You’re right that the approach of one-size-fits-all branding doesn’t work well online. But it’s the only approach newspaper business people know.

A couple of my colleagues, Chris Welle and Chris Dorsey, spoke at NAA’s Nexpo this year about contextual advertising. Few people showed up to the event. If the lack of interest comes down to a lack of NAA leadership, I don’t know. I tend to be of the mindset that we’re in the cat herding business and we’re not very good at it.

The sad fact is that display advertising on the Internet is a self-devaluing proposition. If newspapers could sell their online inventory at anywhere near rate card, we would not be having this discussion. CTRs and CPM have been falling since the 90s and show no sign of stopping.

This whole discussion ignores the fact that search advertising is far more effective because all users will have already self-selected their behavioral targeting factors by entering search text. It’s just a much, much better approach. The qualitative difference between a simple, non-intrusive text ad (users like, so users click) and an intrusive, non-targeted display ad (users hate, users train themselves to avoid, aka banner blindness) is another factor the newspaper media people simply ignore.

When you go on a big name newspaper site and see the dancing sheep/low, low mortgage rates in you area ads, those are “network” ads at ridiculously low CPMs, like $1 or less. Just dirt.

Web ads are trackable/measurable in fine detail, so the fact that display ads don’t work that well is known to advertisers who use that information to their advantage. The newspapers can’t really say “no” to any offer.

That newspapers are not more aggressive about developing BT/relevance-seeking ad-serving systems is yet another sign of their not-getting-it-ness. The NAA, to a large extent, has shown p*ss-poor leadership on this and many other issues.

It’s hard to have sympathy for this group, having worked on this issue for about a decade. They really are quite sure that they – and only they – know how things work.

They get nothing from the click through to the publisher site. Nothing.

Actually, Google gets a lot from the click through, since most newspaper.com publishers devalue their own advertising by placing Google AdSense ads on their pages, too. Google directly benefits, while the newspapers cut off their nose to spite their face.

Newspapering isn’t the only game in town filling the desire for information.

Frankly, I’m insulted by your suggestion that only opinion would remain. So what if it did, in a hypothetical event where all ‘unbiased’ information evaporated from the planet? Are you suggesting that that all people are too stupid to parse facts from opinions? Are you suggesting that only newspaper men have that ability to interpret and disseminate the facts, unbiased? The arrogance in your comment is appalling.

For what this is worth, my anecdotal experience is very, very different from what you describe, although I am also a very, very different kind of user than the “people ” to whom you refer.

I have never liked Yahoo search. Back in the 90’s at the height of Yahoo’s power I had a Yahoo homepage, but I used Alta Vista for search. My experience was that Yahoo just wasn’t that good. Then an engineer where I was working discovered Google. It was probably 1997. Google positively destroyed Alta Vista by an order of magnitude, so that was my search engine from then on.

Later, Yahoo started to be far more interested in serving their advertisers than they were in serving their users. I accepted it for a time, but when the served up the first interstitial ad – the most hated of all internet advertising – I quit them forever. Showing me a full page ad instead of the page I asked for is something up with which I shall not put.

In the years since then, Yahoo has sagged while Google – who still put the user first to the extent that I have actually kissed my computer screen when a super-helpful new feature was added – has done fairly well for itself.

A direct connection? That would be very difficult to demonstrate. As I said, my evidence is anecdotal but instructive, I think.

However, it seems like Jeff is equating “fast-growing” with “success” and then concludes that we should emulated the fast-growing company to achieve similar success. I see many problems with this line of thinking, especially in terms of analyzing the situation with newspapers during this transitional period of upheaval. It’s not surprising to me that google, with it’s cute name and nerdy, bare bones look and feel, captivated our fascination. There is a very low level of commitment in choosing a search engine. People chose google on a whim and there’s no reason to change (yet). But there’s nothing stopping people from flocking to something new someday unexpectedly. I think consumers would happily be using yahoo to this day had they not been tickled by the silly name and caught off guard by the strikingly sparse UI devoid of advertising (and the charming “I’m feeling lucky” button). You’re right that google has rapidly improved many things to do with search. The question is can they sustain it?

Not so sure about that sir. Google was originally successful because it’s search technology actually _worked_. Nowadays, others have caught up, but they’re still not the same as Google. Yahoo comes really close, but I know that I prefer Google’s search results over them.

“Plugin in some other search engine tomorrow?” You’re right that Google has built a brand. But content is still King.

“an occasional spike in “drive-by” traffic which is increasingly difficult to monetise” – money occurs when the page loads. All ads that are called to the page generate revenue whether they are viewed, stay ‘below the fold’ or get blocked by a pop-up blocker. The “difficulty” is the pathetic real world CPMs that display ads are generating. If papers could sell their online inventory at rate card, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But they can’t. So they post ‘ad network’ ads (aka dancing sheep) at $0.25 per M. And that’s not a joke. It’s a real network CPM.

“and Google takes the spoils” – um, how? Show me the ads on Google news. Google make nothing from Google News directly, only indirectly when a user searches. And even then, they make money from their own AdWords advertisers. They get nothing from the click through to the publisher site. Nothing.

“Another myth is that by publishing just a teaser and a headline the aggregators are respecting the IP of the content provider.” If you know how indexing systems work, you would know that there’s a super, super simple way to prevent aggregator from publishing your content. You just block their spiders/bots. Done. As I say above, I dare any paper to block the Googlebot. Some tough-guy publisher is gonna, and I can’t wait.

“…and as Walter Matthau barked to Jack Lemmon in The Front Page “who the hell reads the second paragraph?”” – First off, you’re really closing your statement re: the interwebs with a quote from a play written in 1931, and the character you quote is a devious say-anything tyrant? Ummmmm…k. Second, are you really saying that nobody reads anything online? Not accurate. This article from usability ubergeek Jakob Nielsen ’splains in great detail how and why people read long articles online.

The newspaper industry has always viewed the AP as a “cost reduction” tool. If they had recognized that the AP could also serve as a revenue generator, all sorts of things would have been different…

bob wyman

I may be thinking something different. I don’t think people will pay for facts-and-details news. I think they’ll pay for something they can identify with that represents a voice of sanity to them in a world of chaos. Intelligent and well-written ideas.

I think that it’s true. I think that it’s also true that people will pay for news in newspapers.

I think that newspapers are dying because they’re not providing news. They’re selling paper with words and pictures and there are cheaper ways to get that.

John Philip Sousa did not refuse to make recordings.

Sousa did claim that that folks who could listen to stars, like himself, via recordings, would be less likely to make music themselves and patronize the concerts of the less skilled.

In that, he was absolutely correct.