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Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope

by jawns 7y ago

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now? Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations. But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.

vkou 7y ago
> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't. For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web. > What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.
- Torwald 7y ago
  > As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Of course! Scientific advertising was published in the 1920s! It's just that Madison Avenue could make a hell of a lot more money by being shy about it. So, nobody was talking. Until the internet made it too obvious…
tathings 7y ago
Also, certain news stories will naturally attract more eyeballs and today's news has optimized for those stories - hence the torrential outpour of sensationalized clickbait. Today's headlines and stories aim to elicit an instinctive, visceral System 1 reaction, while System 2 articles that take a bit more thought are relegated to the back pages. I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content. [1] https://www.thinking-about-things.com https://www.thinking-about-things.com
Nextgrid 7y ago
As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy. No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake. This means I can be confident an ad in a magazine won't be an outright scam and I can somewhat trust it (sure, it's still trying to sell me something that I wouldn't have otherwise bought, but if it's relevant and I'm confident it's not a scam or low quality crap, then why not?). The same does not apply to digital advertising where there's plenty of shit, no human actually reviews the ads and given the ads are very targeted there's little chance anyone else sees the ad (in a magazine, everyone sees it, so an expert in the field can speak up, unlike for a targeted ad where only the people in the targeting criteria - who often lack the knowledge to make an informed decision - see the ad). The other advantage of the lack of tracking is that I get exposed to ads outside of my daily workflow. I work in IT, and if I were to browse without ad blockers (cancer blockers as I call them) I would just see IT or business-related ads all over the place. I don't want to see those - I already know what products I need for IT and have the knowledge & experience to do my own research. On the other hand, a print ad which knows nothing about me might show me an ad for cat food - I want that; I know nothing about the subject and am willing to trust the magazine's reputation behind it.
- notahacker 7y ago
  I think the theory behind the legitimacy is better than the practice. Sure, you can't buy ads in national publications for a fly-by-night level scam the way you can buy social ads. But outright scams can be as big as Enron, and people running scam ICOs/MLM companies etc can definitely afford the ad bill if they don't find the sucker ratio higher through more targeted digital channels...
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Binance is charging a million dollars to list your token on the exchange. If anything there's an adverse selection effect: the more willing you are to fork over a million dollars to get your token listed, the more likely you are to be a scam. Crypto projects with the most real adoption and genuine development (like MakerDAO) didn't even ICO at all, they just airdropped tokens to get the ecosystem started and let the quality of the product take it from there. IIRC there was a similar phenomena with the dot-com boom: companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising did so because they weren't selling anything useful, while the actual survivors spent zero on advertising and grew virally from word of mouth. Google and Facebook make money by selling ads, not by buying them: Google's first ad didn't run until 2010.
kodablah 7y ago
> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?
- bluk 7y ago
  Related to this, I wish more of Hulu's financials were made public. They have essentially concentrated on growing their ad-supported subscriptions by cutting the consumer price and doing subscription bundle deals with others like Spotify. Sometimes you could get Hulu for $1 per month (when it costs about ~$12 per month for an ad-free subscription). Is it due to ad supported subscriptions being worth more to Hulu or is it just a subscription count growth strategy?
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    Hulu's privacy policy[1] is one of the whackiest I've ever seen. Most policies limit sharing of user information to affiliates, service providers, business partners (read: advertisers) and when legally required. Hulu makes no such promises: > We may share information collected from or about you with third parties as explained further below, including business partners, social networking services, service providers, advertisers, and other companies that are not affiliated with Hulu. Basically anyone. But it's probably not that big of a deal if advertisers and "other companies not affiliated with Hulu" can see that you watch Always Sunny with alarming frequency, right? Well that's not the only data they're collecting. Hulu's tracking is just as invasive as Google and Facebook: > This information may relate to your use of the Hulu Services, websites you visited, advertisements you viewed, and your other activities online. Advertising that is based on information collected from or about you across websites, applications and other platforms over time is known as interest-based or online behavioral advertising. It's not tracking though, Hulu uses the far less sinister name of "Behaviorial Advertising" in their policy. And the policy repeatedly justifies their practices by pointing to the "Self Regulatory Principals for Online Behavioral Advertising"[2] which are not particularly principled principals. Unsurprising when you consider they were created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Hulu might share information about everything you do online but at least your personal data will be cloaked in the anonymity of "aggregate" data, right? Nope. > We may share the information collected from or about you in encrypted, aggregated, or de-identified forms That's a tres commas club sentence. Meaning they'll share your information in the aggregate OR de-identified OR they'll encrypt it. So they might send all of your information and browsing habits to the highest bidder but at least they'll do you the solid of encrypting it first. And notice they use the term "de-identified" instead of the standard "personally identifiable." That's no mistake. According to the policy, "de-identified" means: > that the information does not identify you personally As in, it doesn't have your full name or phone number. Contrast that with the typical definition of PI[3]: > any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity It's no wonder they aren't operating in Europe. TL/DR: Hulu's privacy practices are significantly more abhorrent than FAANG's. [1] https://secure.hulu.com/privacy https://secure.hulu.com/privacy [2-PDF] https://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/seven-principles-07-01-09.pdf https://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/seven-principles... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data
