Brainworks Blog

Yahoo and Adobe Team Up to Put Online Ads in PDFs

2007-11-29T21:25:42Z

Yahoo and Adobe will partner to allow publishers to run dynamically generated ads on PDF files posted on the Web or distributed via e-mail, opening up a new frontier in online advertising.

Until now, publishers have been able to embed only static ads on PDF files, but Yahoo and Adobe are developing a system to make those documents display contextually relevant ads delivered on the fly from Yahoo's inventory at any given time.

The inclusion of pay-per-click text ads on PDF (Portable Document Format) files will give publishers another revenue-generating option for the content they have in this popular Adobe document format

The benefit for advertisers: They get a new channel for their ads.

The service is free for publishers, who don't need to buy or install any software for it. At this time, only U.S.-based publishers whose sites are in English can participate in the program.

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NAA Article: Independent Research Shows That Newspapers Are A Destination -- Not a Distraction -- For Advertising Content

2007-11-20T20:29:14Z

Supported by numerous facts and studies, this NAA article points out that consumers still prefer newspapers when it comes to making buying decisions or gathering information before making purchases. From the article:

"In a fragmented media environment with channel proliferation, consumer control of media messages and advertiser demand for accountability, the most effective marketing vehicle may surprise you: newspaper media--in print, online and combined.

"Why newspaper media? Because in a world where consumers are tuning out advertising right and left, independent research shows that newspapers are a destination--not a distraction--for advertising content.

"According to research by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University, advertising is one of the top five drivers of newspaper readership. That's because consumers seek out the newspaper to make product buying decisions."

Regarding online efforts, the article points out:

"Newspapers own 11 of the top 25 online news and information Web sites and, locally, they provide the dominant information site in most of the top 75 markets."

So, is the death of newspapers imminent? Consider this:

"While newspaper circulation has gradually eroded, newspapers' readership continues to be strong and its total audience has expanded with the introduction of a variety of print and digital products. Newspapers--in print and online--are the number one local media brand.

"Newspapers also provide unique opportunities to reach broad or targeted audiences across multiple products in the local market. Using the traditional newspaper, niche and specialty, publications and a variety of Web sites, advertisers can reach more adults in a specific market than they could with other any other media. And the portfolio of products allows advertisers to target specific segments geographically, demographically or by interest."

More facts and figures are available in the article.

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A Look at Newspapers 2017

2007-11-15T21:59:52Z

Newspapers of the future won't be found on the Internet, under a prototype for the future suggested by Tim O'Briant, news director of the Aiken (S.C.) Standard. Instead, they would be available by subscription across a proprietary satellite-based communications network. O'Briant outlined his "think outside the box" vision in a contest entry that earned him a $2,000 cash prize in the Newspaper of the Future contest, sponsored by SNPA's Readership Committee.

The contest required people to submit their vision of what newspapers would look like in 10 years. They were asked to think about innovations that would sustain and nurture newspapers - or reinvent them - and how newspapers in 2017 would connect and engage readers and broader audiences in communities by redefining local news and the roles journalists play.

Newspapers 2017 is a radical look at what news gathering and distribution organizations might look like in the not-too-distant future. The video is thought provoking and challenges publishers to get serious about considering how modern technology might be used to reinvent the business of news.

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View video in Flash format.

SNPA Convention Update: What Recent Transactions Say About the Value of the Newspaper Franchise

2007-10-30T19:02:02Z

Wall Street and the private equity funds that Veronis Suhler Stevenson represent believe that, even though newspaper revenues are relatively small today in comparison to total newspaper spending, the newspaper industry has the substance in its content to end up having a growth story again in the future. That was the message delivered at last week's SNPA Annual Convention by John S. Suhler, president, and James P. Rutherford, executive vice president, both of Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

Rutherford encouraged publishers to manage costs harshly and aggressively and to invest in online opportunities.

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SNPA Convention Update: Newspaper Next 2.0 - Building Audiences Beyond News ... Building Revenue Beyond Advertising

2007-10-30T18:40:31Z

Over the past six months, the American Press Institute has been examining the next steps to take with its Newspaper Next project. At last week's SNPA Annual Convention, Andrew B. Davis, president and executive director of API, said his staff is now focused on bridging from what it calls "maximizing the core" to "building audiences beyond news and building revenue beyond advertising."

