Could that clucking sound be chickens coming home to roost???
By mbecker908 Posted in Culture — Comments (38) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
According to the New York Times, advertising revenues in February of 2007 vs. advertising revenues in February of 2006 are off pretty significantly. Specifically,
At USA Today, the nation’s biggest newspaper, ad revenue was down 14 percent this February, compared with February last year. Gannett, which owns USA Today and is the nation’s biggest newspaper company, reported that its overall ad revenue declined 3.8 percent in February from February 2006.Ad revenue at The New York Times Company fell 6 percent overall, declining 7.5 percent at The New York Times; ad revenue at the company’s New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe, was down 4 percent. At The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones, it was off 10 percent.
The Tribune Company, whose papers include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, reported losses of more than 5 percent. So did McClatchy, whose papers include The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and The Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky.
Even papers in smaller markets, which are shielded from some of the forces buffeting some of the bigger metro dailies, saw losses in February. Ad revenue for the publishing division of Media General, which owns The Tampa Tribune, The Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Winston-Salem Journal, were down 5.8 percent.
Most of the numbers were worse than January’s and came after a difficult year in which many newspapers continued to pare costs by laying off employees, shrinking the physical size of their print publications and reducing benefits. Several newspapers also tried raising revenue by accepting advertising in prominent spaces that they had long reserved for news.
And still the numbers were bad. Collectively, the February sales were “the worst group performance to date,” Steven Barlow, an analyst at Prudential Equity Group, wrote to his clients.
The culprits? Well, there's money shifting to the web, free ads on CraigsList, hurricanes, just the usual suspects.
Any chance it might have something to do with fact that liberal editorial policies have invaded the front page? Who knows, it's not discussed. Except that since the WSJ revenues are down 10%, that couldn't possibly be the case.
Too bad,so sad.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Allow me to be the first to blame it on Global Warming.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
The bread-and-butter of print newspapers has long been local classified advertising. That's why to this day there are people who believe that the business has a future. (I'm personally acquainted with people on the boards of some of the organizations you mentioned, so I can't elaborate on that point here.)
I think Craig's List and similar things are the arrow pointed at the heart of the print business. To date, Google hasn't figured out how to effectively target local advertising. It's a difficult problem, and has been ever since the earliest online ad networks recognized what a gold mine it would be if you could solve it. (I was a consulting CTO in this business back before the bust.)
So what's an alternate business model? Well, look at the (successful) WSJ and FT online presences, and the (probably unsuccessful) NYT presence. You charge people money to see your content.
Unfortunately, this model is vulnerable to precisely the point you raise: it only works if you have a distinctive editorial voice to differentiate above the noise. That's not necessary if your revenue comes from local advertising. But the NYT, WaPo, LAT, and all the less-important major newspapers all have the same spin on the news. The WSJ has exactly the same editorial slant (left-liberal), but there's enough distinctiveness to the paper's business focus to give them a differentiator.
There's something to be said for the value added by professional journalists who go out and sleuth for stories and produce the grist for our (meaning, bloggers) mills. Unfortunately, the professionals are so infected with groupthink and risk-aversion that their product isn't easy to differentiate and put a value on.
In short, I think the print business is under serious pressure now, but its future is far worse. Maybe that's why so many smart people are trying to keep it running as is, without fundamental changes, even at the cost of significantly lower revenues compared with the past.
is the absolute insulation from either reality or the marketplace of the perceived kingmaker, the New York Times Co's.
The way Pinch & Family structured their stock, the BoD is the handmaiden of the Sbergers and it will take an act of God or Congress to get Pinch's attention.
I don't know who's actually on their board, but I do see lots of stuff in the financial press about ML and major shareholders of the non-voting stuff trying to get somebody's attention. The last thing I saw indicated that there is a move afoot to boycott the annual meeting.
The current direction seems to be "cost control" at the major dailies which is shorthand for killing off the good stuff like real investigative reporting and propping up the agenda journos like MoDo and Klugman.
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Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
Side point first: the holders of NYT Class A do seem to be hanging in there, don't they? Obviously you have to discount this company for the unusual governance structure, but they're actually pretty diversified. The Times and the Globe are just a part of the operation. I don't know enough to say anything useful beyond that.
You mention MoDo, the Krugmeister, Tom Friedman, Brooksie, and the rest of the gang. Like everyone else, I thought the Times had lost their marbles when they put these people behind a paywall, because no one reads them anymore. I used to read them only because I was led to them by my interest in seeing what was on the front page, not because they're worth reading on their own merit.
You'd think the Times got it completely backwards, but they may have been thinking of the point I made upthread, which is that their mainstream news coverage isn't differentiated enough to justify paying for.
On the other hand, they may actually believe the whole "paper of record" nonsense, and decided they needed to keep their frontpage reporting free for that reason. If so, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "not knowing the first thing about business."
