I finally got around to watching CBS Sunday Morning today, and enjoyed their piece on the downfall of newspapers. However, they glossed over the same point I’ve heard time and time again:
Tierney is facing the same dilemma every paper is: while he could save a fortune becoming Web-only, readers don’t pay for it and advertisers won’t pay nearly what they do for a print ad.
This honestly baffles me. With an online ad, you get exposure to more eyes, you have better tracking of success (by click-throughs), and have almost infinite possibilities of what your ad can look like or do. I never have figured out why newspaper companies don’t charge a premium for online ads, or have not started offering the same type of assistance for ad creation that they do for print. On the flipside, I’m not sure why Google (who has been extraordinarly successful in this area) hasn’t approached newspapers to offer help in capitalizing on their readers. With a service like Google news, this would really be in their best interest.
Perhaps when the economy picks up newspapers need to take the bold step of increasing online ad rates–their survival absolutely depends on it!
Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, has some interesting things to say about online advertising:
Nielsen also unpacks the problem of users’ “banner blindness” and the ethics of online advertising. Quite interesting stuff.