Category Archives: Advertising

Google attempting to woo publishers with advertising plans

In a charm offensive, Google has been posting a series of reports on the future of display advertising. Yesterday’s entry focused on the search company’s efforts to help publishers make money online.

We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 per cent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

Part of the challenge is reducing the administrative costs of display advertising for publishers, says Google, as these currently account for 28 cents of every dollar spent on these ads.

Full post on the Official Google Blog at this link…

Should bloggers pay business tax?

Should bloggers making money from their site have to pay a business tax?

It’s a question that’s been doing the rounds in the past week, following what commentators have been labelling a “tax amnesty” in Philadelphia. Thousands of online writers have reportedly received letters from local government reminding them that if they make money from their site, they must pay up.

Any bloggers earning revenues from their online publishing – through display advertising or services such as Google Adsense – will be asked to pay $300 (or $50 a year) for a Business Privilege Licence. Alternatively, they can remove any advertising or other money-making means and have their blog classified as a hobby.

The renewed efforts by the city council to ensure everyone eligible to pay does so have sparked wide debate and commentary across the web, from the Washington Post and Reuters to technology news site Mashable, who say the fee will only have limited impact. Казино игрите имат много последователи по целия свят. Ако вие сте любител на слот игрите, покер, рулетки, зарове, блекджек, можете да изберете българското казино PalmsBet. В казиното на Палмсбет ще намерите голямо разнообразие от казино игри, като например над 300 слот игри, както и голям избор от игри на маса, видео покер и други.

The Atlantic Wire offers a neat summary of the main arguments, from Technorati’s post arguing that a $300 tax is “outrageous” for bloggers who on the whole make little returns, to New York Magazine’s suggestion that bloggers should shun advertising services, rather than hand over the small profits they make.

The difficult reality of open council data and journalism

Andy Mabbett has an interesting post on his pigsonthewing blog about the difficulties surrounding open data for councils and subsequent media interpretations and reports.

Giving an example of grant funding and council spending, where conditions may involve money being spent on certain forms of advertising, he adds that often this is misinterpreted by some members of the press, unaware of the attached conditions or other related spending on important projects involved. As a result, the headlines focus on what appears to be unusual spending.

As a supporter of the principles of open public data, he says a solution needs to be found.

What can council’s do to prevent this scenario? Annotate every spend item in their published data? Surely impractical. List such items separately? I don’t know (and don’t get me wrong, I’m an open-data advocate; and this is a relatively minor matter, which shouldn’t stop such data from being published), but do I hope somebody has an answer.

See his full post here…

Editors Weblog: Google CEO on telling people what to do

Continuing the debate over how Google and online news publishers can, or can’t, work together in the future, Editors Weblog has a short article based on an interview between Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and the Wall Street Journal.

The overall message is that the future of digital news will lie in using advertising to “tell people what they should be doing” and capitalising on the movement of news searches to other platforms – namely mobile.

Once again, Schmidt promises newspapers a profitable place in Google’s future. “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetisation, and the only way I know of to increase monetisation is through targeted ads. That’s our business.” Newspapers have always answered questions that people were not aware they had to ask, and they simply have to continue doing this to fit in.

OJR: Revenue is the only metric that truly matters

Revenue: how to build it, how to maintain it and how to increase it – this is the challenge facing every online news outlet owner or director looking to secure a future in the industry.

But according to a post by Robert Niles on the Online Journalism Review, some sites are getting caught up in the latest ‘metrics’ craze based on the perceived successes of others, whether it be page-views, unique visitors or time spent by browsers on the site. But none of this means anything if it doesn’t make you money, he says.

I’ve seen sites post phenomenal numbers for each of those categories, and fail. There’s one metric, and only one, that truly matters in determining your websites’s commercial success. Revenue.

Your visitors can spend hours per month on your website, but a huge “time on site” value by itself won’t entitle you to a dime (see Twitter). I suspect that one reason why various web metrics fall into and out of favor over the years is that managers talk up or down those metrics based on their website’s individual performance. Someone notices that people are spending more time, on average, on the website, then he or she gets on a panel at a news industry conference and – boom – “time on site” becomes the metric everyone needs to consider.

He advises instead that organisations do not look at these categories in isolation, instead with an eye to how they can be used to boost revenues through advertising and other means.

