views. The problem is that the page view-driven online advertising economy is […]

I tried to visit TechCrunch.com this morning and instead ended up here:

As much as we focus on the Web economy that operates in the sunshine, e.g. advertising on TechCrunch, there’s an entire economy that operates “underground,” e.g. pay-per-click ads on domain typo sites.

Following up on my post about the poor state of online ad relevancy, I’ve been digging deeper with some of the companies that are working to improve that state, which lead to the following interview with Larry Allen, SVP, Business Development and Marketing at TACODA. Believe it or not, we completed this interview before the […]

How will newspapers shift their business center of gravity online the same way most have shifted their audience center of gravity? That is the question keeping every newspaper executive awake at night.

Bill Keller, the New York Times Executive Editor and excellent editorial emissary, made the following comment in an interview:
But the Web audience is growing […]

On the heels of hyperlocal pioneer Backfence shutting down, the Washington Post has launched its own hyperlocal experiment — LoudounExtra.com, a site dedicated to Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, DC. (Thanks to Hashim for the tip.)

It so happens I live in Loudoun County, and with that context, here’s my first take — LoudounExtra.com isn’t […]

I was on the New York Times site just now and was a bit freaked out when I glanced at the adjacent ad:

I live in Leesburg, and the ad knows this. What struck me is that I was “freaked out” even though I understand the geo-targeting technology that makes this kind of customized ad possible […]

Search advertising is probably the most scalable advertising platform in the history of advertising and marketing. But ten years into the promise of the web and new media to transform advertising into an ROI-driven marketing engine, the success of keyword-driven pay-per-click text ads is the exception, not the rule.

The problem is scalability.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is suing Google for deceptive advertising practices. I don’t know if the suit has legal merit, but it puts the spotlight on Google’s advertising formats (which are used by most search engines) and, given that this is a government suit, raises significant questions about commonly accepted search advertising practices:

Nielsen took a big step towards accelerating the death of the page view by announcing it would rank websites by time spend on the site instead. But time spent is an equally problematic metric that assumes that more is better, which isn’t the case with web applications designed for efficiency, like Google search.

Poor newspapers. Their cash cow service, classified ads, is probably about to break a record for facing more competition from free services than any other in the history of paid services. Faceboook recently piled on to the Craigslist disruption of the newspaper classified market with a free classifieds marketplace. Now eBay has launched a free […]

Yahoo has launched an advertising platform called SmartAds, which allows display ads to be customized “on the fly” based on a user’s behavioral profile, taking a significant step towards the long-promised but thus far poorly-delivered paradigm of total customization for online display ads.

By Robert Young

Late last week, the Financial Times reported that MySpace was likely to respond to Facebook’s much-hyped F8 Platform initiative with its own third-party application/widget development program. Last week also brought forth an interesting debate, initiated by Jason Kottke via his aptly titled post “Facebook is the new AOL”, questioning whether the […]

Why does TV advertising continue to do well in the face of declining viewership and transcendent online video? Here are some examples of the typically contradictory reports that make it so difficult to get a handle on what’s really going on (bold is mine):

Time Inc. has selected Quigo to provide an Adwords-like platform for bidding on pay-per-click text ads across all Time Inc. sites. Quigo will replace Google AdSense network and Yahoo Publisher Network, which currently serve pay-per-click ads from advertisers that buy ads in Google’s and Yahoo’s centralized search advertising marketplace.

What distinguishes the Quigo platform is […]

If I were in a shareholder of a newspaper or any print based media company, I’d be demanding that financial reporting breakout the absolute amount of print and online revenue, rather than concealing the actual amount by which increasing online ad revenue is offsetting decreasing print ad revenue — or rather the degree to which […]

If the future of advertising is online, many companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and WPP, are betting that the future of online advertising is in ad networks, i.e. centralized platforms for the buying and selling ads, where the company that controls the network controls the sale and the flow of revenue to the publisher. This […]

Is there a difference between a blog advertiser posting their own content in a clearly labeled sponsor post (i.e. NOT written by the blogger), which is allowed to appear in the RSS feed like an editorial post, and a format like PayPerPost, where bloggers write in their own editorial voice about an advertiser’s product or […]

As newspapers struggle to transform themselves into digital media publishers, many have begun to produce online video, in some cases going head-to-head with local TV stations for traditional newscasting. Newspapers have struggled with the transition to digital because classified ads, their cash cow, are available for free online, and because they can’t command the same […]

What does an ad agency do? It brokers ad sales, right? So is Google an ad agency? I mean in the traditional sense of being the middle man between advertisers and media companies, not as a media company selling ads directly, as Google does with AdWords. You tell me:

FeedBurner just quietly posted to their site the official announcement that Google has indeed acquired Feedburner. Here’s what CEO Dick Costolo has to say about why it’s such a great fit (which it really is):

Publishers trying to manage rising online ad revenue against declining print ad revenue are looking at the wrong metrics. Instead of looking at the advertising trends in silos and comparing percentage increases and decreases, they should be looking at the relationship between absolute increases and decreases in ad revenue over time.

