Newspapers Finally Realizing That Online Ads Shouldn't Be Ignored
from the it's-a-little-late-for-this-epiphany dept
With the Christian Science Monitor going online only, many newspapers are again re-evaluating their online strategies. When you listen to newspaper execs, you usually hear the same line over and over again: even though online page views are up and paper sales are down, the amount of ad revenue coming from online is still tiny compared to print. That's definitely true, but a large part of the problem is that many newspapers don't really concentrate on online sales -- especially among the best targets: local businesses. Many small businesses advertise online, but because newspapers don't court them, they go elsewhere, such as directly to Google.The NY Times is writing about how at least some newspapers are realizing that, rather than focusing their sales efforts almost entirely on print ads, they need to start focusing on selling online ads as well. Amazingly, many of these newspapers have almost all of their sales commissions for print ads. In those cases, is it any wonder that they don't get more online ads? In fact, many ad sales folks simply "throw in" some online ads as a bonus to get companies to sign the dotted line for print ads, which is exactly the wrong incentive needed if you're trying to grow the online ad business.
What's really amazing is that newspapers are just now catching on to this. They're only about five years too late. The local businesses, which would have been interested five years ago, have figured out that there are other options for online advertising from Google to "local" sites like Yelp and CitySearch.
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Filed Under: newspapers, online ads, strategy
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Online Newspaper Classified Ads
So it may be too little too late for them, to compete with search engine paid ads, or even online yellow pages ads, which I've been using for years. Especially since most newspaper web sites are harder to use & navigate, than most of their advertising competitors.
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Re: Online Newspaper Classified Ads
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At last! (But what about social media?)
They need to bear in mind that the cost of an online ad is vastly less than a print ad, so the net revenues are much greater.
An ongoing challenge will be to generate ad revenues when overall spend is declining and when users are generally turning off to online ads. Maybe they are too far behind the curve already, as @Computer Bob suggests.
Perhaps their investment should include social media strategy as well.
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Re: At last! (But what about social media?)
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ads?
actually my town just set up a webpage to host ads from local businesses. and it's not just our own craigslist page either. but the town's so small, if i want to see the weekly specials, i'll just walk down the street. all the businesses that matter are on the main drag, and that's only about 30 minutes on foot.
oh the parting shot is even better. where do they advertise this shiny new website? you guessed it. in the daily paper's dead tree edition.
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Business view
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Online Classified Ads, Alternative Revenues For Small Business Owner.
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