cwbrandsma 7y ago
My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. The newspapers had been steadily dying since the 1970s, but Craigslist certainly didn't help them any.
  - milesvp 7y ago
    Not so. Newspapers reached peak profits in the 1990's. At least, this is common wisdom from many people I know who worked at one at the time. Lots of first class travel and good per diems. This was also the time that lots of papers got bought up by big media companies. Newspaper profits were also pretty good up through the early 2000's. I've never been convinced that craigslist was immediately responsible for the loss of classifieds revenue (which used to represent %50 of many newspaper's income), so much as the internet made it really cheap to build classifieds ads distribution platforms, craigslist being only one of them.
WalterBright 7y ago
> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out. For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us. I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.
  - musicale 7y ago
    People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing experience. I think that means we're doing it wrong, but nobody wants to admit it.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      That's because they push ads at people for what they think they want. That's very different from people buying ads for what those people actually want. For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ads. I don't want to see a fuel injection pump in a home decor magazine. Hemmings Motor News is another example of effective advertising. It's nothing but car ads - and people pay for a subscription. An online example is newegg.com. All it is is computer electronics. It's my go-to location when I'm looking for stuff for my computer. Seeing ads on newegg is exactly why I'm going there.
im3w1l 7y ago
> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog That just seems like common sense to me. The advantage of newspapers should be that they have more readers, not that their readers are any "clickier".
vilhelm_s 7y ago
I would point to the graph here: https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-google-or-facebook-or/ https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-goog... The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Ugh. For an article whose point is "the sum of these lines does X," you'd really thing they'd graph the sum of those lines.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I think there is a lot of inadvertent irony/lack of awareness in: "Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with." Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has heard about the role of classifieds, and how they propped up newspapers until Craigslist came along?
    - jeegsy 7y ago
      I heard somewhere that the Craigslist guy first went to newspapers with his ideas and he was basically laughed out of the room
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        So, they didn't identify it as their market. But it clearly was, with hindsight.
- dhruvrrp 7y ago
  Which is completely in line with what that person said. Why spend $x on newspaper advertisements when you can spend them on Google and have much better targeting.
pravda 7y ago
>So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now? Because they lost their monopoly! In most markets, there was one newspaper and that newspaper could charge advertisers as much as they wanted to. When your monopoly rents go away, you go out of business.
pdonis 7y ago
> why was the business model robust then and in shambles now? It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?
jldugger 7y ago
> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_. > They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship." After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.
- syrrim 7y ago
  The question is: where did this pattern come from? Why buy too many ads in the first place? Corporations are supposed to be maximizing profits, and yet we hear they are wasting tons of money on ads. Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders? Some thoughts: - A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency every week, and wanted to be at the top. They would therefore run ad campaigns at the end of the week in order to drive themselves to the top, even if the ads were a net loss in revenue. This suggests that a lot of advertising is aimed at people who are already invested in the company: execs and shareholders, who see the ads and think it is reflective of how well the company is doing (which, in a way, it is: it signals they have extra money to waste on advertising) - I recently saw a clip from a Jobs interview, where he contrasted non-monopolies, which are run by product people, with monopolies (like Xerox and IBM), which are run by "sales and marketing" people. Presumably some ads are effective. Controlling the ads that are effective gives marketing power over the company, in the monopoly case. Having attained this power, they then use it to route the company's spare revenue to buy still more ads. This has the interesting implication (perhaps obvious) that a monopoly is bad for shareholders (as well as consumers), who are being robbed of the revenue now being spent on ads.
mc32 7y ago
>They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. I believe many magazines (though not newspapers) had a “Reply Mail” thing. I bet they derived metrics from those.
mrunkel 7y ago
The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%." Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher. This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard. Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.
- cm2187 7y ago
  I wonder also how much of this ad money isn’t insurance against being treated too harshly by the newspaper. There are ads in newspapers where I just can’t think of any other reason. Like an ad for EADS (don’t remember if it was EADS or an equivalent). I ain’t going to buy an Airbus airliner in my next sunday shopping! And I doubt airlines make decisions based on ads.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Could be brand recognition - subsidised by the airlines (potentially unintentionally, when the price of the marketing is baked into the cost of an airplane) to make you feel somehow better in flying in an Airbus instead of a Boeing.
moksly 7y ago
It’s anecdotal but the advertisements that work best on me are the ones hanging around public transportation hubs (I’m Scandinavian). I would never go to the movies if those spots didn’t inform me there was a new movie running. No one is gathering that information though.
1998 7y ago
Newspapers had a local monopoly on publishing to their circulation. If you want to communicate with 100,000+ people in your city tomorrow you had to pay. News, sports, comics, the content is bait to drive the circulation. Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers. Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.