For this purpose I’ve […]

AOL announced a strategy to increase ad revenue by reducing clutter in order to attract higher CPM ads, i.e. they’re going run fewer ads (via MediaPost):

Google may be forever denying that it is a media company (and an ad agency), but Microsoft is embracing the transformation of software into media and the overall convergence of media and technology. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president and chief advertising strategist, said in reference to denying rumors of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo […]

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore spoke yesterday at a Magazine Publishers of America event and gave evidence that Time Inc. is having some success in digital media — but she gave no evidence (at least none cited in the Ad Age coverage) that this success is compensating for challenges faced by the legacy print business:

Every media company is positioning itself to benefit from the increasing shift of ad dollars from offline media to online and digital media, but in many cases ad dollars aren’t moving online in a 1-to-1 ratio. That’s why newspapers, for example, still get 80-90% of ad revenue from print, an artifact of monopoly pricing that […]

Google has so many conflicts of interest, e.g. delivering the highest quality “organic” search results vs. tolerating high ranking sites that clearly have no purpose other than to make money from Google AdSense (i.e. “made for AdSense” sites). There’s also pay-per-click arbitrage, where someone buys keywords in Google AdWords in order to send users to […]

Now that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and WPP have spent collectively $10.4 billion to acquire the largest online display ad platform companies (DoubleClick, Right Media, aQuantive, and 24/7 Real Media) on the bet that display ads will be a key driver of growth for online ad spending, it’s fair to ask exactly what the value of […]

It’s clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company — the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google’s AdWords created a new model by combining a media company — Google’s search results and its […]

I saw one of Google’s “agency relationship managers” give a pitch to a top agency, where she gave the standard line that Google doesn’t want to be an ad agency. I didn’t believe it for a second. And neither does WPP, one of the top agency holding companies, which just announced the acquisition of 24/7 […]

Social media marketing, i.e. promoting content through social media sites like Digg has become a cottage industry. Digg and other “audience as editor” sites have fought tooth and nail against gaming, trying to keep marketing content from receiving the same homepage attention as “editorial content,” i.e. content voted up by the community without marketer influence. […]

I sat in on a presentation by a Google rep to a New York agency — it was a big, wet sloppy kiss. Here was Google, king of impersonal, self-serve online ad efficiency up to its eyeballs in gooey “relationship building.” It’s no accident that Google’s New York office has more humans than servers.

This is […]

Here are some watershed moments that mark the radical transformation of the publishing industry to a non-print-centric business:

1. New York Times becomes an aggregator

The New York Times, paper of record and one of the last great bastions of the belief that one entity can create all the content that anyone needs, has finally capitulated to […]

If Craigslist is killing the newspaper classified business, then it appears that newspapers’ real missed opportunity may be in failing to provide a sufficiently conducive environment for seeking and selling sex and love.

Reading this analysis by Compete was one of those Doh! Of course! moments (and, as a commenter on the Compete post points out, […]

Let’s play connect the dots with a number of recent announcements that together reveal the real battleground for the future of media:

Doubleclick announces that it is setting up a “a Nasdaq-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements”

Google announces that it is extending its AdWords marketplace to TV

AOL announces that Advertising.com will provide […]

What is Google’s core competency? I would argue that it’s harvesting the value from massively scaled, complex human activity, i.e. millions of websites linking to each other and hundreds of thousands of advertisers bidding on key word and experimenting with ad creative, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates. The other critical element of this core competency […]

As anticipated, Google has launched a “cost-per-action” advertising program that allows advertisers to pay only for specific results, such as a sale, lead, sign-up, etc. Andy Beal thinks this is a threat to online affiliate marketing, and surely it is. But Aaron Wall’s comment jumped out at me:

If they push this as hard as they […]

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, […]

Here’s a koan for everyone in media: YouTube had revenue of $15 million is 2006; what is the value of YouTube in 2007?

