Digital Opens Door to Ads August 13, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentNEW YORK Historically, TV and print news outlets have offered limited opportunities for advertisers, at least compared to their entertainment brethren. Recently, however, companies including The New York Times Media Group, the BBC, CNN and MSNBC.com have come up with some innovative digital options.
Shoba Purushothaman, CEO and co-founder of The Newsmarket, a Web-based video marketing and distribution platform, said it’s encouraging that the news industry is recognizing it can’t simply take traditional ad models and apply them to digital platforms. “It’s not about slapping it on the Web and saying it’s going to work,” said Purushothaman.
That point is not lost on The New York Times Media Group, which late last month partnered with business social-networking site LinkedIn. In the deal, LinkedIn members who read the business and technology sections on NYTimes.com will automatically have articles related to their professional interest set up for them on the site. (This is made possible by a cookie on LinkedIn.)
Denise Warren, svp and chief advertising officer for The New York Times Media Group, said the agreement allows the organization to tap into “executive decision makers.”
Advertisers will receive targeted information based on profile data — e.g., a person’s industry, job, gender and geography-gathered by the NYT Media Group. Sales reps will help advertisers choose the appropriate platforms — including mobile, video and blogs — for ads ranging from banners to leaderboards.
Last year, for the first time, BBC.com — the international Web site for the BBC (outside of the U.K.) — began selling advertising globally. In April, a multiplatform sales force was launched in the U.S. to sell advertising across BBC.com, BBC America, BBCAmerica.com, BBC World News and BBCworldnews.com. (Advertising on BBC America and its Web site had been sold by Discovery Communications.) Two ad units are available, both offering video capability.
Currently, when users in all markets go to BBC.com, they’re routed to bbc.co.uk.
But the Web site is launching a U.S. edition in the second half of 2009 that will cater to U.S. appetites, according to Mark Gall, svp of advertising sales for BBC America and BBC.com.
CNN “turned a corner” when it struck a partnership in June 2007 with Google’s YouTube to present the network’s presidential debate coverage, according to Greg D’Alba, evp and COO of CNN ad sales. Starting with the 2004 elections, CNN had made a concerted effort to attract election-coverage sponsors with packages that offered a variety of platforms. In 2004, only four jumped on. Now the network has 12 sponsors, including AT&T, Cisco Systems, Exxon Mobil and Hyundai.
The perception is growing that CNN’s product is for a range of demographics, not just “the gray-haired gentleman with a huge portfolio of wealth getting ready to retire,” said D’Alba. Roughly six additional sponsors have inked election coverage packages, he added, though he declined to name them as those advertising flights have not yet begun.
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NEWSPAPERS have lost the lead in local online advertising for the first time December 18, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentLocal Papers’ Web Scramble
To Internet Players,
Forcing New Steps
December 18, 2007; Page B2
With Web companies now beginning to dominate the market for local ads online, newspaper publishers are scrambling to change the way they sell ads, hiring sales teams that specialize in the digital market and creating new editorial packages to sell. But it may be a case of too little, too late. McClatchy, which publishes 31 daily newspapers around the country, is revamping its commission and incentive plans to better reward staff for online sales. Gannett now operates 50 mom-centric social-networking sites around the U.S. as part of a broader strategy to boost online revenue through what it calls “hyper-localized” sites. Other publishers, from Lee Enterprises to Media General, are taking steps of their own to jump-start sales of local online ads.
But time may be running out. Now, for the first time, pure-play Web companies have the biggest share of the local online-ad market. In 2007, Internet companies had a 43.7% share of the $8.5 billion local online-ad market, while newspaper companies had a 33.4% share, according to the media research firm Borrell Associates. Just three years ago, newspapers had 44.1% of the local online-ad market. (Directories such as the Yellow Pages have 10.1%, and local television outlets 9.3%.)
Local media companies, because they are based in the communities they serve, would seem to have an edge over Internet sellers when it comes to persuading the diner or corner hardware store to take out an ad. But they have largely failed to convert that advantage into sales. Instead of tailoring their sales to local businesses, many newspaper companies initially focused on selling ads to bigger advertisers who were already buying space in their print products.
While this strategy allowed them to quickly and cheaply create a customer base for their online ventures, it also limited their growth, because they weren’t expanding their customer base. Many newspapers also hurt themselves by simply plopping their papers online instead of creating new Web sites that offered advertisers something they couldn’t get in print. Meanwhile, Web companies such as Google and Local.com are growing rapidly because they have made it cheap and easy for local companies to take out ads.
“Newspapers are tied too closely to defending their print products and have not seen the Internet as an innovative and competitive tool to go out and compete,” says Gordon Borrell, chief executive of Borrell Associates.
Newspapers are feeling the biggest effects of this competition — local TV outlets and directory businesses aren’t experiencing the same degree of erosion in their core ad revenue. Analysts say newspapers may have maxed out on the amount of ads their existing print customers will buy online. They point to a slowing in the growth of online revenue across the newspaper industry. Online-ad revenues rose 21.1% in the third quarter to $773 million, down from 23% in the same quarter last year. The growth was as high as 39.7% in the first quarter of 2005. For newspapers, this slowing trend is taking place amid steep declines in the sales of print ads.
“All of the players, from Google to other local media companies, are putting more attention on going after the local dollar,” says Jack Williams, president of Gannett Digital, the Gannett unit responsible for developing online revenue.
On the plus side for newspapers, there is still a huge potential opportunity: Spending for local online ads is expected to grow 48% next year to $12.6 billion.
![[Graphic]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-AN289_ADVERT_20071217192044.gif)
On the flip side, newspapers have a massive challenge ahead: Online-ad revenue at newspapers made up only 7.1% of total revenue in the third quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Analysts say that ideally that figure should be in the low double digits, then hit the midteens in about five years as the drop in print revenues stabilizes.
Increasingly, newspapers are deciding to form deeper alliances with their main competition. More than a year ago, Yahoo struck a deal with about a half-dozen newspapers to create a national online-ad sales network. Since then, additional newspapers have signed up. In the coming year, papers in the alliance will start using Yahoo technology on their sites so that they can sell more-sophisticated ad offerings, such as behaviorally targeted ads. Separately, a group of 11 newspaper companies representing nearly 300 newspapers recently formed a partnership with real-estate site Zillow.com to tap into more real-estate classified ads.
Analysts say these kinds of steps will help but that none is a silver bullet. “Ultimately, it is going to take a lot of singles to really have a significant impact on the overall operations of the company,” says John Janedis, a publishing-industry analyst at Wachovia Securities
Mags Migrate From Building Content to Buying It July 31, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentMags Migrate From Building Content to Buying It
Hearst and Time Warner Grab Web-Only Properties to Bulk Up Online Stables
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Published: July 30, 2007
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — It took a little while, but most magazine and newspaper publishers eventually accepted the need to establish web versions of their cherished print properties; it was pixelate or risk perishing. But now those same publishers are demonstrating a growing belief that while those companion sites are necessary, they are not sufficient.
Hearst Corp. acknowledged as much last week when it revealed a deal to buy UGO Networks, a suite of men’s lifestyle sites about games, movies, TV, movies, music, sports, women and comic books — but little connection with established Hearst magazine brands such as Esquire or Seventeen. Condé Nast Publications has been busily building sites such as Flip.com, Lipstick.com and others with zero old-media roots. And who can forget Time Inc.’s online-only Office Pirates, both born and axed in 2006? It may have survived only six months, but its parent has promised to try again.
Part of the drive stems from the failures of many print brands to make much of themselves on the web. Hearst’s Esquire.com drew 247,000 unique visitors in June, according to ComScore Media Metrix; UGO sites got 11.2 million.
“A lot of companies are aware of the fact that big media brands have not successfully migrated online, or that there’s certainly a lack of them,” said Jonathan Simpson-Bint, president of Future US, publisher of magazines such as Guitar World, Pregnancy and PC Gamer. “So the feeling is we need these new brands.”
New players dominate
Even an established online player such as Time Warner’s AOL has found more success with gossip site TMZ than it ever did depending on Time Inc. brands such as People.com. TMZ drew more than 9.3 million unique visitors in June, up 99% from last June, ComScore said. People.com, now in Time Inc.’s control, got fewer than 6.1 million, up 29%.
Future US has a lot invested in magazine companions such as GuitarWorld.com, but it also just launched a brand at Gloob.TV, where editors present videos picked from the ocean of available clips. And that curated experience was supposed to be the main draw, but already visitors are making good use of another element: the ability to embed their own videos in the comment threads.
New digital brands can draw from those sorts of interests and influences of crowds — in a way that established names can’t. “A lot of the big successes online are successful at something that wasn’t their original goal,” Mr. Simpson-Bint said. “MySpace was built to be basically a network for bands. They didn’t really think that 20 million kids were going to go get their own home pages on there. If you put something out there and it’s exciting and malleable and connects with people, the audience will potentially take it in a different direction. You have to create the room for these things to take place. That’s possibly why established media brands have struggled online — because there’s automatically baggage.”
Not giving up
It’s not that anyone, including Future US, is giving up on digital companions for print properties. They remain the centerpieces of most online businesses run by traditional print operators, who view other acquisitions or launches as complementary.
“You take Seventeen.com and some of our teen magazines … it translates pretty well,” said Ken Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media. “UGO reaches an 18-to-34-year-old male demographic, which is often difficult to reach with traditional media properties.”
Established print brands have an opportunity to capitalize on their currency among advertisers and readers, said Eric Blankfein, senior VP-channel insights director at Horizon Media. “The approach to promoting the web versions of competing magazines is what’s key, not the fact that they haven’t been created from the ether,” Mr. Blankfein said.
But online brands’ central focus on digital and ability to offer interactive experiences, among other things, overpower the strength of magazines’ print brands and content, said Rishad Tobaccowala, president of the Denuo Group. And where eyeballs flock, advertisers tend to follow.
Buying blog cache
There are, of course, different ways to deploy a brand online. Complex magazine, where Complex.com is an important part of the brand footprint, has just formed partnerships with the independent blogs Nice Kicks, Nah Right, Bastardly and SlamXHype. Each deploys classic internet irreverence and subject expertise to attract and maintain its audience. Complex could have tried building similar blogs on its own site, but it didn’t see as much upside.
“When you have an opportunity to get in bed with and partner with people who are pure and organic as possible, especially in the trend marketplace, it’d be insane to reinvent the wheel,” said Rich Antoniello, publisher of Complex. “Also you can’t just decide, ‘We’re going to be pure and organic.’”
At Condé Nast and its CondéNet division, destination sites such as Epicurious.com are meant to be big ad plays while companion sites such as VanityFair.com are meant to enhance print readers’ relationships with each title.
‘Companions’
“You could try to build a really big site based on a brand,” said Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet. “We have just chosen to be very focused on having the sites be companions to the magazine. That means echoing the brand, supporting the brand, giving the person who’s really into that magazine more to do online. Which is very different from trying to make a big magazine site itself.”
The new brands do lend themselves to faster growth, Ms. Chubb added. “A brand like Epicurious, because it was a new brand, had elasticity to it that meant, from day one, that we could make it what we wanted, which was the No. 1 destination for food online. If you’re working with a pre-existing brand, a pre-existing corpus, it’s a different thing.”
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Los Angeles Times Has `One of Worst Quarters,' Publisher Says July 17, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentLos Angeles Times Has `One of Worst Quarters,’ Publisher Says
By Tim Mullaney and Michael Janofsky
July 14 (Bloomberg) — The Los Angeles Times had “one of the worst quarters we have ever experienced” as advertising fell and cash flow dropped 27 percent, the newspaper’s publisher said in a memo to employees.
Second-quarter sales slid 10 percent, Publisher David Hiller wrote yesterday. A slump in advertising pages overwhelmed gains in Web ads and newspaper supplements, he said.
The Times is the largest newspaper owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co., which has agreed to be bought in an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout led by investor Sam Zell and an employee stock ownership plan. Sales and cash flow declined at other Tribune newspapers as well, Hiller wrote.
“Results were similar across Tribune, but overall Tribune was worse than the industry,” Hiller said in the memo, which didn’t provide more specific financial details.
Tribune is set to report second-quarter results on July 25 before U.S. financial markets open. The company’s newspaper revenue fell 10 percent in May and 8.6 percent in April.
The decline will complicate efforts to complete the sale, said analyst Ed Atorino of Benchmark Co. in New York. The decline in cash flow was steeper than the 15 percent he had estimated.
“It’s going to cast a pall over the deal,” Atorino said in an interview. “The stock is going to go down.”
Hiller, in an interview yesterday, confirmed the contents of the memo. He disagreed with Atorino, saying he didn’t believe the results would interrupt the sale.
Negative Trends
“The current trends across the whole industry are in the negative range,” he added. “We’re hoping to do a variety of things to improve upon them. It remains to be seen how fast we can do it.”
The landscape for newspaper publishers has become “extremely competitive and dramatically changed from what it had been not so long ago, with an explosion of options and choices for readers and advertisers,” Hiller said.
In the memo, Hiller said the Los Angeles Times is considering selling ads on its front page, a move that has been made at newspapers including The Wall Street Journal.
“They are common at reputable papers across the U.S. and Europe,” wrote Hiller, who said the ads would “raise several million dollars in revenue.” He invited employees to comment on the idea and on other planned initiatives to boost sales.
Shares of Tribune, which also owns 23 television stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, rose 60 cents to $30.58 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They are little changed this year.
Tribune agreed to the $34-a-share buyout in April after the publisher and broadcaster’s largest shareholder, the Chandler family trusts, pushed for a sale. The company has scheduled an Aug. 21 shareholder vote on the plan.
Zell was named to Tribune’s board in May after investing $250 million in the company, also publisher of the namesake Chicago Tribune and Newsday in New York, as part of the transaction.
To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Mullaney in New York at tmullaney1@bloomberg.net ; Michael Janofsky in Los Angeles at mjanofsky@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: July 14, 2007 00:47 EDT