by jawns 7y ago

vkou 7y ago

> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't. For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web. > What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.

Torwald 7y ago
> As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Of course! Scientific advertising was published in the 1920s! It's just that Madison Avenue could make a hell of a lot more money by being shy about it. So, nobody was talking. Until the internet made it too obvious…

tathings 7y ago

Also, certain news stories will naturally attract more eyeballs and today's news has optimized for those stories - hence the torrential outpour of sensationalized clickbait. Today's headlines and stories aim to elicit an instinctive, visceral System 1 reaction, while System 2 articles that take a bit more thought are relegated to the back pages. I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content. [1] https://www.thinking-about-things.com https://www.thinking-about-things.com

Nextgrid 7y ago

As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy. No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake. This means I can be confident an ad in a magazine won't be an outright scam and I can somewhat trust it (sure, it's still trying to sell me something that I wouldn't have otherwise bought, but if it's relevant and I'm confident it's not a scam or low quality crap, then why not?). The same does not apply to digital advertising where there's plenty of shit, no human actually reviews the ads and given the ads are very targeted there's little chance anyone else sees the ad (in a magazine, everyone sees it, so an expert in the field can speak up, unlike for a targeted ad where only the people in the targeting criteria - who often lack the knowledge to make an informed decision - see the ad). The other advantage of the lack of tracking is that I get exposed to ads outside of my daily workflow. I work in IT, and if I were to browse without ad blockers (cancer blockers as I call them) I would just see IT or business-related ads all over the place. I don't want to see those - I already know what products I need for IT and have the knowledge & experience to do my own research. On the other hand, a print ad which knows nothing about me might show me an ad for cat food - I want that; I know nothing about the subject and am willing to trust the magazine's reputation behind it.

