Online News and Advertising
PEJ: Online advertising on news sites is still not targeted, neither by context nor behavior; http://eicker.at/NewsAdvertising
PEJ: Online advertising on news sites is still not targeted, neither by context nor behavior; http://eicker.at/NewsAdvertising
Media agency leaders: What the media agency of the future will look like; http://j.mp/9gUvYK
PediaPress offers books (print or free PDF) from Wikipedia and MediaWikis with Collection Extension; http://j.mp/PediaPress
German mass customizationer Chocri goes USA: create chocolate bars from scratch; http://j.mp/9CDu5N
URL shortener Is.gd acquired by cloud hosting firm Memset, plans custom short URLs; http://j.mp/9wDndR
NewsCred goes Pro: eliminate NewsCred branding, customized layouts, personal domain, own advertising; http://j.mp/5iorXb
Robot Reporters: Nozzl Media builds custom, real-time, and local news streams; http://j.mp/52seiq
Nozzl: “We create a massive reservoir of information about your community. Our proprietary and third-party software scours your circulation area for content: your own staff’s stories and blog posts, plus other blogs, Twitter posts, photos, videos, podcasts and other user-generated content. The software also analyzes electronically available public records, such as property sales and licensing databases, detects significant new records and adds those to the reservoir. – We create a separate reservoir of classified, text and display advertising. Our system is best-suited for real-time transactional advertising, such as special offers and coupons, delivered to consumers on the basis of their interests or location. Each ad is tagged with one or more keywords that can be matched to consumers who have the same keywords. In addition, smartphones with GPS capability enable our system to alert consumers to nearby deals. – We open gates from both reservoirs. That allows all the content – news and advertising alike – to flow out in a real-time river of bite-sized headlines, images, links and other short-content forms. That river is technically a microblog, the same basic technology that Twitter uses. – We enable the end user to choose only the information that he or she wants: everything within a mile of home, for instance, or anything having to do with job hunting, green living or new restaurants. That information includes not only news, but also relevant in-stream advertising. A click on an item takes the reader to a landing page.”
RWW: “In the end, human reporters and raw robot feeds sound like a great combination. That appears to be what Nozzl is aiming to create by offering its widgets to established news organizations. The company says that a mobile application could be in its future, too. That’s something I’m very excited about. Be it a widget or a mobile app, Nozzl’s robot reporters need more polish before they are ready to win back the hearts of fast-leaving newspaper readers. As a picture of the future, though – Nozzl is very inspiring.”
Facebook Pages: a 101, customisation collection and the Static FBML app to start easily; http://j.mp/44JDro
Gerrit Eicker 14:40 on 13. February 2012 Permalink |
PEJ, Who Advertises on News Sites and How Much Those Ads are Targeted: “A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue. – Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.”
PEJ, Who is Placing Ads? – “Who is buying ads on news sites? The answer reveals part of the trouble the news industry is having findings its way in the new marketplace. Across these 22 news sites, the biggest single advertiser is the news organization itself or its parent. Ads promoting the organization’s own products, known as ‘in-house ads’ in industry terms, accounted for 21% of the online ads studied – more than any category. … The magazine websites studied here (time.com, newsweek.com, economist.com and theatlantic.com) ran the largest percentage of in-house ads, fully 50% overall, from economist.com at 40.1% on the low end to time.com at 56% at the high end. In the print version of these magazines, by contrast, 10% of the ads were promoting the magazine or its company (Time magazine 11%, The Economist 13%, Newsweek 4%, and The Atlantic’s print edition contained no self-promoting ads). – Newspapers contained the second-highest level of self-referencing advertising, 21% of the Web-based ads versus 9% of their print ads. … For these print-related outlets, though, the heavy reliance on self-promoted ads could reflect two different factors. First, the newspaper industry still relies on its print product for the vast majority of its ad revenues. At the end of 2010 (the latest data available) fully 88% of overall newspaper revenue came from the print product versus just 12% from the Web. … Another phenomenon could be the inability of the industry to draw advertisers-and thereby ad revenue-to their online space.”
PEJ, The Financial Industry: “The second biggest category of advertising online was one that played a fairly small role for news in legacy platforms, the financial industry. Ads for financial products or services accounted for 18% of all Web ads captured, more than triple that of the next biggest category, toiletries and cosmetics (5%). And on more than half of the sites, 12 out of 22, financial ads ranked first-above self-promotion. … These numbers stand in contrast with the small role financial advertising plays in most of the legacy platforms studied. Only magazines contained more financial industry advertising in their original platform than online.”
PEJ, Targeting: “The customization or targeting of ads based on audience data is one of the newer ways to serve advertisers interests-helping those selling goods to reach consumers perceived to be the most likely to be interested in and thus to act on their ads. In targeted advertising, in other words, the ads one person gets will differ from what another person receives, depending on their online purchase history, location and/or personal habits, even if they click on the same website at essentially the same time. … Overall, only a handful of sites exhibited high levels of targeting. A few more had a moderate level of targeting. Most showed no signs of targeting at all. … Overall, just three of the 22 sites exhibited high levels of targeting, defined here as at least 45% of the ads were different from one user to the next. … One question that emerges is whether targeting has more or less natural appeal on some websites than others. In other words, do national sites with their larger and more diverse audience pools lend themselves more naturally than smaller sites to the benefits of ad targeting? … Finally, on a few sites, there was evidence of another method of targeting-not according to users but according to news story. On a number of occasions, there was a close relationship between the content of the story and the ads displayed.”
PEJ, Use of Discount Sites/Coupons: “About half of the sites studied, 16 of the 22, carried some discount/coupon advertising. But on only five did discount ads make up more than 10% of all the ads studied. For the most part, sites that created their own discount programs tended to rely on these ads more. … Among nationally oriented sites, Yahoo News carried the greatest percentage of discount/coupon advertising, 15% of the ads studied. The majority of these were from the national services Groupon and LivingSocial. – The other two sites with the highest use of discount advertising, the Toledo Blade and Los Angeles Times, have created their own daily deal operations to compete with the national companies. … These were the only two sites in our sample that had tried their own daily deal style business, but they are certainly not alone. Various papers now have their own Groupon-like services…”
PEJ, Format: “That leaves banner ads, classifieds, video and rich media as the four main kinds of ads news sites can offer advertisers. – Banner ads, the oldest form of advertising on the internet, make up the second largest percentage of ads on the internet (24% of total online advertising revenue). Going forward, most market analysts expect banner ads will represent a smaller portion of online advertising than search, but the category is still expected to grow. For instance, eMarketer predicts that banner ads will increase from $7.6 billion in 2011 to $11.7 by 2015, a bright spot for the news online. … Across these 22 news sites, that same tendency toward banner ads emerged; static banner ads made up nearly half (46%) of all the ads on news websites. Some differences in the style of ads used did emerge-mostly according to the legacy media genre, though individual sites did at times stand apart from their media brethren. … The Washington Post, on the other hand, relied on banner ads for just 18% of the ads studied. Instead, the site used sponsored links far more than others, 66%. Two other national papers, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, also used sponsored links more than static banner ads.”