While researching information from my Thesis I ran across this unsettling bit of data from the Newspaper National Network website. It appears on the homepage in the green sidebar.
“Ad wantedness” is highest in newspapers. In fact, one recent study, reported that 90% of consumers prefer newspapers with ads to newspapers without ads. Newspapers are the primary source for shopping information for most product categories, with 52% of people seeing ads as “valuable” when planning their shopping. -Jason E. Klein President and CEO Newspaper National Network, LP
The statement is aimed at marketing people and is meant to sell them on the benefits of advertising in a newspaper. I thought maybe I misread it but sure enough, holy cow! This is extremely troubling news for newspapers. When I read that first sentence I interpret it as, “only 10% of newspaper readers purchase the paper purely for it’s content -consumers prefer newspapers with ads to newspapers without ads”.
This flies in the face of newspapers claim that their real value addition is their news coverage and editorial content. Let me get the sequence of this correct.
- advertisers are finding better ways of targeting their customers
- they leave general-information newspapers
- readers wonder where the advertisers went, as they prefer a newspaper loaded with ads
- readers get the hint and stop utilizing those newspapers
- readers follow advertisers, to niche sites and such
- the remaining advertiser and subscriber base cannot support the newspaper business model
Crazy. That’s really contrary to the conventional thinking that advertisers leave AFTER or WITH the departure of readers and subscribers.
The entire statement alludes to Nicholas Carr’s Unbundling theory (The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.) and my Krugman Paradox (the phenomenon where newspaper websites, even the biggest ones in the nation, cannot generate economically sustainable online advertising revenues).
What is a newspaper to do? The only thing I see is target the heck out of something which has a value (monetary) attached to it that will support your business model. Newspapers must create a product where 90% of the readers will want to read the product regardless if there were NO advertisements in it. Having said that, there are no catch all winning business model out there. Publishers can email me in regards to their specific situation for confidential appraisals.
I would love to get my hands on the report he cites. …I’ll send him an email and see if he’s interested in explaining to us.
-robert
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