If you’re not familiar with koans, this is from Wikipedia:
A kō·an is a story, dialogue, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are […]

The death of print publishing is coming, it’s just a matter of whether it happens in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years. I’m betting it happens sooner than anyone expects. Colin Crawford, the SVP of online for IDG, posted some stunning figures:
Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline […]

Discussions of Google’s offline media ambitions — to extend their wildly successful platform for online advertising to offline advertising — typically assume that Google’s success in the offline arena is just a matter of time. But the reality is that Google has nothing but a string of failures to show for itself, most notably in […]

I embedded Barack Obama’s Brightcove video announcing his presidential candidacy in a post about how the use of viral videos may be shrinking the advertising pie for media companies. The video seems to have gone MIA.

It also appears to be MIA from Obama’s own site:

A word of caution to candidates or anyone else jumping on […]

Google is experimenting with ads in some Google Video clips (via Inside Google via Boing Boing) — a stunning failure of innovation, here is was an example of an Allstate ad embedded into a Charlie Rose clip, which is was as interruptive, untargeted and utterly old school as anything mass TV advertising has ever inflicted […]

If you spend too much time in Silicon Valley you’d think that the technology industry — with Google leading the charge — already owns the future of advertising. But don’t count out Madison Avenue just yet — they may be responsible for perpetuating the imbalance between media time spent online and ad dollars spent online […]

There’s more talk about the death of page views, this time from the Chief of Insights at Yahoo, the recently dethroned page view king.

The reason page views persist is that they are a key variable in the still dominant currency of online advertising — impressions, and its derivative CPM. Impressions themselves are merely the clunky […]

Here’s a statistic to put a chill the heart of any online content or web app business looking to ride the wave of consumer advertising shifting online (via AdAge):

Corporate and brand websites — once derided as “brochureware” in a digital marketing world that quickly moved to sexier applications — are getting a rehabilitation of sorts […]

Everybody is betting on the future of online advertising, but catching up on reading for this week, I was struck again and again by how deeply painful the growing pains are…

The Internet Advertising Bureau has launched an ad campaign to “convince” advertisers to spend more money online (via MediaPost):

To help develop the campaign, the IAB […]

Last week the big news was CBS and YouTube crowing that distributing video clips of CBS TV shows through YouTube was (ostensibly) increasing CBS broadcast TV ratings. Today, the big news is that UK viewers who watch online video are watching lest broadcast TV.

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, […]

In the standing-room-only Web 2.0 Summit workshop sessions on the future of marketing and Advertising 2.0, the belief that the revolution will be funded by advertising came face to face with the deep structural problems of advertising in the digital age. The poster child of both the promise and the existential angst of networked, digital […]

Unbowed by its failed magazine print ad program, Google has cut a deal with 50 major newspapers to sell remnant print ad space to its enormous roster of AdWords advertisers. Here’s the upside and downside for Google and the newspaper industry:

Upside

Google — Even if newspaper print advertising continues to decline, Google’s share will be greater […]

Isn’t there an odd contradiction in all the thinking about new media? Individuals are now empowered to create content, to publish and have a voice without going through the old corporate hierarchy. You can blog and be heard, all for free, without asking permission. But what about brands? The assumption that online advertising will finance […]

Despite increasingly frequent reassurances to content creators, Google clearly wants nothing less than to own the content industry — but Google is completely earnest about not wanting to actually own or create any content. Google wants to own the BUSINESS of content.

The big news today is of course Google’s launch of customized search, which allows […]

It’s inevitable that a PR firm like Edelman would create a phony blog for one of its clients (in this case Wal-Mart — see Shel Holtz for a great analysis). For all of the hype over “conversation” as the new media paradigm, no one has yet figured out how to use conversation to reliably achieve […]

There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost):

In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking […]

Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube solidifies Google’s position at the center of media. Google already has Google Video, so they didn’t buy YouTube for the technology. No, they bought YouTube for the traffic, the same reason they cut the $900 million deal with Fox Interactive Media.

