This is the final post in my series about the transition of print newspapers to online news. In print news, distribution costs led to scarcity, allowing publishers to create an audience and a marketplace for advertisers. Online distribution costs are nearly free, producing massive competition for audience engagement and a disaggregation of the newspaper business model. In addition to new competition for audience engagement from social networking and games, news publishers have to increasingly compete with themselves – the total disaggregation of the newspaper business model. This becomes clear when examining the articles read by an online-news audience. Rather than purchase multiple newspapers, print news readers consume local, regional, national, and international news from one paper. In online news however, […]
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Why Online News Revenue will Never Equal Newspaper Revenue
A publisher’s ability to monetize the news ONLINE is different than their ability to monetize the newsPAPER. According to the Newspaper Association of America data at naa.org, the average user spent 1 minute and 12 seconds with online news last month. That is 0.6% of the 3 hours and 25 minutes an average user spent online in 2010 according to eMarketer. And when compared to average time spent with the print newspaper, online news engagement is 4.1% of the reported 29 minutes per day of Nielsen Media Research Study of 2006. Of course if lost engagement were not bad enough, the Web has both commoditized advertising rates and set an anchor subscription price of free, further crunching the revenue stream […]
SEO is for Suckers
Richard Tofel’s post this week about how digital news will be better when publishers move beyond SEO was an interesting op-ed, but most of the debate seemed philosophical as opposed to factual. Our advice to publishers: SEO is for audience development, not revenue (that could have been a softer title for this post). Here are the facts behind that recommendation. Fact: Loyal audience members do not use search as a means to engage with publishers. The striking difference between fans and fly-bys is the percentage of visits that are based on direct vs. search. Upwards of 95 percent of fly-by visits are generated from a search whereas upwards of 70 percent of fan visits are direct. Of the fan visits […]
What about an Adwall?
In the pursuit of earnings, publishers have done two things - intensified SEO efforts, which creates fly-by ad revenue and established paywalls, which create fan subscription revenue. Remember these definitions: Fly-by – Someone who visits once. Occasional – Visitor to the site two to three times per month. Regular – Visitor to the site one to two times per week. Fan – Visitor to the site more than two times per week. Some fans are willing to subscribe through a paywall, and fly-bys are commodity impression to be bought and sold through exchanges, but what about the other 15-25 percent of the audience? The barbell focus on fans and fly-bys for revenue optimization overlooks a significant untapped opportunity in between […]
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