Online advertising

In this time of radical change for newspapers, you’ll find lots of folk trying to make sense of it all – especially in the blogosphere. These writers are trying to interpret the signs of the media times and to recommend what we should do next. You can’t read them all, but when I see Steve Buttry’s byline attached to something, I always take time to check it out. I hope you will read the entire blog post at the URL above. Talking about the free vs. paid content issue, Steve notes that many people see the Original Sin of newspapers as not beginning to charge for online content from the get-go. But in a typical (for Steve) flash of insight, he notes that the Original Sin was on the ad side. Here’s a brief sample: "The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers. We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.” If you agree with what Buttry is saying, you will definitely want to make plans to attend our Internet ad sales workshop on Oct. 29 with Chuck Nau. Mark your calendars now and watch for more details on the website and in your inbox soon.

Shortly after the Ann Arbor News closed, AnnArbor.com went live. The site has an interesting format -- it's rather blog-like -- and it screams hyperlocal. It's definitely worth looking at if you're a community journalist. And on top of the interesting format for news, they've also rethought advertising in a unique way. Check out the articles for more information. The first link, from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, covers the reasoning behind the sites layout and delves into the ad issue as well. See the other two links for some commentary on the site from Steve Buttry and Jeff Jarvis.

Here's a site you need to check out, and print out for your ad staff. According to recent research, consumers trust advertising on local newspaper, magazine and television Websites, and are very likely to take action after viewing ads on these sites. It's a piece any Texas ad rep needs in his/her pitch book when selling Internet ads.

This is definitely an advertising concept that I can see working for community newspapers. The Nieman Lab has a story op about MinnPost's experiment with "real-time advertising." They're sort of a technologically-updated version of classified ads that are powered by micro-updates from businesses.

An article in Advertising Age reminds newspaper publishers that they might want to be careful about how high they build their pay walls, because online advertising revenue is still climbing. "Digital ad revenue won't replace the print revenue newspapers used to wring out of near monopolies, but digital ad spending at newspaper sites won't keep falling beyond next year," according to the article.

Newspapers who are curious about why their classified revenues are down need look no further than this study: According to Pew research, online classified use is growing significantly. The number of online adults to use classified ads websites, such as Craigslist, has more than doubled since 2005. Online classified use has more than doubled in the past four years. Almost half (49 percent) of Internet users say they have ever used online classified sites, compared with 22 percent of online adults who had done so in 2005. On any given day about a tenth of internet users (9 percent) visit online classified sites, up from 4 percent in 2005.