So don’t believe Eric Schmidt for a second — […]

Last week I attended the Consumer Engagement Conference, put on by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), where I discovered that the word “engagement” — which is being proffered as a new “output” metric for advertising to replace outdated “input” metrics like Gross Rating Points and Impressions — […]

As advertising dollars continue their inexorable march from offline to online, the battle for control of those dollars will be fought over the fuzzy middle ground between branding and direct response. I can’t count how many times at the OMMA conference I heard someone say it “depends on the advertiser’s objectives.” The problem with allocating […]

Yahoo dumped a bucket of cold water on the (irrational?) exuberance over the torrid growth in online advertising, warning investors that their revenue for Q3 would come in at the low end of their forecast due to an unexpected slowdown in auto and financial services ads:

A Yahoo Inc. executive said Tuesday a slowdown in advertising […]

As further evidence that technology is turning everything into media, Universal Music announced that it would be backing SpiralFrog, a digital music site that will attempt to transform the music business into a media business by selling advertising rather than charging fees:

Universal Music, the world’s largest music company, is backing a start-up that will allow […]

Google has Microsoft squarely in its sights with the release of Google Apps for Your Domain — a bundling of Gmail and Google Talk, Calendar, and Page Creator for the enterprise, focused at this point on universities and small businesses. Here’s what jumped out at me from the press release:

Girouard underscored that the Google Apps […]

I wonder whether any of the brands that YouTube is approaching to create customized video channels will really take the time to look at what kind of content is acutally driving the outrageous success of this much-hyped video sharing site.

Let’s take a look at what’s on the front page of YouTube today.

There’s the human […]

A debate has erupted over the definition of blogs and the value of blog “influentials” as drivers of advertising CPM rates, which is so Old Media in the particulars it’s really quite astonishing. Scoble challenges Windows Live Spaces’ definition of a blog and then plants this lightening rod:

What does Microsoft do when it says “we […]

Folowing the 2.0 maxim that “everything is media,” online retailers have woken up to the media value of their website traffic and have started selling advertising on their sites (from WSJ, sub required):

Last week, Amazon.com Inc. quietly began testing the sale of display ads on its home page to companies such as Ford Motor Co. […]

Flush with confidence after closing a $900 million deal with Google, MySpace is taking on its next challenge — convincing advertisers who have put up brand and product pages on MySpace for free that they should pay for “their space” instead:

Now, advertisers say the company is stepping up its efforts to convince big clients using […]

Om Malik took an interesting critical look at the Google deal with News Corp, which got me thinking about whether MySpace matters much at all to this deal, despite all the hype:

In a conference call, FIM executives noted that a very large number of people leave MySpace to go to Google. According to data collected […]

I’ve been predicting for a while that the TV advertising house of cards would collapse, and McKinsey just huffed and puffed and predicted (to its big Fortune 100 advertiser clients) that “by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990″ (from AdAge):

That shocking statistic, delivered to the company’s Fortune […]

What does it say about an advertising format when an industry “council” has to be formed in order to arbitrate the problem of advertisers not knowing whether they are getting what they paid for? That’s what happened to both pay-per-click advertising and TV advertising this past week, and the similarities between these two ad councils […]

The Guardian observes (via Jeff Jarvis) that YouTube has overtaken MySpace — but here’s the thing — it’s not really YouTube vs. MySpace. It’s user content and community hosted by YouTube vs. user content and community hosted by MySpace. The hosting is besides the point. It’s people like Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz who are […]

If you thought the social networking market was frothy, online video is rapidly expanding to fill all the bubble space. Jeff Jarvis observed that YouTube has now surpassed MySpace on Alexa (at least in reach) and speculates on who might buy YouTube — he also invited me to comment, and I’m going to take up […]

Inform.com has wisely gotten out of the Web 2.0 news aggregator business and into the publisher services business. Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 Blog has the scoop:

As readership declines for newspapers and online readership grows, every publisher faces the threat coming from the edge of the network. Sites like Google News, Yahoo News, […]

An NYU professor conducted an independent analysis of Google’s efforts to combat click fraud and found that, while Googe’s efforts are “reasonable,” pay-per-click advertising “does not offer any ‘built-in’ fundamental protection mechanisms against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are valid vs. invalid in general” and that any particular […]

Beyond affiliate and cost-per-action advertising, all paid media advertising models — from billboards to print ad to TV spots to pay-per-click text ads — are “indifferent displayers of advertising.” I lifted that apt phrase from Bruce Schneier’s Wired piece on Google’s click fraud crackdown:

Google is testing a new advertising model to deal with click fraud: […]

Gawker’s Nick Denton has announced a restructuring, including a staff shake-up and the sale of two under-performing sites. Nick is a smart guy, and he’s clearly getting ready for the inevitable moment when the new media bubble begins to deflate — a “perversely countercyclical move” he calls it.

What I found most fascinating is the […]

After my initial revulsion at http://www.payperpost.com, the new service that connects bloggers who want to shill with companies in need of shilling, I created an account to get a look at the terms of the offers. After some very bad PR, PayPerPost is not surpr