“On a CPM basis, to make $59 billion in online ad revenue, at a $30 CPM, you need 1,966,666,666,666 ad impressions.” – The moral of the story: Change advertising models or die.
Page Views And CPMs Are Suppressing Online Advertising Growth and Innovation » Publishing 2.0
That’s a good, clean homicide map. I like that it’s not muddled with any standard news site nav or templating, but at some point, someone’s going to ask us to put some ad positions in apps like this.
“Why doesn’t Craigslist choose small towns? … In cities, there are enough buyers and sellers to make markets work – whether of used stuff, new stuff, events, etc, etc. In smaller towns, there just isn’t enough supply or demand.”
Mike has the institutional memory on this on to point out the possibilities: 1) Google’s policy has changed, 2) Google is making up the rules as it goes along, or 3) Google has a loose salesperson who doesn’t know the diff between ad and edit.
Does Google like advocacy ads, or not – Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley
Terry’s notes on pre-roll advertising in video.
It’s all in the headline (or not) – Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog
Scott Karp points out the difficulty in waiting for the monkeys to write Shakespeare and Ian King reminds us all that free content requires filtering that costs time and money.
Both are talking about the NYT bit on Heinz’s ketchup-stained UGC ad ploy.
Which brings me to the point: User-generated advertising content should be amateurish. That’s the whole idea. You’re trying to appeal to an audience that prefers YouTube to slick production values. They’re looking for people who look and act (and are lit) like themselves. That’s pretty basic stuff, I thought.
Now let me put on my news hat: User-generated news content must be edited. (Damn, I just felt my workload increase.)
Seriously, it’s all well and good to aggregate the YourTownNameHere Flickr tag on a community site, but you’re going to need to keep an eye on it, depending on your audience and how much they like your publication.
If we’re talking about crowdsourcing the news, then, yes, the wisdom of the crowd is fully in play.
But if you put out a call for comment and get 100 replies and 4 of them lead to sources, congratulations, you’ve done well, because it’s not the 96 people with an opinion that are going to make your story, it’s the 4 with a personal experience to share. Find them. Give them places to talk to you and give them places to talk with each other.
The Ian King post closes with this:
“Don’t tap the wisdom of the crowd; it doesn’t exist per se. Find the wise people in the crowd, and tap into them.”
I’d expand that: Tap into the crowd of 100 to find the 4 wise people and then do it again and again with every story. Pretty soon you’ll find yourself with a field of community leaders to do some of that UGC filtering for you. (Ah, now I feel my workload going back down a notch.)
Google buys Feedburner, which means we’re one giant leap closer to a solid AdSense for RSS feeds.
$100 Million Payday For Feedburner – This Deal Is Confirmed – TechCrunch
Could be a useful way to get those rotating house ads rotating.
10ton.tv – a production company making online video. This one’s pretty cool – curious to see a product advertised. (Full disclosure: An old friend is working with these folks…)
Terry Heaton’s take on the Yahoo/Amigos deal and other attempts to make up for lost print revenue with online advertising dollars turns on this point:
“…the essential problem for all local media companies is their insistence in the belief that a model of scarcity online will generate the kinds of revenue needed to offset losses to legacy platforms.”
For as long as I’ve been interested in this business, I’ve thought local advertising is the way to go at local online news organizations, but Terry’s counting out even that seemingly-obvious model, taking fragmentation and the unbundling of news as a given. Which I do. But I still think branding is a big part of unbundled content, feeds, and widgets.
We give away information so that we can increase the presence and prominence of our brand, get the newspaper’s name out in front of more eyeballs, and draw attention to any and all baby-step innovations we have to offer.
Making money off that is, of course, a long-term proposition.
Some more from Terry: “The longer we wait to aggregate the local web, the more we accelerate our own demise.”
“…aggregate the local web…” Now we’re on to something here.