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 […]

Freakonomics author and blogger Stephen Dubner has a long, tortured post about why the New York Times will only offer a partial RSS feed for the Freakonomics blog now that it’s being published on NYTimes.com. The most interesting and utterly damning part by far is this:

But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so […]

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 […]

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 […]

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:

Yesterday, there was the the news about a current and a former New York Times Digital executive joining DailyCandy, the successful email newsletter company targeting young women with the “ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered.” Today, there is the news about print ad revenue at the New York Times continuing to fall, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

What content category benefits greatly from digital, web-based organization and distribution, but is best appreciated offline? If you said art photography, then you understand intuitively why JPG Magazine is such an interesting Publishing 2.0 play.

The idea is elegantly 2.0: give the new breed of digital-technology-enabled pro-am photographers a place to showcase their work and […]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems […]

Scott Donaton has a column in Ad Age imagining the inevitable day when the Wall Street Journal will fold its print publication:

I don’t have enough insight into The Journal’s economics to say when (or, with confidence, whether) the day will come when a print-to-digital conversion is economically feasible. Could be two years, could be 10. […]

There are only two plausible reasons to publish a “digital edition” of a print publication, as the New York Times is now doing in partnership with Microsoft:

1. To prop up print advertising revenue by artificially increasing the “print” circulation through “digital distribution”

2. To make a bucket of content, i.e. the print edition, available for “browsing” […]

I’ve been very skeptical of Google’s Print Ad program since its inception. So I’m hardly surprised by the news from BusinessWeek that the program is a dud (thanks to David Utter for passing on the article):

Carl D. Haugen, president of BluePenguin Software, spent $3,000 on an ad through Google, which ran in the November issue […]

Everyone thought TiVo, with its ad-skipping technology, would lead to the death of TV advertising — but it’s actually the shift of audience and media value to digital media that is draining the value from broadcast media. Take Coldwell Banker’s new ad campaign in which TV plays an ancillary role, supporting the real action which […]

Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle wants to know why Google has extended the deadline for its print ad program:

Does this mean that responses and bids have been less than stellar, or that Google realized twelve days simply wasn’t enough time for most people to get their bids in?

Can someone please give all these Google watchers a […]

So Google thinks they can measure the ROI of advertising in offline media. Good luck! For years, Corporate America has been putting the screws to marketing departments to find a way to measure the ROI of advertising, but until recently the results have been mostly smoke and mirrors.

One of the (many) empty promises of the […]

It’s entertaining to watch tech commentators, who know next to nothing about the dynamics of print advertising (with all due respect), assess Google’s new print advertising program. Does anyone writing about Google Print Ads today know who the Nielsen of print ad buying is? (hint: it’s MRI — Mediamark Research).

It makes perfect sense that Google […]

It’s now conventional wisdom that the future of media is digital and on-demand — content creators no longer own the distribution channels. But the economic center of gravity in media has not shifted to reflect this change. The laws of media dynamics will force the center to shift — advertising dollars always follow the audience, […]

The conventional wisdom is that traditional advertising is wounded and dying at the feet of innovators like Google AdSense and Word of Mouth Marketing. The NYTimes continues its role as a media and technology hype machine today with its coverage of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association meeting:

Speakers with titles like “marketing medic” or “manager of influencer […]

The Wall Street Journal is shifting it’s center of gravity away from print in the wake of Peter Kann’s ouster. Kann’s replacement, Richard Zannino, has big plans:

One of the things he stresses is the importance of making the Journal’s content available via every imaginable outlet, whether it is the Internet or handheld devices like […]

You can’t blame print publishers for having a bad case of cognitive dissonance as they try to figure out the future of their business. Try digesting this:

From BusinessWeek, January 9, 2006, page 29 (for those of you following in print), Call it Gutenberg’s Revenge:

Upstart Internet publishers, helped by low costs that go with signing […]

For most print publishers, online ad revenue (from the online version of their print publications) has represented only a modest percentage of total ad revenue — sufficiently small that they still see themselves as principally in the print publishing business, since that’s where most of the money comes from. Online advertising revenue has been growing […]