How to Save the Newspaper Industry Part 1: Change Advertising ...

This is part 1 of a 3 part series about how to save the newspaper industry.

I met Joe Boydston?at Wordcamp in Salt Lake City. He is an IT director for a small group of newspapers in California, and is speaking at several Wordcamps to share his vision of the future of the newspaper industry. In his presentations he shows the innovative ways their newspapers using WordPress, social media, and advertising.

Joe led the newspapers he works for in adopting WordPress as a single CMS (content management system) to publish both the digital and print versions of the newspaper. ?The model is working. Ad rates are up 5,000%, and their audience is growing. All of this with no cuts to the newsroom. This at a time when many daily newspapers are hurting. They are either closing or laying off staff. (See also:?Newspaper Death Watch).

Newspapers make most of their money through advertisements, not selling subscriptions. Unfortunately advertising is way down. Some blame the internet for killing newspapers, but it?s perhaps more how newspapers treat online and print reads and ad rates. According to Joe, using a pay for performance model is to blame.

Newspapers use traditional banner ads across the top and sidebars of their websites. When?advertisers pay for print ads, they pay a set fee per day or by column inch (this site lists newspaper ad rates by state).?You can see the difference in pricing compared to banner ads ? just look at this ad rate sheet from Tampa Bay Times.?If you advertise online, you often pay based on the number of clicks. You pay much less for online ads.

For example: a print ad in the newspaper might cost $700 a day, the online version might bring in $7 a day. With readership shifting online, this represents a huge loss.

Rapidly declining advertising revenues continue to be the industry?s core problem. The losses in 2011 were slightly worse than those of 2010 ? 7.3% compared to 6.3%. Ad revenues are now less than half what they were in 2006.

-?State of the News Media 2012

Another issue is ad placement. Online, the ads are usually separate from the content, which diminishes its value.?Instead the ads can appear with the content, and look just like they do in print. The ads are only different from print in that they are clickable. They can be click to call, click to go to a web site, or click to enlarge (and possibly print) an ad, such as a coupon.

The ads are also shown no matter where the content is accessed.

Advertisements that appear in the printed newspaper will ?follow? each article on that page throughout the day. No matter how readers choose to receive their news, information and advertisements, the ad experience will remain consistent.

So looking at this, one way to increase advertising revenue is to create consistent content in print and online, including ads. Stop using banner ads which are based on CPM (cost per 100k impressions) and move to a different pricing model that takes total readership into account.

In Part 2 of this series I look at how newspapers can value online subscribers and how the papers use social media to extend their reach.

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Source: http://www.newspapergrl.com/how-to-save-the-newspaper-industry-part-1-change-advertising-models

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