Newspapers in the Digital Age

Way back in ancient times when I was a kid, TV came to your house through an antenna on the roof. Watching TV wasn't free, of course, you had to buy a TV, the antenna (and maybe a fancy device to turn it toward the signal), but you didn't have to pay for the signal itself. TV stations made money by embedding advertising in the signal so that watching TV meant watching the ads too, and the more people that watched a show the more money that could be charged for advertising during the broadcast.

I've been wondering why newspapers and other print media don't follow a similar model with blogs. If you go to, say, YouTube or Google video, for bloggers using standard software it's pretty easy to post a video on your blog. You click on a button, enter the name of your blog, give it the password, a title, and some text, and it posts to your blog automatically. It's really easy (and you can get the computer code as well if you prefer, as I do, to post things yourself).

Why don't newspapers and magazines do this, but embed ads in the articles just as ads are embedded in TV programs? Suppose you see an Op-ed you want to post on your blog. Just as with YouTube or Google video, there could be a button at the bottom of each article to push to post the article to your blog. In the article, or beside the article in the sidebar, ads would appear (my preference would be to give up sidebar space for Google style ads that run beside the article). The agreement would be that you can run the articles freely so long as the ads are there.

This seems to have lots of advantages. Newspapers would increase their circulating substantially as their articles went out to all the blogs, and since the ads would accompany the articles their ad revenue ought to increase. People running blogs would have free access to content without worry about copyright, etc., allowing them to collect information from various publications and specialize in particular topics (e.g. economics). Newspapers would, essentially, be like TV stations of old and blogs would play the role of TVs (though with more specialization) and receive and show the content along with the embedded ads.

What am I missing about the economics that would make this infeasible?

Comments

[Michael Cain]

What am I missing about the economics that would make this infeasible?

Not necessarily the economics, but the technology. Think the Firefox browser with the Adblock extension. A number of the online newspapers that I read (and at least a couple of blogs) have advertising -- in some cases, lots of advertising. A few entries into Adblock, though, and the browser completely ignores them. Completely as in doesn't even request the content. I am occasionally surprised by discussions about an obnoxious ad showing up on a site I read, because I never see the ads. Only my personal opinion, but Adblock is by itself a reason to seriously consider using Firefox instead of other browsers.

So there's a technology battle being fought. The end-user software trying to recognize and filter out unwanted embedded content versus the other sides' efforts to make such content unblockable. Right now, I believe the end-user side is winning -- methods for making the advertising unblockable tend to be error-prone, tend to make access to the underlying content more difficult, and tend to slow things down substantially.

[Stephen Spear]

I don't know if there are server side ways to determine whether someone is blocking content, which would allow a technical way around ad blockers, but I would argue that the kind of model Mark is proposing would work for two reasons. First, sidebar ads are easy to ignore, in ways that ads on TV or in DVDs are not, since they interrupt the flow of attention. Secondly, if blogs could adopt the kind of narrowcasting, targeted ads that Google and others now use routinely, so that ads were potentially useful to readers, this would be a positive impetus to not block them. I also expect that given that most bloggers are basically narrow casting themselves, the print media would find it relatively easy to focus ads relevant to a particular blog's audience.

[robertdfeinman]

Google Video has announced an attempt to include ads. They would appear on the bottom third of the screen as a sort of semi-transparent overlay for the first few seconds.

Several TV stations offer video with included ads at the beginning. They seem to use non-standard viewing software so cutting them out, if possible, would require special treatment for each site.

You may be interested in the blog of media maven Jeff Jarvis. He is making a career out of trying to shake up the traditional media firms and them to engage in a "conversation" with their audience instead of just doling out content. He's also teaching at the new CUNY journalism school.

The site is buzzmachine.com

[gordon]

And what cut of the ad revenue would go to the owner of the blog? After all, he/she is distributing the ads and would be entitled to a percentage. Exit blogging for fun, enter blogging for profit.

[ken melvin]

When I look at Sutro I see a WiFi tower.

[James Killus]

There are already bloggers who make money from it; in some cases the money is not trivial.

[BJ Feng]

I don't know exactly how it works, but advertising is lucrative enough for people to buy and sell websites for the income stream. There are people who buy a promising website, and then optimize the site so that it gets more hits from searches on Google and other engines. They then can "flip" the site, much like a house, for a profit.

I don't mind watching video ads for good content. March Madness is a good example where CBS makes every game available live on the web. I don't mind watching a 30 second ad first, and then regular commercials as the game develops. Websites have to be careful not to overload their sites with ads. I don't know the stats, but I don't think pop-up ads are a good idea. They are so intrusive that I automatically get annoyed and won't even consider what is being offered. I also will shy away from sites that have too many intrusive ads, such as ESPN. I'll deliberately go to other sites to get sports news.

[Esben]

Gordon, obviously the blogger wouldn't get any cut. Running those adds would be the price the blogger paid for the permission to use the newspapers' value content. The blogger could however run his OWN adds separately, the revenue of which could increase due to the content provided by the newspapers.

I think this model could work well, if only someone was willing to try. It's true that the end user can block out adds using all sorts of technology, most notably Firefox add-blocker, but that is just as true of the content on the original page. But of course those papers which use all sorts of paid premium content might still want to keep something for their paying customers.

[Tim Worstall]

There is a business that works along these lines. Voxant, they are at www.thenewsroom.com.
It's exactly what you're suggesting, wire reports, Reuters and AP videos, certain newspaper articles. Ad supported, the blogger gets 25% of the gross revenue. (Between $1 and $4 per 1,000 page views).
This isn't meant to be an ad for them and they've only been going a few months so no one really knows whether it will work long term. But it is someone doing exactly what you're ruminating upon.

[donna]

There are ads on web sites?

Huh. Never noticed.

But then I never read the ads in newspapers or magazines, either.

And we've Tivoed out the TV ads for years.

I hate advertising. I wish companies would just make good products instead.

As to newspapers, I quit reading them mainly because they weren't reporting THE NEWS. I think plenty of people would buy them if they returned to doing so, instead of being administration mouthpieces.

[Jean]

Steven Spear, have you seen those ghastly sidebars with the wiggling men or any rapid moving image? It's impossible to block it out. I hang a piece of paper over that part of the screen because it is virtually impossible to ignore these little monstrosities. There is no delete or stop function, of course. They are playing on either our primordial training to watch movement or our more recent trainings at the movies or living rooms watching TV.

[Laurent GUERBY]

Obvious solution: restore the free market!

Get rid of ultra-evil government intervention.

Bye bye copyright :).

[cm]

My big problem with ads is not the ads themselves, but that accessing ad farms from all over the intenet slows down the page load so much as to make it effectively unusable, and that with broadband internet. What's worse is the "trackers" (Doubleclick etc.) which operate by the same principle.

I'm using Seamonkey for browsing, which is an offshoot of the pre-Firefox Mozilla browser.

As most advertisement/tracking is farmed out, my most effective blocker is to specify "only load images from the originating server", which I couldn't figure out how to do in Firefox (I think they simply removed that option). That plus a local content-filtering proxy shield me from most stuff.

For the occasional unfiltered access I need I have "unprotected" browser configurations.

[cm]

As for newspapers, my take is similar to donna's -- the signal-to-paper ratio is simply too low. About the only useful part is the local news, and that also appears to be heavily tainted.

[Lafayette]

MC: Only my personal opinion, but Adblock is by itself a reason to seriously consider using Firefox instead of other browsers.

Ditto here. Firefox is also a safer browser, though MS is closing the gap on that front after years of disabusing its browser users.

Don't expect to see such features within IExplorer. MS knows on which side its bread is buttered. It WANTS ads to appear on its browser, so that more corporations will optimize their web-pages for IExplorer and thereby retain the hegemony of the Windows suite of products.

Expect to see this sort of mechanism from Firefox, an "open source" browser more likely to cater to consumer and not corporate interests. The people who make Firefox possible should be deeply gratified by its "come-from-behind" success.

[Lafayette]

d: I quit reading them mainly because they weren't reporting THE NEWS.

And, so, do you think Fox IS reporting the News"? Do you think that ANY television news program is reporting the news in an unbiased fashion?

More so, what is "news"? Is it not also a media product?

Fox is a prime example of what is happening in terms of "news marketing". Fox realized that CNN was too centrist (or even liberal) in its reporting -- so it molded its news to cater to the right, thereby carving out this niche. The strategy worked well.

All news organizations have a "point of view", which is why it is important to read a number of different sources. And, expect better, more in-depth coverage, from printed news (and analysis or commentary) than from the talking heads on TV.

Finally, there is an even more subtle effect afoot, and it is this: Research has shown that people remember far more of what they "see" than what they "hear" (or from any other sensory input).

So, radio as a news conduit is a loser on that count. But, also TV. A talking head has no real visual impact, certainly not as much as "action shots" of the news as it unfolds. So, the more news packed with "action" the larger the number likely to be watching.

Then there is the matter of the way news is covered. What can you expect, by way of intelligent consideration, of an event that is just a "sound bite". Or news coverage that is a succession of "you saw it here first" news-bites.

Which is why blogs are so popular. It gives people a more intricate view of complex issues, debated from a great many different perspectives. And, of course, the possibility to add their two cents worth.

Blogs are not always so neat and well written, however. In fact, there is typically far more chaff than wheat. But, if you work them properly, you get opinion with all the different colours of a rainbow.

What Americans hate -- and Europeans seem to love desperately -- is diving into the details to look the devil in the face. This tends to slow/stop the decision-making process because it provokes a diversity of reflections, many of which are quite sensible. It puts off therefore a decision and "action" on a subject, which is culturally anathema in America. In Europe, it may take a lot longer to arrive at a consensus of public opinion; but when that happens, the concurrence has become stable and ingrained.

Latin dictum: It is often wise to give time to time. (But, never too much.)

PS: The work behind "animating" a good blog is tremendous. Hats off to Mark Thoma for a job that is very well done.

[Patricia Shannon]

The moving ads are more than annoying. They can cause some people to have epileptic seizures.

When the news of the demise of the printed version of Weekly World News was reported, I felt like it was only to be expected. To see the kind of stuff we used to read about in WWN, all we have to do now is read the MSM.