Ethnique Media :: Le Blog

The Globe and Mail published an interesting article titled The Future of the Magazine, on glossy magazine’s foray into the digital world of the Internet.

I don’t want to paraphrase the article, you should read it instead. Obviously, the main question that the article explores, and drives magazine publishers mad, is “how to make money online”. An interesting approach is to include the digital views in the base advertisement rates: that is count the eyes viewing the digital magazine and include these in the ad-viewership number, which eventually determines ad rates.

A complementary approach is to create what I would call “digitally augmented ads”, that is, ads that provide digital features and charge extra fees for these features. For example, embed in the digital version of the ad a video that users can click on and view or embed a website links such that users can be drawn to visit the site of the advertiser. It seems like this idea is actually already gained ground:

Advertisers can pay extra for digital features, such as a tag the user taps to go to the product website or to watch a video ad. Out of approximately 180 ad pages in the December GQ, more than three-quarters included one of these extras.

The big plus of the Internet is that all these new techniques can actually be precisely measured and monitored. It’s easy to measure the viewership numbers, and it’s easy to measure the number of viewers interacting with these digitally augmented ads. This is one of the biggest strengths of the Internet vs traditional print media, and it is one of the foundations of the business model of Internet advertisement giants, such as Google.

These digital augmented ads are nice and dandy for publishing giants such as Conde Nast, News Corp or our local Rogers, Transco and Quebecor, but what about small independent publishers that don’t have the technical or financial means to implement such online advertisement strategies?

It’s a tough question to answer, and I want to keep that for another post.

It’s now official: as of today, in the UK only, more money is being spent on online advertisements than on TV advertisement. See BBC’s article Online advertising ‘overtakes TV’.

As the article points out, many different marketing tools are bundled together under the umbrella of “online advertisement”. That makes the comparison between online and TV ads a bit unfair, as online ads include direct advertisement by email, contextual search ads and display ads, whereas TV ads are usually only display (unless you have an interactive TV from the future, but I am not sure they are producing those yet).

What’s more, the reality is that the distinction between “online” and other medias such as TV is getting blurrier by the minute. For example, more and more people actually consume TV on the Web, radio is also being massively consumed online and everyone reads their news on the Web.

Still, the reality is that this milestone is important, and is clearly showing that the Internet has now become an advertisements juggernaut.

And this trend is only set to accelerate, especially as “online” and other medias converge further into one massive soup of professional, interactive and user submitted content super-media.

I don’t understand Japanese, and I know nothing of Naver.jp, except that it is a search engine.

But the layout of the landing page is great, the color scheme is simple but beautiful, and the video ad is amazingly well shot, with a refreshing analog feel to the recording. And the concept of humans holding of the search text-bar throughout the video is a great idea.

Here it is, enjoy some fresh web marketing directly from the land of the rising sun.

There is a small controversy brewing as we speak. Yesterday, AP announced that it will seeking to protect its content from online sites that use it’s headlines, basically threatening to sue aggregators showing its headlines. Aggregators are sites, like Google News or the Drudge Report that simply show (aggregate) a set of popular/relevant headlines. This behavior on the part of AP is ridiculous, as all legal aggregator sites always link to the original version of the story, basically driving billions of visitors to the websites of newspapers around the world.

Today, the CEO of Google gave the closing keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference, attempting to address the issues that newspapers execs have.

Read the story, but I believe that newspaper execs are barking at the wrong dog, and are miserably failing to understand that the issue lies with their content and their online pricing strategy, not with Google or other news aggregators.

Newspapers need to reinvent themselves and their pricing strategy on the Internet. Apple’s iTunes has showed that people are ready to pay for a good service on the Web, now it is time for newspapers to follow suit. Newspapers need to concentrate on creating creative and original content, not just reprint AP and other wire stories.

Once the creative content is there, you can charge customers to access this original material online. If no one else can provide for free the same quality and content of coverage on a certain topic, then customers will pay to read online. Opinion stories, rich editorials, investigative journalism, local coverage, community (or ethnic) coverage: all these could be original and unique content that readers would pay for.

And it doesn’t need to cost a lot, because a million readers at a certain price, the money adds up very quickly.