Ad sales. Without the sales staff.

Writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, Michael Andersen looks at Flyerboard, which offers online publishers and businesses self-serve advertising. Click over to Boston.com’s Your Town page for Newton and see an example of Flyerboard’s handiwork on the left rail. The image in this post is from the Houston Chronicle website, Chron.com.

What good are page views if you can’t monetize them?

Bill Grueskin, Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia University, has a must-read article at paidContent that supports the position I took in a recent post about how overrated the quest for page views has become:

What good is Web traffic anyway when the online advertising model is so badly broken? …

… It’s troubling that, even as traffic to news sites is growing, their once-lucrative home pages and article pages are displaying house ads or remnant ads with CPMs of no more than $1. At that rate, even a link from Drudge, which could refer 500,000 page views, generates only $500. …

… In other words, even if it’s true that aggregators are siphoning off users from news sites (and it’s pretty clear that they refer traffic to sites as well as drain traffic from them), does it make a big difference in a world of $1 CPMs? …

… The value of advertising online ought to be measured more by engagement than by sheer numbers, that is, more by metrics like time spent or page views per user than by the sheer number of people coming to the site, many of whom may not assign any value to the journalists who generated the content.

Beyond advertising revenue

UPDATE: USA Today regrets not charging for its iPhone app.

Paul Bradshaw, who writes for Online Journalism Blog, says forget about making money from online content (which is what USA Today recently announced it will be doing with its digital edition) and focus instead on value-added services:

Bradshaw’s points about newspapers needing to build new revenue streams is echoed in this post from John Temple, former editor and publisher for the Rocky Mountain News:

I don’t think the industry can get there if all it does is try to hold on to its legacy revenue streams and its legacy business. One thing that concerns me is that newspapers don’t seem to be working with local businesses to help them find their own foothold on the Internet and at the same time possibly place themselves in the middle of transactions. This might enable them to find a new revenue stream they couldn’t have tapped before.

And here’s just one example, provided by the Center for Strategic and International studies, of a news outlet that is going beyond advertising for its income:

European companies have also been finding creative ways to thrive in a changing media environment. Norway’s VG Nett, which is affiliated with the popular Norwegian tabloid, Verdens Gang, rivals Google in Norway and has a profit margin of nearly 30 percent. It does this through charging for services such as a $90-a-year weight-loss club, a pay-for-upgrade social networking site and streaming soccer games.

The last people the news industry needs in a crisis

From Newspaper Death Watch, in its commentary on a meeting of newspaper executives seeking to implement a paid content plan for their websites (emphasis below is mine):

The newspaper industry’s paid content debate sounds more and more like the desperate protests of the music industry when file-sharing began to dismantle its business model. The two industries have some characteristics in common. Both are mature, traditionally stable and highly profitable businesses with predictable growth and high barriers to entry. The people who gravitate to such industries excel at managing costs and limiting risk.

These are the last people you want to run operations at a time of crisis. Crisis demands innovative thinking, fast reaction times and tolerance for risk. One reason we’ve seen so little of this in the newspaper industry is that the people at the top have no capacity for making dramatic changes. The innovation that we’ve seen comes almost entirely from startups or skunkworks operations that publishers have had the sensibility to leave alone.

Thinking outside the paid content box

In his recent post about Journalism Online’s intent in proposing a system for news sites to charge for their online content, Steve Outing notes the absurdity of asking readers to pay for content offered by outlets whose quality has diminished after laying off  thousands of journalists:

The minute paywalls go up on content on the web, all but the most devoted will click elsewhere to find alternatives. Consumer behavior will make an abrupt change online. Brill and his supporters think that newspaper content is so special that bloggers and new news players online won’t match the quality, yet newspaper quality has been sinking badly as thousands of journalists have been pushed onto the street.

Setting aside the issue of quality, news sites that intend to charge for content have their heads in the sand if they think people will pay because “Who else will provide the coverage?”

Plenty will. And plenty are, as Mark Potts pointed out during a panel in Baltimore, titled “The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?”:

Creative Loafing's Ben Eason talks to Editor & Publisher

Ben Eason, Creative Loafing’s CEO, gets some prime real estate in Editor & Publisher‘s Special Report on newspaper bankruptcy.

The most interesting part of the article is Eason’s revelation that he expects CL to emerge from bankruptcy over the summer, at which time “everyone will know the company’s real worth”:

“As time goes on, people are more realistic in what the company can produce going forward. We have an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to suggest to the creditors, to the judge, to everybody involved what we believe the company will look like going forward and then we have the opportunity to suggest what the capital structure is going to be. We are forced to value the company, not as we would like it to be, or what it was, but what it is today.”

The numbers don't lie. Or do they?

Well, something doesn’t add up. When Martin Langeveld crunched the numbers, he found that newspaper Web ads were yielding an absurdly high CPM (cost per thousand page views) of $80.28.

I knew that number couldn’t be correct, as I recalled an instructive post by Ethan Zuckerman:

While highly targeted ads (an ad for roofing services in Pittsfield, MA) might be worth several dollars a click, most ads sell for a dollar or less a click, often much less. An ad that sells for a buck a click and gets 1% clickthrough is functionally a $10 CPM ad, which suggests that lots of ad inventory (the nickel-a-click stuff) selling at sub-$1 CPM.

Ryan Chittum agreed the number was ridiculously high and endeavored to come up with an explanation:

Don't fight Google, work with it

Forget walled gardens of content: Steve Outing says the newspaper industry can help itself by working with Google, not against it:

So here’s an idea for newspapers, the AP, et al: Think through how you can help Google make more money! Figure out how to spread your content much more widely instead of focusing on how to restrict its flow. …

… If they can achieve an intelligent dialog with Google and come up with a plan that benefits both sides, then newspapers can follow Huffington’s advice (of which I concur, 100%), and do everything they can to get their content everywhere possible online. Monetize it not just within your walled garden (website), but on every blog or website that your content appears on.

A True/Slant on ad revenue

In the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg looks at True/Slant, a new Web journalism enterprise with an interesting revenue model. First, the journalism side:

It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,” assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the originating outside site.

The initial group of contributors includes current or former writers for publications such as the Financial Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Time magazine and the Boston Globe.

Now about that rather unique revenue model:

True/Slant will run regular Web ads throughout. But, in a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists’ pages, but will be labeled as ad content.

"Death spiral" is preferred way to describe newspaper industry

In  “‘Death’ of papers seen as oversold” (April 1, 2009), the Washington Times looks at an ongoing journalistic craze with no end in sight: reporters navel gazing over every layoff, furlough and quarterly loss of ad revenue as signs of the coming apocalypse for the newspaper industry:

Each monetary woe — whether it’s the New York Times cutting salaries by 5 percent or layoffs at the Houston Chronicle — is lumped together under the heading “the death of newspapers.”

The exact phrase “death of newspapers” was used to headline or anchor more than 300 separate news stories in the past year, according to a Nexis search — that’s about 25 stories per month that have pronounced the death of the genre. “Death of print” is another favorite.

So is “death spiral,” which made an appearance (via citation) in my recent post Visual proof that newspapers are doomed.

In fact, it was seeing ”death spiral” for the umpteenth time that got me wondering: Is it my imagination, or has the term really been as overused as it appears?