Erik says...

Total advertising revenues (both print and online) declined 16.6 percent to $37.85 billion, according to the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America.  That is $7.5 billion less than in 2007.  Print advertising alone declined 17.7.  Classifieds were down 29.7 percent. And even online advertising was down 1.8 percent to $3.1 billion.

Newspapers are shuttering their print editions, laying off staff, or closing entirely as a result of this severe contraction in revenues brought on by the double whammy of economic recession and competition from the Web. Drilling down into the fourth quarter numbers, total advertising dollars shrank 19.74 percent, making it the tenth straight quarter in which revenues have declined, and the sixth straight quarter in which the rate of decline has been accelerating:

3Q07: -7.4%
4Q07: -10.3%
1Q08: -12.85%
2Q08: -15.11% 3
3Q08: -18.11%
4Q08: -19.74%

The rate of decline in online revenues also seems to be accelerating.  .Online revenues were $778 million, which was 8 percent lower than the year before.   The year-over-year decline was also greater than the 3 percent decline in the third quarter and the 2.4 percent decline in the second quarter (which was the first quarter when online ad revenues for the newspaper industry went down).

(Photo by Scott Glovsky).

The table below shows both online and total (print and online) advertising revenues for the newspaper industry for each quarter of last year.  The “total” column below includes both online and print revenues

And here are figures for annual newspaper advertising revenues for the past five years.  The newspaper industry is still huge, but the print portion is just getting decimated. Meanwhile online revenues still account for less than 10 percent of the total (8.3 percent, to be exact), and even those are facing challenges.

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(* Source: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins  *)

Just as TechDirt’s Mike Massnick, I was an editor in my high school journalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism department in my youth, as well as the editor for an underground publication that served not just the highschool, but the region’s BBS community. I imagine that if you were to poll a lot of the leading members of the blogosphere, you’d find quite a few folks that fall into both of those categories during their high school years.

Thus, it wasn’t hard for me to identify with Massnicks observations based on a story he picked up about a high school principal who shut down the high school newspaper after being offended by an editorial regarding flagburning:

Shasta High published its last issue of the Volcano, the student newspaper, before the end of classes last week with an image on the front page of a student burning the American flag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_States and an editorial inside defending the practice.

“The paper’s done,” said Milan Woollard, Shasta High principal. “There is not going to be a school newspaper next year.”

Given the pervasiveness of blogging and social media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media in today’s online world, Mike rightly muses what the point of this is, “as there’s nothing to stop the students from taking the content, and putting it all online and not needing any stamp of approval from the school administration.” He then goes on to muse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse for a few sentences on the value of even having a school newspaper in the first place.

As for my high school journalism experiences, I can say that they were infinitely more valuable than the experiences I had even in college. My own little underground publication began as far back as middle school, and continued its run up until my later years in high school, when other entreprenurial ventures took my attention.

Still, experiences in my high school journalism classes weren’t valuable because of what I learned about publishing, but because of the adviser who served as a role model for instilling journalistic ethics and best 

practices. She also forced us into exploring what our personal strengths and talent assets were, and into finding ways that could best be applied towards journalism.  She gave us the instinct to always be on the hunt for the hook and the story, and not be a passive observer of life, but a chronicler.

These are the more important tenants of journalism, as I see them.  All the rules, business models, procedures, and even the ethics can change and shift with time and the various media one uses to practice their craft.

What needs to shift in high school journalism, then?  Clearly we’re moving more towards an online social media dominant future, so instead of teaching them the ability to run a form of journalism sure to be dead by the time they’ve graduated from college, how about we create curriculum that shows them how to successfully navigate the waters of social media.  I’ve often heard the blogosphere described as a giant version of the high school cafeteria, with all the drama and infighting (hint: we call them bitchmemes, these days).

What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt the material to modern life, and likely a great deal cheaper than paying to have a paper sent to press. If we’re truly interested in taking our little Web 2.0 experiments to the mainstream, we need to be pushing to export our experience to the ones who will be running this joint in a few years.

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(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006, the biggest drop in revenue since 1950, the year they started tracking annual revenue.

Online provides some solace for the dead-tree business, with internet ad revenue growing 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006, but a rate significantly lower than the 31.4% growth the year before, and not even close to replacing the losses from print. Online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenues.

Newspapers do have a future, but as I wrote in November, we are yet to see a major consolidation of print in the United States. Declining revenues will ultimately force consolidation across print media in the United States, and many of those that fail to embrace change will be on borrowed time.

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(* Source: Kristen Nicole *) 

That's one for the book club, Mr Ian... 