notahacker 7y ago
I think the theory behind the legitimacy is better than the practice. Sure, you can't buy ads in national publications for a fly-by-night level scam the way you can buy social ads. But outright scams can be as big as Enron, and people running scam ICOs/MLM companies etc can definitely afford the ad bill if they don't find the sucker ratio higher through more targeted digital channels...
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Binance is charging a million dollars to list your token on the exchange. If anything there's an adverse selection effect: the more willing you are to fork over a million dollars to get your token listed, the more likely you are to be a scam. Crypto projects with the most real adoption and genuine development (like MakerDAO) didn't even ICO at all, they just airdropped tokens to get the ecosystem started and let the quality of the product take it from there. IIRC there was a similar phenomena with the dot-com boom: companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising did so because they weren't selling anything useful, while the actual survivors spent zero on advertising and grew virally from word of mouth. Google and Facebook make money by selling ads, not by buying them: Google's first ad didn't run until 2010.

kodablah 7y ago

> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?

bluk 7y ago
Related to this, I wish more of Hulu's financials were made public. They have essentially concentrated on growing their ad-supported subscriptions by cutting the consumer price and doing subscription bundle deals with others like Spotify. Sometimes you could get Hulu for $1 per month (when it costs about ~$12 per month for an ad-free subscription). Is it due to ad supported subscriptions being worth more to Hulu or is it just a subscription count growth strategy?
- elliekelly 7y ago
  Hulu's privacy policy[1] is one of the whackiest I've ever seen. Most policies limit sharing of user information to affiliates, service providers, business partners (read: advertisers) and when legally required. Hulu makes no such promises: > We may share information collected from or about you with third parties as explained further below, including business partners, social networking services, service providers, advertisers, and other companies that are not affiliated with Hulu. Basically anyone. But it's probably not that big of a deal if advertisers and "other companies not affiliated with Hulu" can see that you watch Always Sunny with alarming frequency, right? Well that's not the only data they're collecting. Hulu's tracking is just as invasive as Google and Facebook: > This information may relate to your use of the Hulu Services, websites you visited, advertisements you viewed, and your other activities online. Advertising that is based on information collected from or about you across websites, applications and other platforms over time is known as interest-based or online behavioral advertising. It's not tracking though, Hulu uses the far less sinister name of "Behaviorial Advertising" in their policy. And the policy repeatedly justifies their practices by pointing to the "Self Regulatory Principals for Online Behavioral Advertising"[2] which are not particularly principled principals. Unsurprising when you consider they were created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Hulu might share information about everything you do online but at least your personal data will be cloaked in the anonymity of "aggregate" data, right? Nope. > We may share the information collected from or about you in encrypted, aggregated, or de-identified forms That's a tres commas club sentence. Meaning they'll share your information in the aggregate OR de-identified OR they'll encrypt it. So they might send all of your information and browsing habits to the highest bidder but at least they'll do you the solid of encrypting it first. And notice they use the term "de-identified" instead of the standard "personally identifiable." That's no mistake. According to the policy, "de-identified" means: > that the information does not identify you personally As in, it doesn't have your full name or phone number. Contrast that with the typical definition of PI[3]: > any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity It's no wonder they aren't operating in Europe. TL/DR: Hulu's privacy practices are significantly more abhorrent than FAANG's. [1] https://secure.hulu.com/privacy https://secure.hulu.com/privacy [2-PDF] https://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/seven-principles-07-01-09.pdf https://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/seven-principles... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data

cwbrandsma 7y ago

My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. The newspapers had been steadily dying since the 1970s, but Craigslist certainly didn't help them any.
- milesvp 7y ago
  Not so. Newspapers reached peak profits in the 1990's. At least, this is common wisdom from many people I know who worked at one at the time. Lots of first class travel and good per diems. This was also the time that lots of papers got bought up by big media companies. Newspaper profits were also pretty good up through the early 2000's. I've never been convinced that craigslist was immediately responsible for the loss of classifieds revenue (which used to represent %50 of many newspaper's income), so much as the internet made it really cheap to build classifieds ads distribution platforms, craigslist being only one of them.