They have been making numerous moves that will let them target ads down to the street. Next time you go into google maps note it nows your history.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
First, you can't reliably infer someone's geographic location from their source IP address. Second, if you do things like note their map-reading history, you've presumptively violated their privacy. This is a bigger deal than many people think. As I said, I've seen the inside of the online ad business since its earliest days (1996). These companies went to incredible (and somewhat ridiculous) efforts to avoid compromising the identities of real people. The risk in so doing (naturally) is that you attract the attention (and the regulatory zeal) of Congress.
I still think that self-selected venues like Craig's List have a very large opportunity to crack the local-ad gold mine, and I like their chances better than local-ad targeting driven from search.
I could be wrong about this, but I watch Google fairly closely, and I think they've done such a good job at monetizing search, that it obscures the lack of success they've had in finding other revenue streams. I shouldn't say more in public.
It bypasses the privacy issue by having people opt in voluntarily and in droves.
Its a very nice way around the privacy concerns. I consult for a startup using the same model. Unfortunately I have a confidentiality agreement so can't say much.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Would you be willing to pay me money if I gave you my personal demo/psychographics? You'd be allowed to show me up to five ads a night, you pick them.
Let's assume I'm in a high-value demo. (Consumer of luxury goods, lives in large city, etc.)
How much would you pay me?
(Note, this has nothing to do with search.)
Sorry I couldn't resist that.
But it does sum up the answer. If you were willing to accept the level of payment that could be generated vs the intrusion/sale of your personal time, you wouldn't be in a very valuable demographic.
But taking it further, for any given population I would want to model the clickthrough/impression rates and see what kind of rate I could charge the advertisers for the privilege.
For a while I was paying over a dollar a click to drive traffic to a site. It was on a very narrow selection and part of the point was to have our ads in front of our competitors. We got traffic but not quite what we wanted.
But enough rambling and back to your question. I guess the answer is a definite yes, but not monetarily. Probably in some type of deliverable content that would go with the ads, perhaps games, news feeds etc. That would have the double advantage of filtering out the people pursuing click fraud while improving impressions delivered to advertisers.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I'm not talking about statistical models across large populations. I'm talking about micro-targeting ad messages to high-net-worth individuals.
I'm not asking you to pay me for clicking a link. (That model is suitable primarily for search.) I'm talking about actually targeting ads based on real demo/psychos. You pay me just to watch your ad. And you know my real name.
I guess I see the flaw that I think you've identified: if you offered me $100 a night to spend five minutes watching ads, it's not worth my while. The model doesn't work with high-net-worths. And for people a step or two down the ladder, you hit the population size issue.
(For what it's worth, some people are actually thinking about this. And they're not in the search business, either.)
I will be saying things I have agreed not to. But there are other ways of looking at it especially when the game has extra players in it besides the advertiser, vendor, and potential customer.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
...it sounds like, on balance, you're a believer in search. (Meaning that the innovation and the growth in ad targeting will come from the search players rather than the alternatives.) Yes?
It's hardly tapped out. Google is certainly moving to tie it in to other things. Note googles's personalized search.
The other players have a different game and different type of targeting. Take a look at Netflix and how third parties advertise with them. They all they have to do is allow adds to be included based on your recommendations of movies.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I'm not a frequent reader of the WSJ but I have never heard it called a left-liberal paper.
How about The Economist?
the editorial pages were rated right-center and the news pages were rated as the #2 liberal news slant, right behind the NYT.
I don't remember who did the "ratings" other than it was a respectable sounding organization and it was last year.
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Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
The news pages of the WSJ are actually the most liberal in the country, ahead of the NYTimes. The editorial page is very conservative.
LINK.
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[F]or by the fundamental law of Nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred...
-John Locke
I thought it was the UCLA study, but I'm old and December 2004 still qualifies as "short term". :>)
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Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
Just for fun, of course. Professional journalists all go to the same schools and they all learn to think the same way. I've long felt that they're not left-liberal by choice, but simply because they're not aware that there is any other way to think. (Maybe that's why they call themselves moderates.)
The WSJ has some old hands on the editorial page that take a strong pro-free market stance that looks a lot like conservatism. Of course, it leads them to positions on immigration, for example, that are opposed by a lot of conservatives.
The Economist: For some reason I really loathe that rag. I almost never read it. Something about the mixture of totally conventional thinking with a supercilious, pompous attitude just turns me off.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but I seem to recall that both The Economist and the London School of Economics are Fabian (a type of socialism) institutions. The aforementioned fact could be why you loath The Economist.
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
Do you know what happened to eBay's foray into localized auctions? When that started, I figured that was the death knell for classified advertising. Instead eBay seems to have decided it isn't worth pursuing.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
If I had to guess, I'd say there just wasn't enough liquidity. From the little that I know about eBay, I'd guess their auctions are valuable in proportion to the size of their readership.
