March 30th, 2009, No Comments »
Mathew twittered about this iMedia Connection article by Robert Moskowitz the other day, and it piqued my interest. Its thesis is that because offline advertising costs a lot more than online advertising, it must be much more valuable:
According to Michael Hirschorn, for example, writing in the January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine, “Already, most readers of The [New York] Times are consuming it online. The Web site… boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October… The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping….
“The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers … are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, [and] are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who… could support only 20 percent of the [newspaper's] current staff…”
The article goes on to cite a bunch of ad executives as they opine on the differences between the two landscapes. There’s a great deal of hedging of bets, lingo and hand-wringing about the state of the industry. What’s illustrative, I think, is how little discussion there is of actual measurement.
Measure, Measure, Measure
We aggressively discourage our clients from spending a cent on advertising that they can’t measure. And I’m not talking about the invented metrics of the ad industry–”brand impression” is a synonym for “might have vaguely glanced at your billboard on the subway”–but actually measuring actions that potential customers may take. This limits their offline advertising options, but if you can’t measure outcomes, why throw money at it?
I was holding forth on this measuring theme at a little brainstorming session for Hollyhock, an extraordinary retreat centre on Cortes Island. It’s the answer I always give to busy marketers who say “I’m already swamped, how do I do this social media marketing stuff, too?” I tell them that they don’t necessarily have to. They just need to analyze the value of all the work they do, add social media stuff to the mix, and see what’s most valuable. If your billboards outperform your Twitter account, then stick with what works.
Speaking of advertising, I read a couple interesting posts on TechCrunch over the past couple of days about the state of the industry. First, it’s shocking to see how rapidly the newspaper industry’s revenue base has declined. The rate of newspaper advertising decline has been accelerating for the last six quarters. Likewise, that article points out that online advertising has declined slightly over 2008.
On the other hand, today’s TechCrunch article is more upbeat. It cites Interactive Advertising Bureau numbers that claim that, after a dip mid-year, online advertising numbers are recovering.
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October 29th, 2008, 9 Comments »
In a comment earlier today, Duncan referenced a New York Times article about recent cuts and closures in the publishing industry. It includes a quote from big-brained thinker Clay Shirky:
Historically, people took an interest in the daily paper about the time they bought a home. Now they are checking their BlackBerrys for alerts about mortgage rates.
“The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem,” said Clay Shirky, the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones.”
I know very little about the auto industry. What sort of products–that is, what kind of vehicles–do the auto industry’s new customers want?
9 Comments »
July 26th, 2008, 7 Comments »
On Twitter, Jeremy linked to this well-written New York Times article by Kara Jesella about BlogHer. Entitled “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling” it emphasizes BlogHer’s strong community ties, appeal to marketers and and an imbalance of power and income among genders in the blogosphere:
These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained. And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.
I think Ms. Jesella misses a key point in making her case. The blogosphere is still pretty geeky (arguably, 8 of the 10 most popular blogs according to Technorati focus on technology), and interest in technology has tradition skewed toward men. So, you’d expect that the most money and fame would follow that topic area. I don’t mention this to refute her thesis, merely to suggest an important cause or symptom that she ignored (or had edited out of her piece).
I did, however, want to highlight the fact that this piece appeared in the ‘Fashion & Style’ section of the New York Times. If ever there was a way to reinforce the notion of BlogHer as a female ghetto, it’s to feature it alongside articles on ‘Dining & Wine’, ‘Home & Garden’ and ‘Weddings/Celebrations’.
7 Comments »
June 23rd, 2008, 6 Comments »
From the New York Times, things are going from bad to worse for the purveyors of ink-stained tree bark:
For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.
Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.
The article goes on to explain that the San Francisco Chronicle is losing US $1 million every week. Every week. The primary cause of this downturn is “the Internet’s siphoning away of ad revenue”.
Would I care if the physical version of every newspaper in the world went away? Nope. The real question is whether newspapers can work out a way to survive as Internet-only entities. I’d really like to see a balance sheet for, say, the Vancouver Sun, to understand how much they’d save (and how much ad revenue they’d lose) if they moved to an exclusively online format. That’s certainly not viable today, but it looks like the writing is on the wall.
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April 21st, 2008, 2 Comments »
I don’t know why, but I really enjoy stories of people obsessively exploring minor details of history. The latest example is a series of three lengthy blog posts by director Errol Morris discussing his research into the order in which two photographs were taken.
They’re two photos by Roger Fenton, taken of a barren road during the Crimean War. One features a stack of cannonballs by the side of the road. In the other, the cannonballs are spread across the road. Morris becomes a bit compulsive in determining which photo was taken first.
And speaking of compulsive, check out Morris’s footnote at the end of the third essay:
The diagrams of rock movement and cannonball position in OFF and ON have been provided by Dennis Purcell. There are now more than 1,000 responses to Parts One and Two of this essay. At first, I thought: I don’t think I will respond to any of them. Then I thought: maybe I’ll respond to one or two. And then came the epiphany: I should respond to all 1,000+ – in detail. Wish me luck.
Good luck, Errol.
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October 10th, 2007, 12 Comments »
Discussing a blog post on the Guardian’s site, Robert writes about referral traffic–the number of visitors he receives when he’s referenced on other sites:
Every time I get on TechMeme I get 500 to 3,000 visits. That matches what the Guardian and what Nick Carr are seeing.
