Ethanz: Are print ads crazy?
Ethan, in a long, careful, and superb speculative piece, wonders if newspapers have been propped up by the fact that advertisers couldn’t tell just how over-priced the ad space in newspapers has been:
Basically, there are two ways to explain the disparity in online and offline ad cost. One is to argue that paper ads are, for some combination of reasons, ten to a hundred times more effective than online ads. The other is to argue that advertisers are better at pricing online ads than offline ads.
So, if we lose the irrational pricing of offline ads, how are newspapers going to support expensive, investigative journalism? Or, as Ethan puts it.
What if the model that brought us Upton Sinclair and Woodward and Bernstein – impression advertising – can’t bring us into the future because it’s based on uneven distribution of information and bad math?
And Ethan’s answer is: We don’t know yet.
Great, provocative piece.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Thanks for the link to this.
Down here in Connecticut, as our municipalities and state legislature face budget deficits, another source of income for local papers may be in jeopardy.
Many places have regulations about notices about public hearings having to be printed in local papers.
Yet this is an expense that people are calling for doing away with. Municipalities are arguing that printing notices about public hearings online are more cost effective and more effective in getting the message out.
So, yet another revenue stream for the print media may be in danger.
[...] by Happypixel on January 17th, 2009 at 08:27pm Joho the Blog » Ethanz: Are print ads crazy? Ethanz: Are print ads crazy? Posted on January 16th, 2009. Ethan, in a long, careful, and superb [...]
It could well be another nail in the dead tree sheet biz coffin. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, most dailies and weeklies abandoned ‘investigative journalism long ago and uses sensational bleeding lead hack pieces, infotainment and aditorials as the content mainstay.
So they are clobbered on both ends, their content has been supplanted by better work on the web and their revenue model is starting to look like mumbo jumbo.
TV and Radio are in the same fix.