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We Never Paid for Journalism

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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#81

Post by sacrificedcapon »

Nextgrid wrote: post #33
jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy. No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake. This means I…

I hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need.

Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The easier you are to be duped.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#82

Post by sacrificedcapon »

vearwhershuh wrote: post #6

I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.

All you have to do is read the history of newspapers and journalism. Almost exclusively, they were created by financial, industrial and political elite to influence the population. They were never created to make money.

Alexander Hamilton didn't create the New York Post to make money. Henry Jarvis Raymond (politician) and George Jones (banker) didn't create the NYTimes to make money. Stilson Hutchins (politician) didn't create the WashingtonPost to make money. These newspapers were created to further their founders' political interests.

And in case you were wondering, Bezos didn't buy WashingtonPost to make money either.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#83

Post by syrrim »

jldugger wrote: post #79
jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_. > They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. You're not wrong, but…

The question is: where did this pattern come from? Why buy too many ads in the first place? Corporations are supposed to be maximizing profits, and yet we hear they are wasting tons of money on ads. Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders? Some thoughts:

- A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency every week, and wanted to be at the top. They would therefore run ad campaigns at the end of the week in order to drive themselves to the top, even if the ads were a net loss in revenue. This suggests that a lot of advertising is aimed at people who are already invested in the company: execs and shareholders, who see the ads and think it is reflective of how well the company is doing (which, in a way, it is: it signals they have extra money to waste on advertising)

- I recently saw a clip from a Jobs interview, where he contrasted non-monopolies, which are run by product people, with monopolies (like Xerox and IBM), which are run by "sales and marketing" people. Presumably some ads are effective. Controlling the ads that are effective gives marketing power over the company, in the monopoly case. Having attained this power, they then use it to route the company's spare revenue to buy still more ads. This has the interesting implication (perhaps obvious) that a monopoly is bad for shareholders (as well as consumers), who are being robbed of the revenue now being spent on ads.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#84

Post by milesvp »

dragonwriter wrote: post #41
cwbrandsma wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.

> My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. The newspapers had been steadily dying since the 1970s, but Craigslist certainly didn't help them any.

Not so. Newspapers reached peak profits in the 1990's. At least, this is common wisdom from many people I know who worked at one at the time. Lots of first class travel and good per diems. This was also the time that lots of papers got bought up by big media companies.

Newspaper profits were also pretty good up through the early 2000's. I've never been convinced that craigslist was immediately responsible for the loss of classifieds revenue (which used to represent %50 of many newspaper's income), so much as the internet made it really cheap to build classifieds ads distribution platforms, craigslist being only one of them.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#85

Post by WalterBright »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #65
musicale wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing expe…

Computer Shopper was more of a condensed catalog of multiple vendors. It served as a search index and comparison pricing utility. Nobody "liked" the ads other than that was the only way to become informed about a wide range of products.

> Nobody "liked" the ads

People like reading ads about products they're interested in. I know I do. This idea that ads are all toxic because their purpose is to sell just isn't right.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#86

Post by RhysU »

jld wrote: post #8

It used to be that the "profit" from advertisement paid for journalists to write stories that would get you to look at them. Now the profit from ads largely goes to engineers to build products for the web, (and shareholders of tech companies). Both journalism and web stuff provide public good, but we need to figure out how to replace the revenue that financed journalism. The public was getting it for "free" before, a…

What would it look like to "engineer" journalism?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#87

Post by jeegsy »

perl4ever wrote: post #69
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. For an article whose point is "the sum of these lines does X," you'd really thing they'd graph the sum of those lines.

I think there is a lot of inadvertent irony/lack of awareness in: "Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with." Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has h…

I heard somewhere that the Craigslist guy first went to newspapers with his ideas and he was basically laughed out of the room

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#88

Post by mc32 »

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

>They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.

I believe many magazines (though not newspapers) had a “Reply Mail” thing. I bet they derived metrics from those.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#89

Post by jldugger »

syrrim wrote: post #83
jldugger wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_. > They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. You're not wrong, but…

The question is: where did this pattern come from? Why buy too many ads in the first place? Corporations are supposed to be maximizing profits, and yet we hear they are wasting tons of money on ads. Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders? Some thoughts: - A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency…

> Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders?

I decided not to answer that question in the comments above in the name of brevity, but since you asked. My own thoughts:

- Punctuated evolution. The firms that follow the data are the ones more likely to survive recessions. One hopes that orgs where convention is only upset in a crisis are the ones more likely to fold.

- Re Jobs: he is widely regarded as a 'sales and marketing' genius, and was succeeded by a former IBMer focused on supply chain logistics, which is where monopolies actually focus. Why hire more salesman when your customer has to come to you to buy regardless?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#90

Post by ghaff »

ip26 wrote: post #74

The model I've wished for is a large micropayment network covering many to most online news sources charging, I don't know, a penny or two per article. Maybe no charge if you close the page after two seconds. Ad views are worth less than that, and I can easily afford ten or twenty cents a day to read the news across a variety of sources. I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six gr…

$20/month is pretty much the rate in current dollars to pay for (at most) one "great newspaper."
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