WalterBright 7y ago

> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out. For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us. I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.

ghaff 7y ago
Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.
- musicale 7y ago
  People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing experience. I think that means we're doing it wrong, but nobody wants to admit it.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    That's because they push ads at people for what they think they want. That's very different from people buying ads for what those people actually want. For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ads. I don't want to see a fuel injection pump in a home decor magazine. Hemmings Motor News is another example of effective advertising. It's nothing but car ads - and people pay for a subscription. An online example is newegg.com. All it is is computer electronics. It's my go-to location when I'm looking for stuff for my computer. Seeing ads on newegg is exactly why I'm going there.

im3w1l 7y ago

> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog That just seems like common sense to me. The advantage of newspapers should be that they have more readers, not that their readers are any "clickier".

vilhelm_s 7y ago

I would point to the graph here: https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-google-or-facebook-or/ https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-goog... The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Ugh. For an article whose point is "the sum of these lines does X," you'd really thing they'd graph the sum of those lines.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I think there is a lot of inadvertent irony/lack of awareness in: "Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with." Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has heard about the role of classifieds, and how they propped up newspapers until Craigslist came along?
  - jeegsy 7y ago
    I heard somewhere that the Craigslist guy first went to newspapers with his ideas and he was basically laughed out of the room
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      So, they didn't identify it as their market. But it clearly was, with hindsight.
dhruvrrp 7y ago
Which is completely in line with what that person said. Why spend $x on newspaper advertisements when you can spend them on Google and have much better targeting.

pravda 7y ago

>So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now? Because they lost their monopoly! In most markets, there was one newspaper and that newspaper could charge advertisers as much as they wanted to. When your monopoly rents go away, you go out of business.

pdonis 7y ago

> why was the business model robust then and in shambles now? It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?

jldugger 7y ago

> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_. > They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship." After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.

syrrim 7y ago
The question is: where did this pattern come from? Why buy too many ads in the first place? Corporations are supposed to be maximizing profits, and yet we hear they are wasting tons of money on ads. Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders? Some thoughts: - A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency every week, and wanted to be at the top. They would therefore run ad campaigns at the end of the week in order to drive themselves to the top, even if the ads were a net loss in revenue. This suggests that a lot of advertising is aimed at people who are already invested in the company: execs and shareholders, who see the ads and think it is reflective of how well the company is doing (which, in a way, it is: it signals they have extra money to waste on advertising) - I recently saw a clip from a Jobs interview, where he contrasted non-monopolies, which are run by product people, with monopolies (like Xerox and IBM), which are run by "sales and marketing" people. Presumably some ads are effective. Controlling the ads that are effective gives marketing power over the company, in the monopoly case. Having attained this power, they then use it to route the company's spare revenue to buy still more ads. This has the interesting implication (perhaps obvious) that a monopoly is bad for shareholders (as well as consumers), who are being robbed of the revenue now being spent on ads.

mc32 7y ago

>They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. I believe many magazines (though not newspapers) had a “Reply Mail” thing. I bet they derived metrics from those.

mrunkel 7y ago

The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%." Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher. This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard. Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.

cm2187 7y ago
I wonder also how much of this ad money isn’t insurance against being treated too harshly by the newspaper. There are ads in newspapers where I just can’t think of any other reason. Like an ad for EADS (don’t remember if it was EADS or an equivalent). I ain’t going to buy an Airbus airliner in my next sunday shopping! And I doubt airlines make decisions based on ads.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Could be brand recognition - subsidised by the airlines (potentially unintentionally, when the price of the marketing is baked into the cost of an airplane) to make you feel somehow better in flying in an Airbus instead of a Boeing.

moksly 7y ago

It’s anecdotal but the advertisements that work best on me are the ones hanging around public transportation hubs (I’m Scandinavian). I would never go to the movies if those spots didn’t inform me there was a new movie running. No one is gathering that information though.

1998 7y ago

Newspapers had a local monopoly on publishing to their circulation. If you want to communicate with 100,000+ people in your city tomorrow you had to pay. News, sports, comics, the content is bait to drive the circulation. Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers. Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.