The goals for this next phase - Newspaper Next 2.0 - are focused on providing practical solutions to help newspapers make the transition from a monolithic business model to a portfolio model.

"If the industry continues the way it is going, things are not going to be great," Davis told SNPA publishers. "But the good news is that we can change." He said newspapers need to exercise speed, intensity and focus in their efforts to help residents of their communities feel a complete part of those communities.

On the advertising side, newspapers need to help businesses connect with everyone who lives in the community who could possibly buy their products or use their services. They need to offer all kinds of solutions for all kinds of needs including narrow, targeted solutions to reach specific target groups, niches, interests; ways to create 1-to-1 customer relationships and build loyalty; and ways to build the business image or brand; ways to reach people when they are most likely to buy

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SNPA Convention Update: Newspapers and the Internet - Where Are We In 2007?

2007-10-30T18:36:32Z

While a few newspapers are being successful in extending their audience reach through their Web sites, most newspapers are only picking up an additional 1-3 percent of the market through their online efforts, Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock), told publishers at last week's SNPA Annual Convention.

He said The Atlanta (Ga.) Journal-Constitution reaches 17 percent of its market with ajc.com. Combined with the paper's 47 percent reach with its print edition and taking into account the 53 percent that is unduplicated (print and online), online readers account for an additional 6 percent of readers.

The Washington (D.C.) Post, Tampa (Fla.) Tribune and The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City) each achieve 4 percent incremental increases with online products.

Citing a Creative Destruction report, Hussman said newspapers can't succeed simply by replacing their hard-copy readers with online readers ... It estimates that a newspaper would have to attract two or three dozen online readers to make up for - in terms of advertising revenue - the loss of a single hard-copy reader.

Hussman also looked at the Top 10 online news destinations, calling three of the companies "free-riders" who don't employ a single reporter: Yahoo! News, AOL News and Google News.

He proposed that The Associated Press use the content generated by newspapers to create the world's greatest Web site, saying: "I think there would be an avalanche of users who would go there. It could generate a lot of revenue - maybe hundreds of millions of dollars" that could be shared by AP and the contributing newspapers.

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The Yahoo! Consortium: Another View

2007-10-25T22:01:41Z

In this article Terry Heaton reviews the Yahoo! Consortium, a partnership between the online giant and nearly 400 daily newspapers, and draws some noteworthy conclusions about who is getting the best of the deal. Are newspapers doing all the work while Yahoo! extends its reach into their markets? Here's a summary of the analysis form the article:

"Let's look at this first from Yahoo!'s perspective. They get:
- to expand their classifieds (hotjobs.com) to 400 new sites.
- "feet on the street" in all these markets to sell inventory at a premium that is now just remnant or not sold at all.
- to move their paid search to the most popular information sites in most markets.
- to expand their reach for national advertisers by 400 sites.
- local content to beef up their local offerings.
- to sell local advertising in the midst of other people's local content.
- to market a mobile application that includes local.

"While revenues are shared, this is still "found money" for Yahoo!, who has to do nothing except manage the technology. The labor is all provided by the newspaper companies, who are providing Yahoo! with an enormous sales force. One assumes that, sooner or later, the business cards of this sales force will bear the Yahoo! brand.

"So now, let's see what the newspapers get:
- association with the Yahoo! brand.
- increased traffic to their websites, potentially even local eyeballs.
- the potential to serve ads to more local web users via Yahoo! properties and pages.
- a share of the revenue gained by Yahoo! in the deal.
- unified search and classifieds platforms.

"I don't mean to suggest that any of these gains are insignificant. I just believe that if you weigh each side, Yahoo! comes out on top. The question is will the consortium members' share of the revenue split be sufficient to create a positive ROI for them? Sales labor is labor, and that is an expense. There may be upfront labor costs for Yahoo!, but the ongoing expense is with the newspapers."

Heaton offers several possibilities beyond Yahoo! that newspapers should also consider. Here's one that is particularly thought provoking:

"The real nut of Media 2.0 for local media companies is the enabling of commerce, not the serving of advertising ..."

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Citizen News Site Becomes MSNBC.com's First Purchase

2007-10-09T21:36:33Z

Newsvine, a "participatory news" site that allows people to write articles, link to mainstream news stories, discuss the news, and earn money by writing their own ad-sponsored columns, is now owned by MSNBC.com.