Of course, you need data in order to analyze it. That’s why smart news publishers ought to be experimenting, constantly. Try new topics, new writing forms, new functionality – then create new tracking channels to monitor those experiments, to build a database of information that can help guide you in making smarter decisions about the growth and maintenance of your website.

See his full post here…

Ads 10 times more expensive on iPad apps than web, suggests ad group VP

Some interesting stats on the use of iPad apps for Conde Nast titles via an article on Advertising Age. Users are spending an average of more than two hours with its Vanity Fair and GQ apps – double the average time spent with print magazines, according to the metrics.

But perhaps more significant are the estimations made by Adam Kasper, senior vice president of digital innovation for global advertising group Havas Digital, regarding advertising rates on iPad apps. Kaspers suggests that an ad on an iPad app will cost $100 per thousand views – three times as much as a video ad on Hulu and 10 times as much as a banner ad on NYTimes.com.

Audience statistics for iPad applications are still very new and more metrics are needed – but are initial pricing points for advertisers too high for this new outlet?

New Scientist peeks into people’s buying brains with ‘neuromarketing’

Certainly among the more forward thinking magazines in terms of content, New Scientist has this week boldly gone where no magazine (they “suspect”) has gone before: neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing is a from of marketing that uses brain-imaging technology to “peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want”.

You may find that sinister. What right does anyone have to try to read your mind? Or perhaps you are sceptical and consider the idea laughable. But neuromarketing, once dismissed as a fad, is becoming part and parcel of modern consumer society. So we decided to take a good look at it – and try it out ourselves.

A group of New Scientist readers – 19 men, to be precise – were connected to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine shown various cover designs for the latest edition, after which NeuroFocus Europe, the company undertaking the tests, looked for “specific EEG patterns which the company believes betray whether or not a person will buy a product”.

The winning design is now on the newsstands. As for how it will sell, that is another test entirely.

See the full post at this link…

You can also take part in the magazine’s “Rate the Cover” survey at this link.

New Italian advertising campaign encouraging people to buy print

The Italian Federation of Newspaper Editors (FIEG) has launched an advertising campaign to encourage people to read the country’s newspapers and magazines, according to the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.

The ads, which have started to appear in the press and the radio, remind potential readers that dailies “are the best way not to not remain speechless.” The campaign aims to explain that reading, “makes the difference in terms of broadening and deepening one’s knowledge, discovering new things, and building critical consciousness,” the FIEG stated in a press release.

Just last week Journalism.co.uk reported on a petition by Italian online journalists and bloggers against the country’s proposed Wiretapping Bill, which included a clause that they felt would “kill” the blogging community.

See the full post here…

French newspapers in cahoots over pay system to rival Google

A collection of French newspapers have together created an ‘online virtual newsstand’ where users can pay to view their content, according to a report by Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.

The platform, which will be launched in September, was reportedly announced by France’s National Daily Press Union as an alternative to Google News, after negotiations with the search giant over ad revenue failed.

The maneuver comes months after Google announced its intention to include advertising on its news aggregation system. French newspapers had tried to negotiate with Google to receive a percentage of the ads revenues. But, as their request was denied, they have decided to launch a paid service of their own.

According to the post, the content’s price will be fixed by daily fees or subscription packages, with options to pay for individual articles or complete publications. News organisations signed up so far include Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, Les Echos, Le Parisien and L’Equipe, all of whom are thought to be in talks with Orange and Microsoft Bing about building the platform.

Read the full post here…

NYT second-quarter operating profit more than twice 2009 figure

The New York Times Company has reported operating profit for the second-quarter rose to $60.8 million from $23.5 million in the same period the previous year, excluding some special items. The figures show the first increase in quarterly revenue since 2007, as a growth in digital advertising halted decline in print advertising.

The company NYT statement also showed that second-quarter revenue had risen to $589.6 million from $584.5 million one year ago. However, net income dropped to $32 million from $39 million year-over-year.

Digital advertising revenue rose 21 per cent, making up 26 per cent of total ad revenue compared to 22 per cent the year before. They also reported that print advertising has improved, from a 12.3 per cent downturn in the previous quarter, to six per cent.

The company also gained a 3.2 per cent rise in circulation revenue, put down to higher subscription and newsstand prices for both the Times and the Globe.