(* Source: Erick Schonfeld *) 

Today, Fast Company relaunched its Website as a business social network, putting blog posts, comments, and questions from its readers front and center. Readers are now are encouraged to sign up, create a profile, and “join the business conversation.”

Over the past few years, the print version of Fast Company has been brought back from near-death (thanks largely to the efforts of top editors Bob Safian and Will Bourne, both of whom were editors of mine years ago at Fortune). Now it is trying to shake things up on the digital side. You might have heard that guy Scoble is starting FastCompany.TV.

Next, it wants to tap into social media. A magazine’s readership is not a social network, but it is a community of interest. And Fast Company seems to understand the difference between the two. Edward Sussman, the president of Mansueto Digital, explains this in a post:

First off, here’s what it’s not: It’s not a pure social network. . . . You go to Facebook or MySpace and find the friends and co-workers you already know. The real world gets reproduced virtually. Maybe you meet a friend of a friend.

We’re not that.

We’re an entirely new community of people brought together because we want to share ideas about business. We like business. We think it’s important. Work gives more meaning to our lives. We believe business profoundly helps define our culture.

On FastCompany.com, you can now start your own blog, join a group, post a video, comment on articles, or suggest a “Fast Talk” question to start a debate. Articles from the print publication are interspersed with blog posts from readers, experts, and staffers, and are arranged in a blog-like chronology on the front page.

The idea is to make it easier for readers to interact with staff writers and contributors, and write their own thoughts, which might be featured prominently on the site. Every contribution a reader makes gets collected on his or her profile page, tagged, and placed into one of the eight sections on the site (innovation, technology, leadership, management, design, social responsibility, careers, and work/life balance). The site is built on top of the open-source content-management software Drupal. And it will support OpenID.

During the dying days of Business 2.0, I remember sitting in editor Josh Quittner’s office brainstorming about how we could do pretty much the exact same thing to save that magazine. We never got beyond the brainstorming. Whether or not this will work for Fast Company depends on how smart its readers are and how willing they are to contribute. But any media site that does not listen to its readers and, indeed, allow them to take over the conversation at times, is doomed for the dustbin.

We saw this with the recent relaunch of the Industry Standard, which tries to engage readers to predict future business events. And we will continue to see it moving forward. As a result, mainstream media and the blogosphere will become harder and harder to tell apart. It will just all become part of the bigger conversation.

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(* Source: Duncan Riley *)  

Picture and file hosting has established credentials as a business idea. As the cost of storage has rapidly decreased as social networking has boomed picture hosting has been a hot vertical. There’s no shortage of sites in this space, and easy money to be had. At the very top Photobucket was acquired by MySpace for $250 million. To date free file hosting sites have been just that: free file hosting where essentially you get a service for free and the operators keep the profits from the site. Shareapic wants to change that.

Shareapic’s model is simple. It offers the same basic service other free hosting sites offer; upload your pic, get an embed code then display the pic on your site of choice. But Shareapic believes that their success in hosting files and profiting from this should be rewarded. Every registered Shareapic user gets a cut of any advertising revenues Shareapic makes. Primarily this isn’t based on advertising revenue made against each image (although users can add their Adsense code for some revenue via Google), payments are calculated based on image views. Their example:

If in month one Shareapic calculates to distribute $1,000 to our members, we will first tally up the total number of image views for that month. Using these two numbers we can determine the respective payouts for each user. If there were a total of 500,000 image views for the month, image views will equate to $0.002 each (1,000 divided by 500,000), or $2 per 1000 image views. If you’re posting lots of pics in forums, MySpace or eBay, you can see how easy it is to earn quite a bit of money!

Perhaps the only draw back is that Shareapic doesn’t disclose the revenue share; it may lack transparency but it’s still more than other sites pay in this space, which is zero.

We’ve covered two other companies that paid members to participate today, AGLOCO which went to the deadpool, and Capazoo, both of which had dubious multi-level marketing schemes (some would suggest pyramid schemes) and usually come with a catch. By comparison Shareapic has an honest model, so honest in fact that it should be the way of the future. What Shareapic does is recognize that users of a free service provide a financial benefit to the provider, and that in return profits provided by user participation should be shared (at least in part) back. Imagine the hours and hours put in by Facebook users or users of other sites; they may be free services but the providers benefit from each participant, and in the case of Facebook’s valuation, greatly. Expect to see more sites like Shareapic who value their users to the point that they offer financial rewards in return; it’s not only a smart marketing pitch it’s also fair recognition of your time and your effort in a market where many have business models that expect a free ride from their users. Build it and they will come may well be replaced with reward them for their time by sharing profits, and we’ll all be the winners from that.

