16 Comments Add your own

• 1. Don Day  |  March 30th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

  Amen.

• 2. tdc  |  March 31st, 2008 at 7:32 am

  ahem!

  this is the study i mention in the comments due to fall off the bottom of the page that i suggested Z (and everyone else) delve into.

  please note (amongst other things) the paragraph “revenues vary” where it’s pointed out “the internet’s reach is beyond a station’s broadcast signal”.

  while paidcontent’s take is not the exact one i wanted to reference, it’ll do.

  terry heaton also has a take on this study.

  do delve.

• 3. Ed  |  March 31st, 2008 at 8:16 am

  Amen!

  When you’re not constrained by a transmitter any more, what does “local” mean?

  Designate your OWN Market Area.

• 4. Rob  |  March 31st, 2008 at 10:36 am

  When I first got into the web business tile ads were thrown onto the site as ‘added value’. Convergent sales today are nothing more than added value with a few bucks shifted from the TV column to the web column on the balance sheet.

  Unfortunately, the death of convergent sales isn’t coming any time soon. In general sales people don’t sell the Internet because the rate of commission on Internet is much lower than TV, they don’t understand how to sell the web and are afraid selling the web would undercut their TV ad buys, so Voila! Convergent sales!

• 5. Amanda E.  |  March 31st, 2008 at 11:22 am

  A rather interesting comment was posted on a slashdot article by a owner of an ad agency regarding selling online spots and the state of online media. The slashdot article is linked in my name and has other interesting comments from folks over the media and the digital age.

  ===========================================

  “Let’s be clear here. To the New York Times and every Internet blogger who fancies themselves the Times-killer, all American newspapers are publicly-traded, big city dailies.

  Unfortunately for the Internet, this isn’t even close to being true. I’ve personally helped start several small-town weeklies/dailies in my area (I do Websites as well, so no bias here), and although one startup over the past 5 years has folded, we’ve got a net gain in my county of two community newspapers over what we had in 2002. Plus one very high-end magazine aimed at folks with $100K+ annual incomes. And this is not unusual across the U.S., where small community publications are still going strong.

  The real story is that the Internet, over the past decade, has failed completely as a local news/information delivery system to the average consumer. And, bear in mind that although the Internet is good at delivering on my $1,000 computer, at much higher cost and bother, what my $30.00 radio delivers every day for little cost or bother — national/international news briefs — it’s next to impossible to find out what’s happening in my town on the Internet in any detail or in a timely fashion. And, lo and behold, what few sources that do exist to find out are, (are you ready, now?) those put up by — you guessed it — my local community newspapers. And those sites normally only have “teaser” versions of the story. You have to subscribe to the Dead Tree Edition to get the full story. Very clever, no?

  Now, this is not merely academic to me. I own a small advertising agency. I absolutely can not get my local businesses to do much advertising on the Web, other than building their own Websites (another interesting topic, but not for this post). Sorry, but they’re just not interested in reaching folks in Botswana and Poland. Can you blame them? The overwhelming majority of American businesses (according to the US Dept. of Labor/Census Bureau) are small businesses, defined as having less than 100 employees. The much-glorified Huffington Post is completely useless to most all of my 300+ small-business clients, as is the New York Times. Without advertisers willing to spend on the Web, Web news sources will stay pretty much as they are now — Digg with the same rehashes of UPI/AP/Reuters feeds, repeated ad nauseum with posters trying desperately to add a sentence or two summary spin to the canned article hoping to reach the site’s front page. Internet News is depressingly incestuous, sketchy, amateurish, and a couple of hours behind my local NPR radio station.

  What media pundits seem to be missing out on is that the American consumer is more and more interested in what’s happening in his own county/town/neighborhood and less and less interested in what is happening in The Big City or on the other side of the planet. We’re getting less centralized, folks. Most of the US population has been diffusing from the big cities and spreading out into the surrounding countryside for the past few decades. I’m here to tell you that the Big City Daily has been dying since the 60’s, mostly due to cable television news channels and the advent of 24-hour all-news radio. I’m in a rural county just on the edge of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Sprawloplex, and we’ve got no less than three 24/7 all-talk radio stations who are getting their quota of advertisers, last time I checked. Plus two 24/7 all-sports stations. Yes, they stream on the Web. No, it’s not an income source for most, but a loss-leader supported by over-the-air broadcasting.

  I do think that eventually, most all news will be delivered via network. In about 30-50 years. Right now, Google and the porn industry notwithstanding, nobody has really figured out how to make money off the Internet in the more localized news market, where the majority of advertisers (small business) and consumers are. We’ve got several itty-bitty print publications in my county that can draw enough revenue to pay for professional writers, designers, photographers, etc. Not a single local community Web portal (out of about six I tracked over the past 10 years) managed to survive longer than 6 months, which means that they simply lasted until the founder ran out of his personal reserves then had to give it up. They just didn’t attract enough advertisers.

  The Web should have killed print publishing about seven years back, but what we got instead was an Internet bubble burst which essentially killed off advertising-supported Internet content. Nobody seems to really know why things happened the way they did, and now my clients are increasingly ditching the PC for a smart phone, which is going to make the Web very much suck as a consumer-grabbing medium. It’ll be an interesting next decade.”

