Warning: Highly opinionated rant follows. Blah.
Link: Report: News-oriented Websites Have a Future - Advertising Age - MediaWorks.
This article from Advertising Age is purely E-VILE, so I say. It lives deep in horseless carriage-land, or as another version of "Give a mass media-paradigm-biased analyst a hammer and he suddenly decides everything needs pounding."
The advertising model is dying, and THAT MODEL itself is what's killing newspapers, but what does this analyst call for but MORE PUSH ADVERTISING TO MASS AUDIENCES OF BILLIONS?
Adage.com benevolently decides that there's still hope for the dying newspaper industry, but only if it forces the one-to-many broadcast model to more fully colonize the interactive, many-to-many online ecosystems that are rejecting the ad-supported content model in the first place through time-shifted, ad-skipped viewing, social media interfaces, and unbound content feeds.
But nooooo, what AdAge says newspapers need to do to become more profitable and viable online (and to pay actual quality reporters) is to go back to that Old Time Religion.
The challenge for all sites is garnering enough traffic and creating a discernable enough brand to make advertisers seek them out.
"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes.
Those ambitious numbers, she continues, show how hard it is for local news sites to be really profitable, and underscore "why local papers will have trouble offsetting traditional media declines" with revenue from their websites.
The report also looks at whether the Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.
Another sign of the short-sightedness of this approach:
Yahoo, AOL at billion mark
Ms. Fine said sites such as Yahoo News and AOL News already get in the neighborhood of a billion page views a month, and it's not out of the question that NYT.com could too."The fact that there are sites out there that are already achieving that suggests that this could work," she said in an interview.
Yahoo and AOL are diverse and INTERACTIVE portals, not finely honed and researched creators of quality content.
In other words, Yahoo and AOL may feature internally-generated content, but it sprawls across a virtual destination that is not fixed or funneled into a narrow set of editorial standards. To compare the NYTimes and its communication model to Yahoo and AOL (which easily pipe out the same AP and Reuters wire content as NYTimes does, but deliver nothing like the same content) is to reveal the lack of understanding of both the content model AND the communications model by people with an inherent MASS media, PUSH ADS, passive consumption bias.
It's like the very idea of Long Tail interactivity patterns never even entered into this analysis, which is based entirely on economies of scale in mass form only.
AdAge isn't saying newspapers are going to survive online by building massively popular Web sites. The analysts are pretty clear that it takes an enormous scale -- over 200 million, or even 800 million, views -- to have hope succeeding in that mass-market advertising model, and that local news sites have pretty much no chance of doing it. In fact, the story quotes an analyst who says the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have *a* shot at that kind of reach, but they're "years behind that pace." Not exactly optimism.
Posted by: Tim | December 17, 2008 at 02:45 PM
True, Tim, they may not be ABLE to do it. It could be within the reach of some.
When I was at CNN, they put out a press release that said on any given news day, we had the potential to reach an audience of a billion people globally. But that was still figuring in the mass one-to-many pipe.
My point was that, regardless of whether or not they could do such a thing (and most local news falls falls on the long slope of the long tail as well), the political implications of even striving for such a thing require a mind-set of the old mass media push model, or rather, an attempt to colonize the upstart interactive Internet into being good passive consumers of massively distributed one-to-many content products.
Even if they COULD do such a thing, I'd argue that they SHOULD not.
Posted by: Chris Boese | December 17, 2008 at 03:00 PM