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(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

Duncan says... 

IBM released an interesting new report earlier this week that predicts the end of advertising as we know it within 5 years.

To quote IBM

Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising.

To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels…

The report observes four change drivers tipping the advertising industry balance of power:”

• Control of attention,

• Creativity,

• Measurement, and

• Advertising inventories

Consumers’ attention has shifted, with personal Internet time rivaling TV time. Consumers have tired of interruption advertising, and are increasingly in control of how they interact, filter, distribute, and consume their content, and associated advertising messages. IBM’s survey findings demonstrated that half of DVR owners watch 50 percent or more of programming on re-play, and that traditional video advertising doesn’t translate online: 40 percent of respondents found ads during an online video segment more annoying than any other format.

Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies, while publishers and broadcasters are broadening their own creative roles. Advertisers are demanding accountability and more specific individual consumer measurements across advertising platforms. Self-service advertising exchanges are attracting revenues that were once exclusively sold through proprietary channels or transactions.

The Full report here (pdf) makes for interesting reading, particularly for anyone working in an advertising related business. A lot of it states what many of us already know, but it doesn’t hurt to have this validated in writing.

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(* Source: Chris Anderson *)

As with Radiohead's bold step taken against the music industry with the launch of their new album for "Free".  Chris takes a look at the book industry and debates what "Free"means with a few interesting points of view taken between promotion, sales and what's complicated.

Chris says 

Unlike simply selling what we make, free requires creative thinking about how to make money around what we make. That is, as Adams says, "complicated". Which is why I think there's a book in it.

 

More here 

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(* Source: eMarketer *) 

The Web is effective, but some find it intrusive.

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(* Source: Techcrunch *) 

Michael says... 

The New York Times took their personalized home page product out of beta today - see it . The look and feel is about the same as it was a a year ago when it - Think , or , with the New York Times logo and without the widgets.

There’s an argument that the product will bring customized home pages to the masses, although frankly Yahoo has already done a good job of this with well over 50 million users. This will be particularly useful for people who live, eat and breathe the New York Times, but others may find it a bit much.

Users can also add pre-selected non-NYT content or their own favorite RSS feeds, and modules can be dragged around the page, just like every other customizable home page.

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(* Source: David Felt *)

It is always refreshing to see old attempting to understand the new and not be afraid of the change but to embrace it with such gusto and recognise it's potential.  Long live! The new media king has spoken.

Rupert Murdoch says 

Traditional companies are feeling threatened. I say, bring on the changes.

Everyone knows that networking--once a face-to-face affair, sometimes captured in a Rolodex--is now worldwide, instant, and impervious to constraints of distance, time or cost.

Those of us in so-called old media have also learned the hard way what this new meaning of networking spells for our businesses. Media companies don't control the conversation anymore, at least not to the extent that we once did. The big hits of the past were often, if not exactly flukes, then at least the beneficiaries of limited options. Of course a film is going to be a success if it's the only movie available on a Saturday night. Similarly, when three networks divided up a nation of 200 million, life was a lot easier for television executives. And not so very long ago most of the daily newspapers that survived the age of consolidation could count themselves blessed with monopolies in their home cities.

All that has changed. Options abound. Fans of small niches can now find new content they could never before. Going elsewhere for news and entertainment is easier and cheaper than ever. And people's expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.

Consequently the old media are threatened by the erosion of our traditional profit centers. Certainly we can't count on things like print classified advertising being around forever. Similarly, DVRs undermine the mainstay of broadcast television's business model: the commercial.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude from this that the age of content is over. On the contrary, people want content more than ever, and there is a role for companies that can provide good stuff--"good" being the operative word. Quality is more important than ever, because the marketplace is more ruthlessly competitive. Options are not merely one click of the remote away; devices undreamed of a few short decades ago are at least as tempting as a change of the channel.

Old media can survive--and thrive--in this new environment, but they must adapt. We must learn how younger generations of consumers prefer to receive their news and entertainment, and we must meet those expectations.

The good news is that we are learning--and fast. Take the type of media I know best--news. News is in more demand than ever, but the vast network of Internet-savvy news junkies want their news with several fresh twists: constantly updated, relevant to their daily lives, complete with commentary and analysis, and presented in a way that allows them to interact not just with the news but with each other about the news. They won't wait until six o'clock to watch the news on television or until the next morning to read it in isolation. This plainly provides a challenge for news providers but also an opportunity to be far more engaged with the audience.

Companies that take advantage of this new meaning of network and adapt to the expectations of the networked consumer can look forward to a new golden age of media. Far be it from me to suggest that either I or my company have all the answers. No one does. But the future of media is a future of relentless experimentation and innovation, accelerating change, and--for those who embrace the new ways in which consumers are connecting with each other--enormous potential.

