Content Bridges

Scratching the Ad Niche....and Blurring the Boundaries

Look at it this way: the days of the daily newspaper as a mass medium are waning. Not over, but waning. As daily and Sunday circulation sprial downward, they are largely be replaced by the daily habit of quick, web reading. We're a quick-reading, check-in kind of people, now. When you look at who's using the major news aggregators -- Yahoo! News, MSNBC, CNN, Google News and more -- their demographics are across the board. Young, not-so-young (!), monied, starting out, women and men. The new news aggregators are becoming the new mass medium, with one in four Americans checking a GYM news site more than once a day and one in two at least daily, according to a report I did earlier this year for Outsell.

So the smarter newspaper companies are pulling as much cash out of mass as long as they can, while making increasing bets on niche, making bets on all kinds of local supplements from real estate (empty nester, first-time buyer, remodeler) to health care (neonates to dotage). Those niches are largely been presented in that old stand-by, newsprint.

Today's Times notes plans by both Gannett's USAToday and Dow Jones to add glossy magazines to their mix. USAToday's monthly would focus on advertiser-friendly topics like boating, hiking, fishing -- all areas that attract lots of discrtionary, higher-end spending. The publication will start in October. Dow Jones is at an earlier stage, planning a new supplement for its Saturday Journal. It's undoubtedly mining Personal Journal territory here, seeing which of the upper-demo lifestyle categories it assiduously covers is best suited for shiny advertising. It's the Weekend and Personal Journals that are ascendant in these new niches.

It's ironic of course that newspapers are moving into glossy magazine markets at the same time as those markets are as mature (or more) than daily newspaper ones. In this case, it is print getting into the other guy's print. The boundaries between newspapers and magazine companies are blurring.

That's much like the blurring that is going on in local sites. Newspaper sites still dominate, but broadcast sites -- powered by networks like Internet Broadcasting, Broadcast Interactive and WorldNow -- are coming at them. And of course, they are coming at, among other things, their classifieds. Yes, classifieds are shrinking at a signifcant rate. But they are still worth more than $15 billion a year, so broadcasters want their nibble, and online they can bite.

Newspaper people trying to take business away from magazines and Yellow Pages publishers. Broadcasters taking business away from newspaper people. Google inching its way into all those markets, through print and broadcast rep deals. The boundaries have clearly been breached, and it's a scramble for every dollar out there.

That's LIFE: R.I.P., R.I.P, R.I.P

I couldn't help but be struck this week by Time, Inc.'s final (?!) closure of Life Magazine. Life, the magazine, had moved from iconic to ironic to occasionally moronic. As Time revived it for a third time and turned it into of all things a largely Friday-oriented newspaper supplement, you got the sense it was a Parade Lite or a USAToday Weekend wannabe. And unfortunately, there are only so many Franklin Mint ads to go around.

When I saw Ann Moore, Time Inc's chief speak in New York at SIIA in January, she was proud to unveil a new initiative: having Google digitize the photo legacy of Life, which of course for many years served as the unofficial history of the U.S. Bourke-White, Parks, Eisenstaedt. How will Time harvest value from these photos and how much Google will take, we don't quite know, but we do know there's a lot of value there.

In a sense, Life is worth more dead than alive. It is it's past that is compelling, that is unique and that is proprietary. Putting out a newspaper supplement is, with apologies to the President and Ford Motor, not the way forward.

Moore saw this, as others had seen, but she's acting more quickly to prune off the vestiges of the company, re-allocate spending to where it makes sense at this digital moment -- video, community, celebrity -- and that makes sense. It's a time to move for all old media companies sitting on assets and on opportunities.

We'll miss Life, but the first version, not the subsequent revivals that diminished its value.

Google, After Brussels: "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)"

Okay, how many Google attorneys can you fit on the head of a pixel? The growth in Google's Legal Department may soon be paralleling the hockey stick growth of its ad business.

Just last week, Google lost one court case, as a Belgian court decided that, non!, it couldn't take headlines and briefs from news sites, put them up on Google and share no revenue. The Belgian case brought by Copiepresse gives further mojo to Agence France Presse's case against Google, to be played out in a D.C. courtroom. In addition, the work of European consortium in putting together a more trackable news content tracking system -- ACAP -- all lead to the same set-to. 

News publishers want a better deal from Google.

Why is this important? Sources in and around Google News will tell you that of all those visitors coming to Google News --   8 million uniques in December -- only about 5% of them click through from the headlines/briefs to the originating news site. That would mean 95% stay in and around Google, satisfied with their news briefing -- just give me the top of it in one place, thank you.

In the U.S., there's been less litigation, though talk of it pervaded U.S. news company law offices on and off for years. Can they do that? Could we stop them? The grayness of the legal area has largely led news companies away from the courts and, haltingly, into the business of business development. There have been many discussion between news publishers and Google, Yahoo, MSN and other players. Certainly, the newspaper consortium deal with Yahoo on recruitment ads is a step toward a wider agreement on news content as well. And Google has already agreed to license AP content for a still-unspecified new product.

Heavens, Google wouldn't acknowledge that it can't take heads and briefs without paying for them.

"We have always explained that any licensing agreements Google does with content providers is for use that goes beyond indexing or referencing," Paris-based Google attorney, told the Times.

Mais, bien sur. As in the AP agreement, which has been shrouded in public grayness, it's clear that Google plainly saw it was side-stepping that legal indexing question by finding a way to push some money in the direction of AP.

Let's parse Googlespeak. What Google is really saying is, "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)".

Paid Circ That Seems.....Free

Paid print circulation still pays the bills. I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year, mainly in advertising, while each SI.com visitor fetches a measly $5. That differential explains why prestigious, long-standing, paid circ vehicles like Time Magazine are just about giving away their product......while calling it paid. Anything to keep those print readers and that print rate base as high as possible, 'til that $5 zooms into double digits and beyond.

The offer I got today:

• 56 weeks of Time at the "Welcome Back" rate of $19. (Yes, given my overflowing NetVibes RSS reader, it's hard to find time to read Time.) 19 bucks against a cover price of $252.45 for the same 56 issues! That's a 92.5% discount.

But that's not all:

• FREE GIFT: The ULTRASONIC Laser Level
• BONUS: 6 Additional Months of TIME (when you pay now)
• TIME  Archive at www.Timearchive.com, featuring 80 years of coverage, for free.

I suppose I can use the level to measure the tectonic changes shaking the publishing industry.

I should note the offer is labeled: "For Senior Citizen Use Only."  Like an AARP pitch. I'm flattered but the MSN Life Expectancy calculator gives me another 42 years of life expectancy.

It's an offer that's hard to resist, and I won't. That archive can come in mighty handy for research.