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Ken Auletta of The New Yorker spoke about this on Charlie Rose a few years ago. He explained that while the operating costs for online news is lower than printi

by nhebb 14y ago

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker spoke about this on Charlie Rose a few years ago. He explained that while the operating costs for online news is lower than printing press / hard copy distribution, the advertising revenues are even lower still. If a newspaper went to an all online format, the differential would be negative.

brandnewlow 14y ago
And the advertising revenues are so much lower because on the web, advertisers measure actual impressions of their ads. They don't pay for ads that don't get loaded by a reader. Meanwhile in print, advertisers have always paid no matter if anyone paged over to their ad or not. The lack of measurement was the secret sauce that made print publications profitable.
prawn 14y ago
Did any newspaper try maintaining budgets across the transition? e.g., advertiser goes from paying $500 for their print advertising, to paying $500 for their print and web advertising, to (in the future) paying $500 for their web advertising? The first stage was already active with every publication. The second stage could've been a reasonable upsell (same price, but get online coverage too!). By the third you're pushing better tracking/metrics, interactive ads, colour-by-default, animation, etc. I get the impression that many papers treated it all very separately. In fact, for some time, one of the biggest entities in Australia maintained separate print and digital writing units (which strikes me as bizarre).
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Once a newspaper sales rep starts talking "web ads" with an advertiser, the client has a host of other options. These options have more reach, are closer to people with purchasing intent, are performance based, self-service, and generate much higher ROI than banner ads on a newspaper site. So the newspaper guys had to offer competitive pricing, or at least pricing in the same galaxy as the other web guys. So instead of a $50 or $100 CPM for inclusion in the print paper, they're getting a $5-10 CPM for includion on the web site.
  - prawn 14y ago
    See my mention of stage two - they're essentially getting web ads for free as an effort to maintain budget during a transition. How would the marketplace apply in that case?
    - brandnewlow 14y ago
      Newspapers gave the web ads for free for a long time. Then when they tried selling them by themselves, the clients refused to pay for them because they'd received them for free for so long....and seen no real benefits or results from them during that time.
- raldi 14y ago
  Re: your last sentence, even Wired magazine has done that to various degrees over the last 15 years.
- corin_ 14y ago
  Print publications have four options when it comes to their digital side: 1.) Publish the exact same content 2.) Publish some of the print content, but only a fairly low percentage 3.) Create separate digital content 4.) Same content, put it behind a paywall Newspapers have typically gone for 1 or 4, because if you do 2 then people will go somewhere where they can get all the news, and 3 seems like a waste of money to them. Magazines generally go for 2 (e.g. Esquire) or 3 (e.g. Wired). These options make more sense to them than to newspapers because... well option 2, there's no "people will just go to a site that has all the news", because it's all custom content - another site might have more content, but it won't include any of the same content. Option 3 because they feel that if they just put the magazine's content online they can't make enough money, and it will lose them money with people reading it and not buying the magazine, on the other hand they don't want to miss out on digital money, so they essentially launch a new product there, under the same name.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

by nhebb 14y ago

brandnewlow 14y ago

And the advertising revenues are so much lower because on the web, advertisers measure actual impressions of their ads. They don't pay for ads that don't get loaded by a reader. Meanwhile in print, advertisers have always paid no matter if anyone paged over to their ad or not. The lack of measurement was the secret sauce that made print publications profitable.

prawn 14y ago

Did any newspaper try maintaining budgets across the transition? e.g., advertiser goes from paying $500 for their print advertising, to paying $500 for their print and web advertising, to (in the future) paying $500 for their web advertising? The first stage was already active with every publication. The second stage could've been a reasonable upsell (same price, but get online coverage too!). By the third you're pushing better tracking/metrics, interactive ads, colour-by-default, animation, etc. I get the impression that many papers treated it all very separately. In fact, for some time, one of the biggest entities in Australia maintained separate print and digital writing units (which strikes me as bizarre).

brandnewlow 14y ago
Once a newspaper sales rep starts talking "web ads" with an advertiser, the client has a host of other options. These options have more reach, are closer to people with purchasing intent, are performance based, self-service, and generate much higher ROI than banner ads on a newspaper site. So the newspaper guys had to offer competitive pricing, or at least pricing in the same galaxy as the other web guys. So instead of a $50 or $100 CPM for inclusion in the print paper, they're getting a $5-10 CPM for includion on the web site.
- prawn 14y ago
  See my mention of stage two - they're essentially getting web ads for free as an effort to maintain budget during a transition. How would the marketplace apply in that case?
  - brandnewlow 14y ago
    Newspapers gave the web ads for free for a long time. Then when they tried selling them by themselves, the clients refused to pay for them because they'd received them for free for so long....and seen no real benefits or results from them during that time.
raldi 14y ago
Re: your last sentence, even Wired magazine has done that to various degrees over the last 15 years.
corin_ 14y ago
Print publications have four options when it comes to their digital side: 1.) Publish the exact same content 2.) Publish some of the print content, but only a fairly low percentage 3.) Create separate digital content 4.) Same content, put it behind a paywall Newspapers have typically gone for 1 or 4, because if you do 2 then people will go somewhere where they can get all the news, and 3 seems like a waste of money to them. Magazines generally go for 2 (e.g. Esquire) or 3 (e.g. Wired). These options make more sense to them than to newspapers because... well option 2, there's no "people will just go to a site that has all the news", because it's all custom content - another site might have more content, but it won't include any of the same content. Option 3 because they feel that if they just put the magazine's content online they can't make enough money, and it will lose them money with people reading it and not buying the magazine, on the other hand they don't want to miss out on digital money, so they essentially launch a new product there, under the same name.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]