• 6. Rick Ellis  |  March 31st, 2008 at 11:55 am

  One of the things to watch is how Yahoo’s newspaper ad consortium does over the next year or two.

  In theory, Yahoo’s ad delivery system should be a boon for local advertsiers. They promise that if Ed’s Muffler buys an ad in the local newspaper and web site, the ad will also be served to local people who visit any of Yahoo’s other properties (or other members of the consortium).

  There are some real questions about how accurate their targeting will be, but in theory, it should make local ads much easier to sell.

• 7. Chris  |  March 31st, 2008 at 3:40 pm

  I would have to agree with Borrell’s assessment that a combined TV/Web sales team is holding back the revenue that these stations could be realizing. The LR and Paid Content summaries of this report don’t touch on what is an undisputable fact at most TV stations — Even the web revenue they claim to have is a smoke-and-mirrors game. Management is under pressure from their parent companies like Belo and Hearst-Argyle to show digital revenue growth. So what do they do? They move dollars around and canabalize other revenue sources. Show me a mid-market station that has more than $500k in new-new revenue and I’ll show you a bridge I have to sell you.

• 8. Z  |  March 31st, 2008 at 3:51 pm

  TDC, my only true beef with you is our long-standing struggle over what a site is named, and that won’t change anytime soon, I suspect.

  But I have to say, while “the internet’s reach is beyond a station’s broadcast signal” is quite true, a local advertiser’s concerns aren’t. Advertisers have told me repeatedly, and in different markets, that they aren’t interested in the pageviews that come from two states away, or even the other side of the state. Those clicks mean virtually nothing to them.

  Even before IB started counting visitors and pageviews without CNN links, several stations were already removing those pageviews from what they told advertisers.

  “Perhaps a good strategy would be to reduce the number of ad units, improving the user experience while creating more punch for existing advertisers.”

  I’ll add another amen to that statement.

• 9. tdc  |  March 31st, 2008 at 5:16 pm

  that’s where you’ll need to consult with rick ellis above.

  i am in complete agreement that a local advertiser has nothing to gain from foreign eyeballs.

  always have been… never once argued otherwise.

  but i’ve argued with nearly everyone that a great deal of eyeballs already are out-of-market and they can’t and shouldn’t be summarily dismissed… they should be encouraged, invited and monetized. why should you “remove those pageviews from what you tell advertisers”???

  WTF???

  MONETIZE every screen. the technology is there.

  “local” advertisers in ANY market will be stoked being able to appear in front of “local” users who can and do pull up content from 1/2 way around the world on a daily basis. that’s where a domain naming strategy come in. if i like what i get locally and there’s an intuitive path for me to follow, i’ll probably follow the path of least resistance and avoid the google and random search results that follow.

  that’s where you apparently have a disconnect; local content and local advertising are two different things.

  frankly, i wouldn’t wait around for a “year or two” as rick suggests. the idea of presenting ads “local” to the user regardless of the locality of the content is what i’ve been saying since day one. geo targeting will only get better going forward.

  i can’t speak for gordon borell, but i have to believe he’s thinking along these lines here.

  and NO, i wouldn’t agree that reducing ads is a good thing… you are in this to make $$$, right?

  improve the delivery and relevance of the ads and everyone will be happy… user, advertiser and sales.

• 10. tdc  |  March 31st, 2008 at 5:30 pm

  the alternative is to let yahoo do it.

• 11. Z  |  March 31st, 2008 at 5:41 pm

  I’ll be first to admit, geo-targeting solutions are not something I know lots about. But if it’s the end-all, be-all of regional or national advertising, why don’t I already see more of it? To this point, I haven’t seen local ads when I visit CNN or MSNBC, or when I hit WRAL or KMBC.

  That would lead me to believe that the current solutions could be:
  1. not working very well
  2. somehow very expensive to run or maintain
  3. aren’t available in a form easy to integrate to existing systems
  4. require information that a given user’s computer isn’t giving up under normal security settings

  I mean, dear God, people jumped all over getting autoplay ads, push-down banners, rich media and video pre-rolls. If geo-targeting is all it’s cracked up to be, I’m shocked that it’s not more universally used.

• 12. Anonymous  |  April 1st, 2008 at 1:01 am

  Most TV, radio and even newspaper websites are lame as a three-legged donkey. Then some have the gall to ask you to subscribe.

• 13. long prong  |  April 1st, 2008 at 5:38 am

  every porn site i visit offers to hook me up with “hot local girls in …”

  the likes of red_d_betty, layZsusan and romp_in_rhonda are always within 10 miles of wherever i’m online.

  howdeydodat?

• 14. tdc  |  April 1st, 2008 at 1:47 pm

  at least twice within the last week when visiting thehuffingtonpost, i was served a nice tile ad to purchase Detroit Tigers baseball tickets (i even clicked through to check prices!).

  that old english D looked so great that i wanted to call arianna and tell her i appreciated her using geo-targeting in her ad serving system.

• 15. Z  |  April 1st, 2008 at 6:06 pm

  Hmmm. Never gotten one there, either.

• 16. tdc  |  April 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 am

  funny, i just got served a geo-targeted (also called an ip targeted) ad HERE ON LR!

  home screen, top slot placement, too!

  “get a degree in SOUTHFIELD, MI”, it said.

  that’s like a cup of coffee from where i’m sitting right now.

  thanks cory.

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