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.

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:

Newsosaur's prescriptions for newspapers transitioning to an online model

In his final installment of “Making the Print-Digital Transition,” Newsosaur Alan Mutter offers a list of things the newspaper industry needs to do now if it is to regain financial well-being.

In his previous posts, Mutter looked at why newspapers need their print editions, especially if they want to build an online following of readers and advertisers.

Now, the Newsosaur provides a get-well-soon recipe: