Advertising, Coupons, Digitization, Disintermediation

Dinosaurs: Newspapers, Print Advertising, Post Office

Last Call — Medium: "... From the advertiser’s point of view, the nation’s newspapers have become little more than a blue-bag delivery service, with a horoscope and enough local sports inside to get people to open the bag. Inserts are one of the last sources of advertising to resist digitization. They are also the next to go. Businesses like Cellfire and Find & Save are working on digital coupons; stores like Kroger’s and Safeway already offer online coupons direct to customers. This digitization is progressing as print circulation decays. Back in Roanoke, the Times was on the market for 5 years before it was bought; in that time the paper lost a quarter of its Sunday readers — 106,000 to 85,000 — and a third of its weekday readers — 96,000 to 65,000. This story too is being repeated all over the country. The print audience continues to defect to mobile, abandon the local paper, or die...."

Follow @johnmpoole

Digital Media--old media just doesn't get it

From Comcast/NBC's horrific missteps of Olympic coverage to the certainty of continuing declines in mainstream media (paywalls will lead to certain death)--it's clear that old media (at least in the U.S.) just doesn't "get it," so it's no surprise the American public is going elsewhere--like British media--

British invasion hits US online media | News.com.au: "BRITISH media have been making inroads in the US market by invading online space, seizing readers who might otherwise visit websites of American outlets such as Fox News or The New York Times. And, even though US news organisations are widely respected around the world, the Brits are peeling away American readers. According to data from research firm comScore, the tabloid Daily Mail's Mail Online overtook The New York Times last year as the world's biggest newspaper website and held the top spot in June with 44.7 million visitors. Separate data from web analytics site Alexa.com showed The Guardian and BBC websites were among the top 15 news sites, holding their own among CNN, Yahoo! News and others. "In the English-speaking world, the divider of the Atlantic Ocean is ebbing away because of the internet," said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with the research firm Outsell. . . ."If you talk to the major British quality publishers, about a third of their traffic has been over the years in the US, which is a surprise," Doctor said. . . . One factor is how internet news searches work."Google has democratised the sourcing of news, so you are as likely to find a story from the BBC as from Chicago Tribune," Doctor said. "There is an audience of people who want another point of view, there is an expat audience, and you put all those together and it's significant." Rebecca Lieb, analyst with the Altimeter Group, said paywalls on some US sites such as the New York Times have driven readers elsewhere, and social media also can help drive momentum for sites from the British."Tweets and social mentions are becoming a significant driver of traffic to news sites," Lieb said. . . ."

For the best quality journalism in the English-speaking world, I personally recommend The Telegraph.

Tweet    Follow @johnmpoole