The year-and-a-half-old, Seattle-based company becomes the first acquisition for MSNBC Interactive News. It will continue as an independent brand, but MSNBC.com will have access to its "full suite of community product features," it said a statement announcing the deal.

Anybody can write content for Newsvine or create a page that includes links to news stories they find interesting, and the site promises to pay the columnists 90 percent of all ad revenue generated from their pages.

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IAB/PwC Reports New Heights, Slower Growth in Online Ad Revenues

2007-10-05T23:47:15Z

Online ad revenues grew 26.4 percent during the first six months of 2007 over the same period last year to nearly $10 billion, according to the latest report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). As with recent ad spending reports from Nielsen and TNS Media Intelligence, the findings reflected a slower growth rate than what IAB/PwC reported for the year-ago period, when ad revenues climbed 37 percent over 2005's first half.

While some in the investment community have interpreted the flagging revenue growth now reflected in three ad spending reports a cause for concern, the IAB prefers to see it as a sign of the sector's maturity.

Some highlights from the article:

- Search spending during the year's first half accounted for 41 percent of all revenues, compared with 40 percent for the year-ago period. In raw dollar terms, search grew 29 percent to $4.1 billion.

- Display advertising meanwhile increased from $2.4 billion, or 31 percent of the pie, in the first half of 2006, to $3.2 billion, or 32 percent, for the 2007 period.

- Classifieds grew $100 million to $1.7 billion, but accounted for only 17 percent of online ad spending in Q1 and Q2 of the year, compared with 20 percent for the same period last year.

- Lead generation, despite regulatory challenges and a mortgage crisis, grew from 7 percent to 8 percent of all online ad revenue, the report found.

- The top ten revenue-earning sites accounted for 70 percent of the total ad spend, down a hair from the 71 percent they commanded in 2006. The top 50 sites collectively accounted for 91 percent of all reported revenues.

- Consumer advertisers dominated online spending according to the report. Their campaigns accounted for 54 percent, or $5.4 billion, of all revenues for the measured period, compared with 49 percent, or $3.9 billion, in 2006.

- Within the consumer spending category, retail led the way with 47 percent of all ad revenues reported by the IAB's members, followed by automotive (21 percent), travel/hospitality (13 percent) and entertainment (9 percent).

- Financial services marketers came in second, with 15 percent of first-half revenues; computing advertisers came in third, with 11 percent of spending; and telecoms and media advertisers trailed with 8 percent and 6 percent of the market respectively.

- One item of statistical interest: In Q2, total revenues hit $5.1 billion, the first time they've transcended the $5 billion mark in a single quarter. That reflected a 4 percent sequential growth over first quarter revenues of $4.9 billion, IAB/PwC found.

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Gannett's New Editorial Approach: Leverage the 'Net and Stay Alive

2007-08-29T16:29:14Z

Newspapers may have ignored interactive in years past, but today leaders of smart news organizations, including the people at Gannett, are changing their minds and recognizing the effectiveness of Internet-related technologies and business models.

Gannett has recently developed a two-pronged approach to editorial that is extremely promising in that it builds on methods that are succeeding online. The first prong is called "hyper-local," and it focuses on niche content that only local news organizations can provide. The second is "citizen journalism," which marshals the growing phenomenon of "user generated content" into an editorial force of huge potential. This approach is covered in detail in the following article from Wired Magazine:

"One morning last December, Tom Callinan, editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, walked into his office to discover a package from his bosses at Gannett, the company that owns the Enquirer and 84 other dailies across the US. When he opened the box, he had to smile. It was a pair of Nike running shoes.

"Callinan -- and all the other top editors who received shoes that week -- got the point: The nation's largest newspaper chain was in deep trouble, and the editors had better get ready to run fast. Callinan had been ready for seven years. Back in 1999, he was in the audience when Intel chair Andy Grove bluntly told the members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the Internet and new technologies were about to swamp their hulking cruise ship of an industry. They had a choice: Change course or go under. The $57 billion industry didn't change, but Callinan did. By day, he was the editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in upstate New York. By night he attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, emerging two years later with a master's degree in new media. He decided newsroom culture would never change on its own. "I learned a phrase in grad school: 'Dislodge the equilibrium.'"

