Newspapers charge advertisers hefty sums of money for advertising in their print products. A one-time full page advertisement in The New York Times can easily cost $160,000. How many people read it / saw it? Half a million? One million? One million times 2.5? who knows? That’s the beauty of paper. It cannot generate accurate advertising metrics. Unfortunately for newspapers, print circulation is falling like a… finish this phrase.
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That’s also the problem / beauty of the internet. Website analytics are precise. For instance, I know how many people came to metaprinter.com today, where they came from, what they clicked on, and where they went when they left. Because the data is so powerful and ubiquitous, Advertisers can demand much lower online rates than their print counterparts. This is exactly what is happening online.
Going back to Flexible Display Technology. This technology is digital right? Well I’m all for using new innovative ways of displaying newspaper content,
but do not expect to generate print revenues from such a device. Advertisers will demand site data from these devices just as they do with their website advertising.
What to do? Align your business model to operate on industry wide online advertising margins and work to develop new ways to increase those margins. Take a close look at how Direct Mail companies have been managing their revenue stream. Newspaper are getting closer and closer to these models, or at least they should be if they want to succeed in the long run.
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