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(* Source: Kristen Nicole *) 

Netvibes is announcing Universes, the rich media portal for a customized start page.

Netvibes Universes allows brands to create their own start page that can be customized by other users for their own use. The start pages feature rich media such as widgets, RSS feeds, videos and images. Netvibes will initially launch about 100 branded Universes from artists such as Mandy Moore and 50 Cent, as well as publications such as Time and The Washington Post. Soon, Netvibes will enable anyone to create their own rich media Universe, granting the ability for these to be shared as well.

With Netvibes Universe, companies and individuals can create a startpage to be shared, and offer a customized option for others to choose what parts of that information they’d like to take and keep for themselves. Netvibes initiated a new way to receive and track information, and their Universes release offers a new way to distribute packaged information. It’s more inclusive than a single RSS feed, blog entry, or podcast, and could prove to be an effective marketing tool once start pages really take off with mainstream users. I’m anxious to see how individuals’ Universes options will be presented and utilized, how advertisements will be incorporated with branded Universes, and what Pageflakes and Google will incorporate with their own start pages next.

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(* Source: Luyi Chen *) 

Xplus is the online publishing platform of Nu Channel, a company established in 2003. Its shareholders include ID Tech Ventures, Legend Capital, China Merchants & Fortune Venture Investment Group, etc. Originally its main business is online emagazine. Although it has launched a platform for users to upload DIY magazines, but the whole UGC market in China still not matures enough for any serious business to rely on.

What caught our eyes is its new online newspaper publishing platform. It launched by the end of last year. It provides a new navigation style that combines traditional and online newspaper.

The advantage of traditional newspaper is how things are organized on one page, big headlines, fonts, images, etc. You can recognize important stuffs at a glance. Xplus epaper shows you an image of the hardcopy of the newspaper. Users can click the pixel area of any particular article and read it on the right side. Also it provides search, headline view of all the articles on one page and navigation to others pages, etc. In one word, it provides a way just like reading real newspaper and its content is more discoverable. What technology it uses? Seems Flash.

It also has some social features too. Such as people read this newspaper also read the following ones. People can leave comments on the newspaper, although not to each article, but the whole volume of one day. On its about page, they have an image which shows their business model. By showing newspapers in this way, they can track how users find interesting stuffs on a page and this data can be used by publishers to tweak their printing style, advertisers can adjust their strategy accordingly.

As the company said on a 5G seminar, newspapers will never die, and its evolution will last. The other big news about newspaper today is Usatoday’s relaunch with a bunch of social features.

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(* Source: Misha Cornes *)

This week USAToday.com revealed a new look and a serious upgrade to its features.  Along with Web 2.0 standards like article tagging, tabbed browsing, and more white space, what you'll really notice are the new community components.

In a clear acknowledgement on the shifting balance between newspaper-as-authority and newspaper-as-content-curator, USAT offers:

• In-screen content feeds from other sources
• Reader comments highlighted against every article
• Digg-style voting for popular stories, with a directional stock indicator
• Photo uploads from citizen journalists
• User profile pages
• Recommend stories or comments to other readers

While they have clearly taken some pages from the New York Times playbook, the site goes even further in trying to redefine what a newspaper website can be.  In a letter to readers, the editorial staff lay out their ambitions clearly:

"[The redesign] is a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience."

While USAToday has never been considered a paper of record, it's very significant that America's most-read paper is seeking to democratize news.  When it comes to information consumption, the user is more in control than ever.

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Xplus is the online publishing platform of Nu Channel, a company established in 2003. Its shareholders include ID Tech Ventures, Legend Capital, China Merchants & Fortune Venture Investment Group, etc. Originally its main business is online emagazine. Although it has launched a platform for users to upload DIY magazines, but the whole UGC market in China still not matures enough for any serious business to rely on.

What caught our eyes is its new online newspaper publishing platform. It launched by the end of last year. It provides a new navigation style that combines traditional and online newspaper.

The advantage of traditional newspaper is how things are organized on one page, big headlines, fonts, images, etc. You can recognize important stuffs at a glance. Xplus epaper shows you an image of the hardcopy of the newspaper. Users can click the pixel area of any particular article and read it on the right side. Also it provides search, headline view of all the articles on one page and navigation to others pages, etc. In one word, it provides a way just like reading real newspaper and its content is more discoverable. What technology it uses? Seems Flash.