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Old Media Tires Of Being "Old"

2007-08-15T03:03:57Z

A trend is arising among so-called "old media" companies. Experiencing the "revenue reapportionment" that has been brought about by the rise of the Internet, traditional media companies, both large and small, are learning from their electronic rivals to find success in new approaches. This ClickZ.com report details several examples including this one of note:

"Gannett, McClatchy, and Tribune teaming up to collectively sell advertising across their Web properties. 'The Wall Street Journal' calls it 'a one-stop shop for online ads.' You could also view it as an ad network.

"'Open Network,' as the endeavor is working-titled, is aimed at capturing spend from the telco, automotive, and other major national campaigns local newspapers have had trouble securing in recent years with one consolidated buy."

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The Traditional Newspaper: Relaxing, Enjoyable, and the Perfect Gateway Online

2007-05-23T22:54:22Z

Traditional newspapers offer portability and easy access (no computer or Internet connection required). But online news sources offer far greater variety and depth. How is this new medium affecting the way people consume news? The article below follows the changing media consumption patterns of an executive, but it reveals a trend that's ongoing throughout our culture. Modern newspapers have already begun to join the online mix, but this is just the beginning. Modern readers often are using traditional newspapers to jump online for greater depth. Are newspapers ready to make the move with them? From the article:

"I'm a news junkie. Since I moved to the East Coast in 1988, I've been reading "The New York Times" and the "Wall Street Journal" every morning. I've been listening to CNN while getting dressed in the morning since it started airing. And over the past five years, I've added My Yahoo and Google News check-ins throughout the day. In the last year or so, I've also included RSS feeds and blog selections in the mix. Historically, though, my single biggest block of news time has been in the morning, as I read the papers and enjoyed my first cup of coffee.

"A year ago, I decided I needed Internet access and a PC to complete my morning news consumption experience. The newspaper stories I read increasingly featured URLs, which begged further exploration, plus many articles raised more questions than they answered. I moved my morning newspaper-and-coffee ritual from the kitchen table to my home office so I could add online. Things haven't been the same since."

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Radio Embraces Ads Created By Customers and Targeted Demographically

2007-05-05T02:38:06Z

The concepts of demographics, mapping and consumer ad creation is about to be embraced by the radio industry. As reported in the NY Times, a company called "TargetSpot" now allows clients to create radio spots online, as well as locate and target an audience based on demographic research. CBS Radio hopes to use the service to increase revenues by attracting new advertisers. From the article:

"As more people listen to the radio over the Internet, radio stations have been looking to generate new advertising revenue from the medium. A start-up company, TargetSpot, is trying to turn this nascent field into a viable business, and CBS Radio is its first customer.

"TargetSpot is planning a service that will let advertisers of any size -- from a local restaurant to a national chain -- create commercials for their desired audience and buy ads that will be slipped into online radio programming. The service, which CBS Radio in part financed, will debut June 28."

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Yahoo Strengthens Newspaper Consortium

2007-04-17T18:53:00Z

A group of 12 newspaper companies and Yahoo have expanded a deal formed in November last year. The agreement stipulates for shared content and the cross-selling of ads beyond the integration of local papers with Yahoo-owned HotJobs.com listings described in November. Graphical advertising will be routed through Yahoo's ad-serving, targeting, and inventory management system. Yahoo's sales force will sell newspaper inventory to national advertisers. In turn, each member newspaper sales team can sell online inventory controlled by Yahoo to local advertisers.

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ZenithOptimedia: Internet Ad Spending Will Overtake Radio Next Year

2007-04-03T15:22:58Z

Ad spending on the Internet is a fact of life. A report by London-based ZenithOptimedia claims that Internet advertising will continue meteoric growth through 2009. Furthermore, the report notes that by 2008 Internet ad spending will overtake spending for radio advertising and move into fourth place overall in worldwide ad spending. The question is, are newspapers taking steps to get their share? From the article:

"While the Internet -- with a total predicted ad spend in 2007 of $31.3 billion -- has a long way to go to reach the $168 billion spent on TV ads, it can hardly be considered a fringe or ancillary medium any longer, said ZenithOptimedia Head of Publications Jonathan Barnard. 'It's now, really, a mainstream advertising medium, and it has overtaken outdoor and radio, two of the longest-established traditional media,' Barnard told ClickZ.

"The report does not break down Internet ads by type. Another ZenithOptimedia study, conducted last year, estimated 35 percent of Internet ad money went to display ads in 2006, 43 percent went to search, 19 percent went to classified, and 3 percent went to other forms including e-mail and mobile."

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