Category Archives: Advertising

Advertising revenues keep USA Today iPad app free to users

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USA Today’s iPad app will remain free for now due to strong advertising interest behind the product, according to a report by the Editor&Publisher.

Brands including Coca Cola, Barnes and Noble, Capital One and Chrysler have all signed up to sponsor the app, creating enough revenue to support it in the near future.

As a result, the publication has scrapped plans to charge users a subscription fee, with promises that the app will remain free “at least through the third quarter”.

According to the report, the USA Today iPhone news and travel apps have also proved popular, with download figures of more than five million in the 18 months since their launch.

See the full post here…

US advertising body publishes guidelines for online ads

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has produced a set of guidelines to help advertisers and publishers “demystify” online advertising.

The IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines aim to define a set of standard terms and processes for use by ad networks and exchanges.

The US-based body has called the current online advertising marketplace “complex and confusing.”

According to the IAB, networks and exchanges that volunteer to be certified against the guidelines will be “providing marketers and agencies with a standardized approach that is designed to make buying easier and to give increased control over where ads are placed”. In turn, marketers and agencies will benefit from “greater brand safety assurances that ads will not appear next to content that they decide is inappropriate”.

“For the first time, the US ad networks and ad exchanges market will be giving advertisers consistent and standardized information, serving to build greater marketplace trust,” says the IAB report.

Editors Weblog: US newspaper and TV websites launch Craigslist-rival boocoo

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A group of US newspaper and broadcast TV news websites have launched boocoo.com – a listings and auction site to compete against eBay and Craigslist.

As well as charging for listings, the revenue plan for the site is to licence listings by zip code to individual newspaper publishers.

Tony Marsella, president of boocoo’s parent company Ranger Data Technologies, tells the Editors Weblog:

On Craigslist the model is “put the ad up and people work the price down”, whereas our model is just the opposite.  Put the item on and bid the price up.  We will also not allow “adult” materials, services, etc.  Our standard will be the high standards that newspapers have maintained for years in their local markets.  We will in the proper fashion make all of these points in our ad campaigns.

eBay is extremely vulnerable in the area of general merchandise auctions.  They have moved far from those people as they continue to move toward big box retail and fixed price selling.  Items that are difficult to ship, (lawn mowers, large furniture, snow blowers, etc) work very well in a market that has a local emphasis. Local focus also gives consumers the added advantage of shopping for services.

Full story at this link…

AdAge.com: New York Times planning new ‘testing’ site

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AdAge reports on a memo circulated at the New York Times, introducing plans for a new public beta ‘testing site’, where the newspaper will try out new features and apps before deciding whether to set them live on NYTimes.com.

The Times expects to introduce the site, to be called Beta620, in July or August. The “620” refers to the paper’s street address on Eighth Avenue in New York.

Full story at this link….

Advertising Age: Calls for Facebook privacy regulation could hit publishers

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A US senator has written to the country’s Federal Trade Commission asking for the development of guidelines for how individual’s information on Facebook can be used.

The letter from Senator Charles Schumer follows Facebook’s launch of its Open Social Graph Platform – a series of new tools and functionality for the social network, including deeper links with third-party sites. The network’s new “like” feature, for example, has already been put into use by numerous news sites, including the Washington Post.

The flap couldn’t come at a worse time for online advertising, facing the very real prospect that it will be regulated in the form of privacy legislation that would require publishers, networks or marketers to receive specific consent to use consumer data for a variety of purposes on the web.

(…) Of course, Facebook needs to default to openness because that’s where the service derives its viral nature. The more that is shared, the faster the Facebook web grows.

Full story at this link…

Hyperlocal ad trial spreads to Guardian Local’s Edinburgh and Cardiff sites

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As reported by Journalism.co.uk last week, the Guardian’s trial of hyperlocal advertising system Addiply has spread across all three of its recently launched local “beatblogs”. The system, which offers low cost adverts that can be sold on a weekly or monthly basis with different rates for different sized customers, went live on the Leeds site last Thursday before being introduced to the Cardiff and Edinburgh Guardian Local sites.

Publishers retain 90 per cent of the revenue earned from the ads, with the remaining 10 per cent split between Addiply and PayPal.

“One of the things Addiply is good for is for people to be able to promote their own community events and local services. It’s not designed or intended to bring in big name advertisers; it’s more for the smaller advertisers in the community or for people listing individual items for sale,” Sarah Hartley, Guardian Local launch editor, told Journalism.co.uk last week.

New Media Minute: ‘Hotspotting’ technology lets users click on videos

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A technology being developed for online video will allow users to find out more information on products and items featured by clicking on them in the footage.

The concept and technology has been discussed for some time, but according to the video below companies using it are now getting good click-through rates.

“Hotspotting” could provide interesting opportunities for advertisers – but could there be the potential for news organisations to link content in this way?

Full story at this link…

Talking Biz News: FT promotes Twitter as newspaper alternative in ads

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Good spot by Talking Biz News (via Martin Stabe) – a new ad for the Financial Times directs readers towards the title’s Twitter feeds.

Hear first and act fast with Twitter feeds.

Get the news you need as it happens, with FT Twitter feeds. Delivering breaking FT news, features, blogs and multimedia, they’ll alert you to the developments that matter.

Image of ad at this link…

Sun runs explosive advert with Moscow terrorist bombings story

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This morning I was leafing through an old guide to subbing from 1968. There were a couple of pages in it stressing the importance of ensuring articles do not clash with adjacent adverts. Weight loss advert next to an anorexia story, cigarette advert next to a lung cancer report, that kind of thing.

Well, it seems that, 40 years on, not everyone is paying attention to their text books. Or their website. Not satisfied with putting images of a plane emerging from a ball of fire adjacent to a story about today’s terrorist bomb attack in Moscow, the Sun’s website made use of some nifty graphics to have plane and fireball emerge from the story itself, leaving behind a charred hole.

Although my book has an additional chapter on new forms of ‘electronic sub-editing’, it doesn’t cover this kind of thing in any detail. I checked. It is however called ‘The Simple Subs Book’, so it may, after all this time, still be ideally suited to some.

h/t currybetdotnet

Advertising Age: US newspapers cut 109,500 jobs in past five years

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Advertising Age’s article from earlier this week on the difficulties faced by media advertising staff making the transition from selling print space to going digital is worth a read – not least for the statistics it offers on media job cuts in the US:

Between January 2005 and January 2010, newspapers eliminated 109,500 jobs and magazines shed 19,400, according to an Ad Age DataCenter analysis of Bureau of Labour Statistics’ jobs data. During that same period, jobs at internet media companies, portals and search engines grew by 18,300.

Full story at this link…