But, truth is not many sites out there do any better. Yeah, when I get on Digg I get 20,000. When I got on the front page of the BBC a couple times in the past month I got 5,000 each time. But Valleywag? I get 100 to 1,000 visits…
Dave Winer? A few thousand per link, but sometimes only a few hundred. Wired? A few thousand. Stumbleupon? I got tens of thousands once, but not lately. Twitter? A few hundred, even when dozens of people put my link up.
Those numbers sound about right to me. Robert’s cult of personality probably amplifies things a bit–I’ve never seen more than 15,000 visitors from a single Digg post on this or any of my clients’ sites.
My best example of disappointing referral numbers is the recent link to this site in the New York Times. The New York Times! The Grey Lady! They get 450,000 visitors a day. Surely that would result in a windfall of referral traffic, right?
Not so much:
The Times was the #8 referrer to this site for July, 2007. I mean, I love each and every one of you 760 Times readers, but you didn’t bring enough friends.
Now obviously, context matters. The Times link was just in the sidebar of an article, among sundry other links. Plus it helps if there’s something really enticing at the other of the link.
Which brings me to a related truth: offline media hits rarely result in radically increased online visitors. We emphasize this to our clients over and over. There’s plenty of value in doing traditional, offline media relations, but in my experience, an immediate influx of visitors isn’t one of them.
12 Comments »
October 4th, 2007, 3 Comments »
I just watched David Pogue’s charming 4-minute review of the $100 laptop (which, as it turns out, costs $188 each). It’s charming because he really seems genuinely excited about the product, and eschews his usual unfunny schtick.
He does reference ’snarky bloggers’ who apparently aren’t digging the laptop. What? Bloggers snarky? I can’t imagine. I think it’s cool–a little piece of nerd history, really–and want one when they go on sale in November.
They’ve got a brilliant sales strategy which you’ve probably already heard of: Americans have to spend US $400 (just CAN $399.04!), buying two computers. They keep one laptop, and another gets sent to a classroom or child in a developing country.
If I can be a snarky blogger for a second, it’d be great if the New York Times let me embed Pogue’s video in this post, instead of just linking to it. You know, like the rest of the planet.
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July 7th, 2007, 4 Comments »
If you’ve come here from this New York Times article, you’re probably looking for my short review of Sicko (The Times only provided a link to my home page in the main body of of the article).
Otherwise, feel free to look around. You may want to browse the categories in the left sidebar below my little link blog. If you like what you see (and you know what I’m talking about), consider subscribing to my RSS feed.
If you don’t know what RSS feeds are, and want to learn, watch this handy three and a half minute video.
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June 29th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Unless you’ve been living on the backside of one of Neptune’s moons for the past couple of years, you know that video is big on the web. There’s a major trend toward transforming text-only sites to text plus video and audio sites.
To change gears for a moment, back in 2005, I wrote this about podcasting:
you need the talent. Everyone learns writing in school, so the barrier to entry is pretty small. However, nobody (or very few) learns how to be a radio broadcaster. Like it or not, that takes ability, practice and, ideally, a great voice. I try not to read poorly-written blogs, and I don’t have the patience for dead air and mumbling…
Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to watch several short videos, hosted by big formerly-text-only sites and presented by writers. They are:
Take a couple of minutes and watch those. I’ll wait.
A. O. Scott is rigidly reading off cue cards through the bottom part of his bifocals. Emily Yoffe looks stiffer than her headboard (note the incredibly awkward nod to her dog). Walt Mossberg prefaces every sentence with ‘uh’.
These folks are all good writers who I admire. The operative word there is ‘writers’.
Presenting is a Craft All Its Own
Much as we like to take cheap shots at news anchors, being an effective presenter takes skill and practice. There’s an art, I suspect, to appearing natural on camera. People go to school for this, and usually spend years honing their craft before we ever see them on national television or radio.
Most writers aren’t presenters. They don’t know how to do it. They’re just victims of online content trends, and have been thrown to the video wolves by their managers, editors and publishers.
It’s odd that Slate would make this mistake. For the past two years, they had the wonderful Andy Bowers (who has a background in radio) reading articles written by other writers on their podcast. June Thomas usually does the Explainer podcasts (a podcast I skipped today because writer Michelle Tsai recorded the last two), but she never wrote them. Yet, when Slate went to video, they’ve thrown out the middleman and turned the camera on the poor writers themselves.
Back in 2005, I also wrote:
This issue is only going to be multiplied when video blogs, or vlogging becomes popular. Amanda Congdon is charming, smart, cute and has a great formula, but she’s not a professional newscaster. Maybe that doesn’t matter to you or me, but it matters to average humans who are accustomed to watching professionals.
I was wrong about that. Amanda Congdon is a great presenter. She’s natural, charming and charismatic on camera.
These media giants ought to hire people like Amanda to present their content. Let the writers write.
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September 5th, 2002, No Comments »
The New York Times maintains a page describing which stories their users most often emailed (you may have to register/log in to see this page–hey, it’s free, and I’ve been impressed by the NY Times’s site). This sort of meta-information is fascinating to me, and one of the unique aspects of publishing information on the Internet. Another good example of this is over at AltaVista, which shows what people are currently searching for. This a powerful part of search engine development, as companies build up a database that maps search terms to the results that people search for. A mere two minutes on the latter site provided these gems that people had recently searched the Web for:
- mad scientist network
- gatling gun history
- hydroquinone
- vintage fruit labels
- dancing bush
- laser sighted pool cue
Also good are images that people search for:
- “area 51″ OR “groom lake”agamemnon
- galapagos birds
- ethan hawke
- rustic decorations
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