Much the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) hype and coverage this week focused on the marriage of video content and online distribution, as Yahoo and Google and others offered up more experimental combinations. In a nod to how technology has become more mainstream, you can read about a few of the highlights in most major newspapers… the next day.
I defy anyone to have kept up with the flood of news, pictures, videos, announcements, analysis, audio, and more from News.com, sister site CNET.com (wonder how many of these announcements will be actual products still in the US market during the 2006 holiday season?), Engadget, or the like. Before online media took hold, coverage would have been limited to industry print outlets, for the most part, with their finite pages, several days after the fact. Instead, we had minute-by-minute reports from the keynotes. Too much information, sure, but people eat it up, on their own time and at their own pace. Makes you wonder who’s actually in Vegas at the show! (Of course, from all reports, it’s jam-packed.)
Before the show, Robert Cringely took a swing at the past, present, and future of media with “Stop the Presses! How Pay-Per-Click Is Killing the Traditional Publishing Industry.” One of his conclusions (“much of print publishing as we have come to understand it is doomed.”) is nothing new, although throwing the dart at pay-per-click is a slightly different take on the transition which is obvious to anyone who’s had their eyes open for the last decade. Measurability across all marketing spends is changing the marketplace, but Cringely gets it wrong when he says that advertising is the problem. The movement of the audience is the problem; advertising dollars are just following that movement… call them smart lemmings.
The more egregious mistakes, though, start here:
…A website is not really an electronic magazine. It can contain all the stories of its print equivalent, but IT CAN’T CARRY AS MANY ADS. … Now compare this to the edit-to-ad ratio for most web pages. The densest web page will have one banner ad at the top, eight to 10 Google ads down the right side, and maybe another Google ad or two at the bottom. That sounds like a lot, but on a strict real estate basis, it is very hard to exceed an ad-to-edit ratio of 50 percent, and most web pages have three times as much editorial content as ad space — the exact reciprocal of the experience with paper publications.
Cringely is underestimating both publishers (of all shapes/sizes) and advertisers. I expect the ad-edit ratio to continue to increase as long as it makes more money for the publisher. Customers will decide if that works or not, and most traffic trends I’ve seen demonstrate that customers are not rebelling against additional advertisements (whether numerically or by page ratios) on web pages. There are limits, and my company is growing on the strength of online advertising, so I’m sure we’ll help find some of those limits over time.
At one time, though, I would have thought Cringely is right.
An alternate universe
In early 2001, CNET introduced big square-ish graphical advertisements to the web, breaking the mold from the 468×60 tyranny. These “Messaging Plus Units” (MPUs), or what the IAB nows calls the Medium Rectangle IMU, were big, bold, and different. This change captured a lot of attention, especially near the nadir of online advertising.
A less recognized part of the proposition was the promise of exclusivity on a page. On News.com, where the MPUs were introduced, only one advertisement per page was shown. Prior to the MPU, the page had a collection of different size units and text links, probably totalling 8-10 ads per page. So, an advertiser was given a bigger canvas and less competition on the page. If that combined promise had been marketing nirvana, then Cringely might be right about the ratio issue (except that he’s still wrong… read on).
Marketers loved the new size, and we’ve all witness the explosion of new shapes, sizes, and formats in the online advertising world, most of them bigger still.
The exclusivity? Few cared, and after some time had passed, multiple ads per page became the norm once more. I remain surprised by this, in some ways, but the numbers don’t lie.
More content does mean more advertising
The more obvious, and more useful, way to carry more ads is to have more content, Cringely’s SHOUTING in the quote above notwithstanding.
Cringely ignores that content doesn’t disappear from one time period to the next online, as it does in print. Last week’s — or last year’s — story still carries ads, and more content does mean more ads. There’s 90,000+ News.com stories online from a decade of coverage. Sure, recent coverage gets most of the audience, but that (cough) “long tail” does still wag in wonderful ways.
The Washington Post recently open its archives for 60 days in a bet that making more of their content available will make them more money. It doesn’t hurt them that NYTimes.com and WSJ.com, the other two major contenders for “national” newspapers are gated to varying degrees. (I didn’t even think about USA Today in that role, despite its print circulation… what does that say?)
The model isn’t the same for everyone, but much online media can, does, and will thrive with advertising.
Cringely is probably right about this, though:
Print publications fade from sight or continue primarily as art forms, rather than businesses. It will take another decade to happen, but happen it will.
Guess I’ll be an art lover.
As an aside: I think all of these companies racing to distribute video content in new ways should be hoping that Sony gets the PlayStation Portable into as many hands as possible, as fast as possible. I don’t have one, but the screen is gorgeous, and notably bigger than the video iPod. Use case for portable video still seems limited to travelling moments, whether commuting or flying, but I’m sure I’m missing something here.