The Media Decline Continues

New quarter, new proclamations of pain from traditional media owners. Many of them are seeing significant declines in their precious advertising revenues.

The problem, as articulated by 'Free', is that advertising was once a scarcity market. It was a market that was defined by a lack of supply. I've lost count of the number of briefs that use the words 'cash-rich, time-poor'.

The implication we're using in this case is that the people we're targeting don't consume much media. They will only see our adverts in a couple of places in the rare times when they're not working or doing aspirational things.

Clients loved it. We loved it. The media loved it. It was even and recycled and sold back to consumers: here and here among the 11.2 million results in Google. Consumers loved the idea that they were so important they couldn't be bothered to engage with stuff that wasn't either fun or self improving.

Our entire industry was then wrapped around this problem. Fickle people need clever strategies for finding them. Media agencies will sit there and come up with cunning ways to reach them. Publishers will dream up shiny media vehicles that are tailored to these people. The agencies will come up with a way to value the audiences that publishers own. The Publishers will then find ways to 'reach' that audience that will turn out to be particularly costly.

Problem is that we've gotten a bit too good at finding solutions to this problem. The internet has been a fantastic leveller in terms of media consumption.

In the old media world, one could argue that the only way to reach a 'high flier' was to buy ads in the FT, maybe the economist and possibly get some posters around Canary Wharf. You wouldn't find them watching Pop Idol or at least the wastage you'd see in that buy would make things a bit pointless.

Now a whole host of companies have come along trying to find ways to get to those people. We can identify them from registration data across Facebook and LinkedIN. They will be reading the business sections online across the Guardian, Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, WSJ, CityWire, Interactive Investor, etc.

This worked for a while but at some point some more clever people came up with ways to identify these people across the internet. Now we can use tracking technology to find regular readers of the FT \ business sections \ heavy online purchasers. Once we've found them, we can target ads to them wherever they are. For the price of one placement in the FT, we can get ten when that person's reading up on the latest gossip on HeatWorld (they still indulge their trashy side too).

The targeting change hasn't fully hit the media landscape yet. We've yet to nail the exact places our ads are going to be appearing in. Testing of the effectiveness of the targeted ads hasn't come back with solid enough results.

What's certain is that once the recession has ended, publishers who rely on pushing high rates for their 'premium' audience are going to have difficulty pushing their rates back up to where they were before the recession.

Image stolen from Big Huge Labs

Got Published!

After a long period of not having time to actually write anything for this, I recently got hte chance to write an opinion piece for our industry mag, "Media Week".

The subject was sparked off by an article by Rupert Murdoch talking about the fact that free content will not endure.

My edited opinion is below. Wrote it in about three hours so it doesn't detail everything I wanted to.

Essentially I think charging is unavoidable for most news sites. I think the bit they add value to are the opinion sections rather than the news sections (many people write news, few people write opinion that people agree with).

The future news site will select relevant news stories from various sources and then add in their own opinion. You'll have to pay to see the opinion but the selection \ filtering will be free.

That's what I think anyway. Grand writing here:

Looking at newspapers' current print-focused businesses, it's almost enough to cheer bankers up.

Their traditional market is drying up, attacked from the internet, the BBC, TV and freesheets. The inescapable problem is that papers make as much from the cover price than from advertising. But there's simply not enough money to support the number of online news sites.

Fantasy football or crosswords do not provide sufficient money either. Charging will come about or the number of news sources will have to reduce significantly. Charging users will be painful and needs a good micro-payment system, which doesn't yet exist.

If an easy way of paying a couple of pence per article can be implemented, then charging will happen successfully. Subscription will be a struggle, but giving users options is always the sensible way to run.

Jellyfish Magazine R.I.P.

Really gutted that Jellyfish has been stopped. Although I can't remotely blame the people making the decision for deciding that the investment had grown too risky, I do feel that this is an idea that will work.

The difficulties involved in trying to make this sort of site work were eventually insurmountable. We'll all be looking on with eager eyes at what Monkey Magazine report on their ABCe number this month - the 'word on the street' is that the site is going to have seen a significant drop.

As is always the case with websites, they don't spread easily - I feel that if we'd put this website in front of enough people, it would have taken off like wildfire. It's the first project I've been involved in that hasn't been a success and although I feel I made a positive contribution overall, I suspect it will always be a frustrating experience. I think I put a lot into this project, a good weekend or two of my time was poured into this project.

One day I think I'd like to give the publishing \ media owner side a go. Although they continually take pretty large risks, there is a heady atmosphere involved in working for these organisations. The sheer amount of belief and determination of the staff on Jellyfish will stay with me for a long term.

I hope I get the chance to be involved in another project like this - I only got involved at the halfway point. I think we could have been slightly more useful from the beginning.


For those that read it, I hope it will be remembered fondly. For those that didn't, I hope you feel that you missed out.