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Friday, February 10, 2012
Cheryl Dell, Melanie Sill, are you listening?
by Jeff McCrory, published on February 11, 2009 at 10:46 PM
Storyline: Local Media
I have a simple suggestion for the Sacramento Bee. It's an experiment. It might not work, but since the ad revenues for newspapers are drying up faster than the lakes and reservoirs of our drought-ridden state it's time the Bee took a few chances.
Why doesn't the Bee try to sell ads on its Twitter page?
Now before the Bee did that it would have to promote its Twitter page. Currently, it has only 468 followers, about half as many followers as the Sacramento Press's Twitter page has. This fact is indicative of the Bee being at sea where new media is concerned.
Twitter works really well for aggregating the content of the Bee's online paper. I unsubscribed to its RSS feed in my Google Reader, because I found it difficult to follow in that format. However, I check my Twitter page all day, and I almost always read the Bee headlines. In fact, the Bee is one of the reasons I check my Twitter page all day.
Now let's assume that I am not an outlier, but the norm for Twitter users. I like hiking. So let's say the Bee sells an ad to REI that gets posted in tandem with every article it posts about outdoors activities. Maybe the ad is doubled as a banner on the acticle's actual page. Maybe the Twitter posting is sold as a value-added with the banner ad. Whatever the details, the Bee would be taking a bold step in the direction of micro advertising.
Again, this idea may have already been mulled over and found wanting. I'm putting it out there because the idea of the Bee folding up or getting entirely eviscerated disturbs me. I want the Bee to everything it can to adapt to the changing media landscape. I want it to try new things until it hits upon a business model that will make it profitable again. I love new media outfits like The Sacramento Press, but they are not yet ready to take up the slack if local, dead-tree newspapers go the way of the horse and buggy.
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So what makes you think that the Bee, or any one else, can make money off of what would require a significant amount of hacking (since Twitter, AFAIK, doesn't have a built in ad delivery platform, particularly for the end client) and strategery (training an ad rep to make the pitch, merging this system with the existing McClatchy ad delivery platform)?
I don't know what the rate per ad impression is these days but the pre-recession rate seems to have averaged around $10 per 1000. I imagine the rate is less for Twitter which is generally not original content, but a feed of links. But let's propose a generous 100,000 viewers per day (which would make that single Twitter page more popular than all but the largest media sites on the Net)...that amounts to $100 a day, times 365...that's $36,500, about enough to pay an entry level reporter without benefits.
The Internet doesn't magically create money for you, putting your content on the Internet doesn't make money appear automatically. The idea that the if only media companies could've jumped on the Internet earlier (and by most accounts, McClatchy did, which is why the own most of the city.com names, like sacramento.com or miami.com. Sacbee.com, as far as I know, is still the largest site in town), they'd be rolling in the dough, is an opinion totally naive of actual Internet economics. 99% of the most popular media sites make only enough profit to cover hosting fees and salaries for the main writers. Mega-sites like Huffingtonpost, which require developers beyond maintaining a Wordpress account, aren't making money. Even Gawker, the granddaddy of all profitable media sites, has made vast cuts and continues to do so.
The New York Times is also struggling, and no one can accuse it of being backwards. Its programming operations are sophisticated enough to be committing code to major open source projects, and it is light years ahead of any media site as far as trying out new forms of storytelling.
It's such an obvious and dull explanation, but traditional media is failing primarily because of the failing economy (and the drop in ad budgets). They are also losing ad dollars to the Internet, but the advertisers are paying a lot less money for ads than they were in print or TV or radio. Any one who is going to start a new media site on the premise of "old media is failing because they're old and don't know the Internet" is going to fail just as badly as the many, many unprofitable new media ventures have.
"I don't know what the rate per ad impression is these days but the pre-recession rate seems to have averaged around $10 per 1000." Any source for this? Speaking as an owner of this company we pay more than that a CPM. All the media outlets in town that we work with charge more than that per CPM. Perhaps Sacramento media is an aberration.
Despite a recession and drops in ad budgets, our company is still seeing huge ad revenue growth.
While the newspaper industry is seeing a hit from the recession its failures are institutional and started well before the current recession (http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/31/newspapers-advertising-media-biz-media-cx_lh_0831newspapers.html).
For an interesting look at what the newspaper industry has been up to over the last 30 years when it comes to innovation check out, "Digitizing the News."
Lastly there are quite a few small media ventures similar to our own that are profitable. Here are two examples: http://www.newwest.net/ and http://www.bakersfieldvoice.com/. And if you want to see a wildly successful new media effort (based on citizen journalism) check out the English version of the Korean website Oh My News (http://english.ohmynews.com/).
For sites that actually pay their writers, some money has been made (not sure if Salon and Slate have made more money than has been invested in them, but they're chugging along) though they are pretty rare and have suffered the same kind of deep cuts (i.e. Gakwer...Gothamist maybe?) than traditional media have had recently. Locally, I can think of one notable failure, Prosper Magazine, which had a pretty forward thinking group of technologists but did not make it past a year.
I'm not sure if any of your examples you mentioned count as profit-making...Newwest is able to pay people but I haven't read anything that says that it has made return on investment (nor should we hold it to that standard...yet). Bakersfieldvoice is a subsidiary of the Bakersfield Californian. Ohmynews is doing well in S. Korea but shuttered its entire Japan branch last year.
CPM figures are from Gawker's and Chicago Reader, other sites too that I don't remember off the top of my head. But the number varies widely (LinkedIn claims to be making $75 cpm). Local sites may get better rates than a national brand, but I suspect the volume is lower.
It's true that traditional media in general (including music/movie sales, Oscar watchers, etc) have been on a decline in the traditional ways of measuring them; the upshot was that there was there were just as many readers/viewers, if not more due to online distribution. The NYTimes has had roughly the same number of subscribers (if we lump local and worldwide together) as it did a decade ago...which is a bad thing considering population growth. But they obviously have a far, far greater reach from their website, and far more ways of telling their stories than they did in 1999. And yet, they're still struggling. The issue, particularly with them, has not been about how to innovate, but how to turn that into money. Traditional media may have been on a steady decline in circ. numbers but the hope was that in a decade, online revenues could substantially make up for lack of traditional revenue. Obviously, when the traditional model suddenly drops out while you're transitioning, that's a problem. But the failure wasn't necessarily in the lack of innovation.
I'm not bagging on Sacramento Press; it's just started and has plenty of room to grow and innovate. But I don't think we should automatically assume that the Bee is struggling just because it's old and didn't make changes fast enough, just as we shouldn't assume that new ventures have a better-than-even-chance of succeeding because they aren't stuck in the old ways, whatever that means.
My Twitter ads scheme was a late night hare brain idea, borne from a) noticing that the Bee had less than 500 followers on its Twitter page and b) wishing thinking. As I said, it disturbs me that traditional media is failing, and I want there to be a solution.
Thanks for the great critique!
If the bee woudl offer a PAGE - Items under $20 - another - Items under $40, Items under $100 - for lower rates - they could fill them. Plus - it'd be a cool page to read - you would go there looking for low cost gifts and cool new stuff from craftspeople, inventors, and small businesses.
If the car company complains - simple answer - You sell a car for under $100 and you can be on that page too !
It would bring in many more advertisers and would be a highly read section of the paper.
If your business model is failing be imaginative.
Though they are not profitable I would rather own twitter than any print conglomerate.
They're old. They need a new and fresh perspective. A website redesign isn't going to cut it.