It also has some social features too. Such as people read this newspaper also read the following ones. People can leave comments on the newspaper, although not to each article, but the whole volume of one day. On its about page, they have an image which shows their business model. By showing newspapers in this way, they can track how users find interesting stuffs on a page and this data can be used by publishers to tweak their printing style, advertisers can adjust their strategy accordingly.

As the company said on a 5G seminar, newspapers will never die, and its evolution will last. The other big news about newspaper today is Usatoday’s relaunch with a bunch of social features.

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(* Source: Steve Rubel *) 

USA Today is unveiling a massive overhaul of their web site that adds a number of great features. The notable additions include: reader comments on every story, the ability to create a profile page that can be shared with others, citizen journalist photos, story tagging and digg-like recommendation buttons.

This is exactly the direction USA Today needs to follow. However, it doesn't go quite far enough. In addition to building these features, the media need to bridge their communities to the ones where we already spend our time. RSS, widgets and embedded content would help here. For example, USA Today should let us add our blog, Twitter or Facebook feeds or even embedded YouTube vids to our profile pages.

Connecting communities is so easy today with web services and it would go a long way toward making the their site - or any site for that matter - stronger. Hopefully we'll see this happen soon.

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(* Piers Fawkes *) 

There's an interesting thought piece by Bjorn Jeffries in Sweden who reacts to local newspapers' moves to buy up web based communities. He argues that newspapers, having got stung by the loss of classified sales to and , are wrongly scrambling to buy the next big thing:

Youth communites differ from online classifieds in one crucial aspect - the classifieds took money from the newspapers. These communities don’t, and can’t. They are aimed for a demographic that the newspapers never really had anyway. So worrying about making a new Blocket-mistake isn’t really relevant.

Good Old Trend » Blog Archive » Communities are the new classifieds

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(* Source: Josefine Koehn *)

 

On December 21, 2006, Europe’s biggest entertainment portal Bild.T-Online is due to launch the new English language newspaper “The AvaStar”. The title will be available once a week for 150 Linden dollars (42 Euro cents) in the virtual Internet world “Second Life”. Bild.T-Online is offering special attractive launch terms to its advertising clients.

“The AvaStar” will offer its readers – the “residents” – around 30 pages of wide-ranging information about life in the virtual world. The majority of its readers will be relatively young, well educated men and women with an average age of 32 years. Its approach is direct and emotive. “The AvaStar” aims to serve as a guide and help newcomers in particular to find their bearings in the “Second Life” environment. The content is clearly structured: News, Business, Celebrity & Gossip, Style & Fashion, Travel and Entertainment form the editorial framework. A weekly guide to “Second Life” rounds off the newspaper.

To mark the launch, the marketing team of Bild.T-Online is offering attractive first booking discounts. The newspaper is sold through street vendors, self-service boxes and the website www.the-avastar.com. During the launch, promotion teams will also be active in “Second Life”.

Gregor Stemmle, CEO of Bild.T-Online: “‘The AvaStar’ is the first mass medium in ‘Second Life’ to be produced with a professional background. Using their experience in journalism and publishing, Bild.T-Online and Axel Springer are establishing a newspaper format for a broad readership and at the same time creating a very interesting publicity setting for advertising clients.”

“Second Life” is a three-dimensional world of its own on the Internet. Today nearly two million residents are registered as virtual people at www.secondlife.com, and at the click of a mouse they lead a life just like in the real world: they work in offices, go shopping, stroll down boulevards and have, in the Linden dollar, their own currency (there are 270 Linden dollars to one US dollar).

Numerous companies have discovered this Internet world as a place for testing trends in a virtual situation. Above all, “Second Life” has created a world that appeals to the users: the market is currently growing by about 15 percent per month, and the number of members by more than 20 percent.

Bild.T-online The AvaStar

Second Life

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(* Source: Marketing Shift *) 

Publishers continue to realize that the fastest path to increasing online revenue is to embrace social media, and acquiring Web 2.0 startups gets you there faster.

Sports Illustrated parent Time, Inc. just bought FanNation.com to acquire the community of fans who can generate volumes of traffic.

Being able to comment on, rate, and share stories is essential to online publishing, and buying a site that already has the tools in place (and audience) saves the cost of in-house development. Allowing fans to participate provides the loyalty that will keep them coming back.

While online ad revenue is growing quickly, it's still not enough to make up for print revenue losses. Sports Illustrated gets 15 to 20 percent of its revenue from online activities, but there's no reason why that figure couldn't be at least one-third with the proper implementation of social media.

The news isn't something "out there" for us to read and move on anymore. It's interactive, and the new media stars are in a good position to help old media make the transition.

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(* Source: Adam Turinas *)

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(* Source: David Feldt *)

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Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.

Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

More here. 

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