Still Not Getting It
(Media • Internet)
The bigger they are, so the saying goes, the harder they fall. I don’t know if that’s always true, but it seems to be foreshadowed when supposedly sharp newspaper minds such as Arthur Sulzberger Jr.‘s insist on doing like that old Doobie Brothers song – trying hard to recreate what has yet to be created.
I’m talking about that paid web content thing. Sulzberger says, down in his speech, that the New York Times is dusting off that fantasy to augment its ad revenue.
It’s a really bad idea on several levels, and you would think Sulzberger, especially, would know better, considering the Times tried with spectacular unsuccess not too many months ago to force web readers to pay for the right to read the Times’ influential opinion columnists. The result was a quick waning in those columnists’ influence, because people weren’t willing to pay up. Plus, those familiar with advanced search techniques were able to keep reading for free anyway.
But the bottom line is this:
A web publisher charges ad rates based on the number of readers he or she can deliver to a particular web page where a particular ad resides. The more readers, the higher the ad rate.
If you deliver your content for free on the web for years, and then abruptly start hiding some or all of it from view unless your readers pay money for it, many of them will refuse. That means you will have far fewer readers on those portions of your web site containing for-pay content. The less readers, the lower the ad rate.
Or maybe the Times will put all its for-pay content on pages containing no ads.
But if they insist on following through with this, the result will be that many of their readers will find substitute content offered by other publications. Some of them won’t come back, others will spend less time on the Times’ site. None of that is good if you’re the Times.
Face facts: Web content wants to be free. It ain’t the readers who should be charged, it’s the advertisers. If you aren’t making enough money, find ways to really amaze your readers so that more of them show up each day. Then jack up your ad rates.
Meanwhile, Arthur, when’s the last time the Times spent money online, advertising its web site content? Maybe such ads are out there somewhere, but I can’t recall having seen any. What other sites are people similar to your readers likely to visit? Maybe they don’t know how good your web content is. If you’re trying to convince businesses of the value of advertising on the web, why not take your own advice and start a web ad campaign designed to bring more readers to your site? In the process of putting such a campaign in place, you might learn a few things about effective web advertising and marketing that you could pass on to your own advertisers, who clearly need a lot of help in that regard.
Don’t thank me, I’m just some dumbass fruit farmer from Semi-South Texas.
→ B.Dunn, Mar 14, 2009, 06 30 am