Considering the cost to sell and ship something on eBay, they have already beaten the newspapers when it comes to advertising merchandise. Not to mention you can get a better price than you may think if there's a real demand for what you have.
I happen work in the classified advertising dept. at a major local daily. Just about all the ads we get are 1. real estate, 2. cars, 3. pets, 4. garage/estate sales. The merchandise ads we get are usually for things that aren't easily shipped, like furniture.
The downside to Craigslist is that once you list your item on there, it's pretty much buried within a day or two and you have to re-post it. Nevertheless, they do have an impact.
However, local news is still important to people and our website is doing great. It doesn't charge you but to see some content you must "register" (give up your demos). The number of people placing online-only ads is increasing.
It's a scary time indeed for this business. I'm going on my 3rd year with the company and they have laid people off every year I've been there. There's no job security, but I'm hanging in there for as long as I can.
I'm glad you brought that up. It could be my imagination (and I'm not a typical news consumer either), but it seems to me that local news coverage is still something that newspapers (and the 10 o'clock TV news) do a heck of a lot better than the Internet does. That even applies to papers like the NYT. Yes? No? Maybe?
Wouldn't it be interesting if the print business became dominated by high-quality coverage of local events supported by local ads? And a considerably smaller national/international/business press found a different business model or moved mostly online?
I think a lot of my fellow ideologues like to poke fun at the newspaper industry and snidely tell them that their revenue is falling because their content stinks (or is biased or what-have-you).
But that's not the reason. Heck, if that would be enough to doom a newspaper, then they'd all have been out of business decades ago.
They're just the modern-day version of the buggywhip maker or typewriter manufacturer. Their product has simply been replaced by alternatives.
I differ from a lot of people in my belief that it may not be such a good thing for Joe Q. Public. After all, the eventual result here may be a reduction in the number of people covering news professionally. That's simple economics -- if the money isn't there to be earned, nothing will be invested toward that end.
Granted, some of the best reporting on Iraq and other world events has been from alternative media -- particularly the blogosphere. But, let's be honest, there just isn't that much money to be made in the blogosphere (yet, anyway) and you wonder how good of a substitute they'll be for traditional reporters.
I will admit, though, to taking some guilty pleasure in seeing these organizations suffer. But they're not suffering because they're biased or bad. They're suffering because they're dinosaurs.
If the editorials are right-center and the "news" is left, Are the readers BiPolar?
Somehow I don't see this as possible, though I continue to learn that 'people don't have to make sense'.
the editorial folks at the WSJ do not exercise control over the news pages.
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Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
I'd bet the other papers would tell us that their editorial page folks do not exercise control over the news either. They have a 'Chinese Wall' between the liberal Democrats who run the editorial page and the liberal Democrats who spin the news.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
The stock tables, the company announcements and certain of the columnists were what was of interest.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
is that if you go for a trial subscription they pack your mailbox everyday with this giant paper, and if you stop your subscription they keep sending this giant damn paper for months.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
Since I stopped reading newspapers, I had to go to cedar chips for litter. It's a bit more expensive, but the cats seem to like it a little better.
The NYT was traditionally ill-suited for use as either cat litter or fishwrap because of the damned runny ink they used. But they solved that problem a few years back.
we are becoming an increasingly semi-literate society and what reading is done is less serious then in the past. Attention spans wither before the purely visual coupled with a dumbed down educational system. It's become an entertainment/gadget society with an ever decreasing attention span.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
Smash bad comment smash, Ooh butterfly me chase.
Seriously, I have heard that every year of my life. It seems less true every day. When I was growing up there was a Barnes and Noble on 18th street and and another 57th. In Florida there wasn't a decent bookstore to speak of. Now you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a giant bookstore.
The written word for interpersonal communication has enjoyed a renaissance of unprecedented proportion. You have email, text messages, blogs (not unlike this one) all contributing to more things being written and read.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I've been scooped by mbecker! I blogged on this myself and reached the following conclusion.
"As a direct result of globalization, information has become commoditized. The Internet offers me fifty different brands of news and information and can poop out exactly the brand of ideological BS which appeals to my own unique sense of smell. If information has been commoditized; OP-EDs have been boutiqued."
Kyoto Now! (Because only pollution from the US hurts the planet)
I beleive we've only scratched the surface of the socialogical changes that are going to come from the internet, and eventually we're going to see as big an impact as Guttenberg's printing press. Freedom of the press was pretty explosive stuff when it was only a freedom for people who owned a press, but now:
Right now, we're seeing a lot more chaff than wheat come out of the new technology, but new medias have always started out by translating the older forms to the new technology (early movies were basically plays staged in front of a camera), but eventually the new media grows into a unique art form of it's own. New forms of entertainment are on the horizon, and as consumers get better at info-winnowing, I'm expecting great things. The cultural power centers will go the way of the passenger pigeon, and that includes newspapers, television production, movie studios, and record companies.
It's ALL BUSH'S Fault!
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle