MinnPost, a non-profit, news site, has opened its most popular blog to micro-sponsors, who pay give $10-$25 donations to the channel.
According to Nieman, 127 people have donated a total of $2,575 since the offer was launched a week ago.
“What made newspapers viable for so long was the fact that they had two products/businesses that were largely unrelated but bundled together,” writes Dave Chase, owner of SunValleyonline.com, a local internet venture.
That’s the news business – monetised by display ads; and the classifieds business – monetised by classified ads, he says.
Chase looks at ways that local media could recognise dual business models.
Also on the topic – check out an article on our main site, the thoughts of the former multimedia manager of a large regional newspaper group in the UK:
‘Ex-regional multimedia manager: “We don’t want to buy a newspaper in the evening anymore”‘
The latest is from MediaGuardian: ‘Google to host ads from European agencies (March 17)’: “Google is ramping up its efforts to make money from its controversial Google News service by striking deals with eight European news agencies, and launching a contextual ad service to display adverts around their stories.”
Here’s a round-up of the recent coverage of advertising on Google News and other parts of Google, and its impact for journalism. Please do add any good links you’ve spotted in the comments below, or Tweet us via @journalismnews and we’ll include them in the list.
- Official Google Blog: ‘Ads in Google News searches’ (February 25): “Last November, we announced plans to begin experimenting with ads on a number of Google properties, including news query refinements within Google search. Today, we’re continuing a similar experience for users by introducing ads on Google News search-results pages in the US.”
- Journalism.co.uk: ‘Copiepresse would sue again if Google introduced advertising to Belgian news channel’ (March 4): “The secretary-general of Belgian newspaper copyright group, Copiepresse, said that if advertising on Google News was introduced in Belgium, as is happening in the US, the group would fight another case.”
- Official Google Blog: ‘Making ads more interesting’ (March 11): “We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching ‘interest-based’ advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube.”
- EditorsWeblog: Google News and newspaper publishers: enemies or allies? (March 11): “The internet has changed the way that people read newspapers in many ways: not least because news aggregators such as Google News have helped to bring readers away from the habit of focussing their news reading on just one paper’s website.”
- WashingtonPost: ‘Google to deliver more interesting ads’: (March 16): The piece asks: “So you tell me: How obnoxious would an ad have to be for you to stop visiting the site hosting it? What if it was a site that you wanted to see stay in business?”
- The Register: ‘Google clones search ad machine on photo sharer’ (March 16): “Google is now showing text ads when users search for public pics on its Picasa photo-sharing site.”
- EditorsWeblog: ‘Google News to host more news agency content with ads alongside’ (March 17) “Google News announced that it has struck a deal with eight European news agencies to host their content and to display advertisements around their stories.”
“27 publishers with a reach of about 109 million unique visitors per month – that’s 66 per cent of the total US internet audience – have agreed to try one of three new online ad formats sometime before July,” reports the Silicon Alley Insider.
This post gives examples of what one of those advertising formats could look like and the full list of publishers. Full post at this link…
What would an ad exec do if he took over a newspaper organisation? Tear up the advertising model, so says Jonathan MacDonald from OgilvyOne to today’s Digital News Affairs 2009 (DNA) audience.
“Take the Profit & Loss (P&L) plan that is based on the next five years of traditional advertising and tear it up,” says MacDonald.
Publishers have to accept the fact that there are six times as many people reading their content that they’ll never know about or be able to monetise, he added.
“These readers are also passing this content to other people you won’t know about or be able to monetise.”
Content producers and news organisations have to consider:
“You need to rethink your business model – create an agnostic layer of aggregate inventory between partners in your space and become a facilitator for advertisers,” he added.
Diane Charton, writing for MarketingWeb, paints a pretty picture for worldwide online advertising spend in 2009. She cites a ZenithOptimedia forecast from December 2008 to support her case, partly focused on the situation in South Africa.
Online companies in Britain are being called upon to sign a new code for behavioural targeting in advertising, led by the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).
Using Twitter to cover the Oscars with its audience, Glam found a sponsor for its Twitter widget – embedded below its GlamTV broadcast.
The title will continue to experiment with this model, but is not restricted to Twitter – a range of third-party apps and sites are being considered as part of a new feature for user-generated content, gWire.
As part of continued experimentation with new ad formats, US users of Google News will now be presented with ads in their search results.
Microsoft has created the Publisher Leadership Council – a collection of digital publishers – to help develop its new advertising platform for online.