Online Marketing & Advertising News
Google CEO insists online advertising is still king for newspapers
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has told newspaper bosses they should continue to rely on advertising but needed to embraced new technology to support more profitable business models, and insisted Google was there to help, not harm.Speaking at the Newspapers Association of America convention in San Diego yesterday, Schmidt assured newspapers that advertising is still king on the internet, and subscription-based models or micropayment schemes can only account for a small amount of revenue.However, he said these models were on their way. “I think you’re going to end up with all three,” he said.Schmidt’s speech came days after News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch said newspapers must begin charging for content in order to survive.His words also followed warnings from the Associated Press that it plans to police the web and is developing a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.Dean Singleton, AP chairman, said AP would actively pursue legal and legislative actions against those who were found breaching copyrights – hinting at news aggregator websites and blogs, such as the Huffington Post, and search engines like Google, which host headlines and snippets of many news articles, including AP, under terms of “fair use”.Although Google and AP signed a distribution agreement in 2007, the search engine giant has recently come under fire in the media, branded as the bane of the newspaper industry for hauling in profits from its ad-funded search results, which link to newspaper websites.Yesterday, Schmidt called on newspapers to work together with Google to create content that would entice readers and engage web users in a deeper online experience.Schmidt sees the future of the industry as more than just news online, but rather in user-generated and edited environments, much like Wikipedia, with real-time updates from services like Twitter, connected to users’ mobile phones.Further down the road, Schmidt sees the newspaper industry coming to resemble the television industry, with a majority of free content, balanced out with some pay-per-view content.However, he said the environment must remain ad-funded because subscriptions and micropayment models work on scarcity, adding “the internet distribution model doesn’t work on scarcity, it works on ubiquity.
Internet Marketing Strategies that Won’t Hurt Your Savings Much
Your new business will benefit a lot from various Internet marketing methods. But you don’t have to spend millions of dollars just to get some decent exposure for your company. There are ways to make your business be seen and felt without doing overkill with your advertisement expenses. Make use of your online power – through Internet marketing.
Here are simple methods that you may employ to boost the visibility of your business without shelling out more than what you can afford. However, these techniques need patience and some footwork to produce agreeable results.
Firstly, you need a website before you can make use of these low cost Internet marketing strategies. So go create one or hire a web developer. It will display your products and services. This will be used in employing the following Internet marketing techniques.
1. Affiliate Marketing - This is the process of recruiting a network of smaller websites known as affiliates to drive targeted traffic to a website. Ad copy and links will be provided by the advertisers. You will have to pay a certain percentage of the sales profit to your affiliates.
2. Links – One of your goals should be to attain a good ranking with search engines. One way to do it is through link building. This could be done through trading links to other businesses that are related with yours.
3. Newsletters- Sending out newsletters to your subscribers (those who signed up for your newsletters) will help greatly in establishing a good working relationship with your customers or prospective customers. It has to be short, sweet, consistent and written for a general audience.
4. E-mail Marketing: As one of the best cost-effective Internet marketing tools, it stays as a very important method of keeping your customers aware of your products and services. Just make sure to avoid spamming or soon enough you will have to close down your business due to complaints.
5. Articles: If you put quality content in the form of articles in your website along with your products and services, search engines will have to index your website. Getting your website indexed by popular search engines means more traffic for you.
6. Forums: Expand your Internet network is through joining forums that mainly discusses stuff regarding or related to your products and services. Actively posting responses or answers and asking relevant information will build your reputation as that forum’s member and boost your company’s visibility through your signature files. These signature files are those that go with your every post. Links to your website could be included in this signature.
Innovation in a World of E-Commerce Woe
Lean times are here again for online businesses, but the Web has changed considerably since the bubble popped nearly a decade ago. Just like before, survival will depend on fresh ideas and the courage to put money behind them. In fact, today’s problems may wind up forging tomorrow’s cash cows, inspiring new ways to advertise, monetize and search.It’s been nearly a decade since the Internet bubble burst in 2001, and the intervening years have seen the rise of powerhouse companies such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , MySpace and Facebook , which have helped broaden the scope of what was once referred to as the “Information Superhighway.”The Internet was once limited primarily to email communication, file transfers and other rather mundane purposes. It’s now evolved into a global social gathering place with as many diversions as the local mall, multiplex and fairgrounds combined. Users turn to the Web to read and post news and opinions on a smorgasbord of topics from politics to food.However, as the impact of an ongoing global economic crises continues, is the outlook for online businesses and services as rosy as it has been for the past eight years?
Why It’s OK for Newspapers to Die
The transition that’s taking place in the news publishing industry — from print to online — is a healthy step in technology-driven evolution, though there will undoubtedly be some short-term pain. The loss of print newspapers is akin to the loss of the horse and buggy. The Internet offers the potential for broader and deeper news reporting.The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased print publication this week to focus solely on the Web, a transition that frightened some in the publishing business, coming so shortly after the Rocky Mountain News shut down. However, as many in the tech industry are aware, this is simply a form of “creative destruction” that should boost both choice and economic activity in the longer term.”Creative destruction,” a term coined by Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, means exactly what it says — the process by which a new technology or structure replaces the old and builds a new infrastructure. This is how progress happens and capitalism moves ahead. For a clear example, think back a century or so, when Henry Ford released his first prototype automobile, relegating the horse and buggy, and the buggy whip industry, to obsolescence.Most would agree that such creative destruction resulted in a good outcome for society. Yet, not everyone is willing to let such revolutions take place without a fight. Indeed, some politicians have proposed bailing out newspapers, as the federal government has done for failing automakers. Don’t Panic “The media is a vitally important part of America,” said Frank Nicastro, who represents Connecticut’s 79th assembly district and advocated for a state government bailout of The Bristol Press. Likewise, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hinting at federal intervention to help the embattled San Francisco Chronicle.”We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect,” wrote Pelosi in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.No one disputes that a strong media is important for democracy, but the core issue is what that media should look like.There is “panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses,” said author Steven Berlin Johnson in a speech at the recent South By Southwest Interactive Festival, “and then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them — that we’re going to suffer as a culture because newspapers will no longer be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.”It is entirely possible that newspapers as we know them today may soon cease to exist. Still, as Johnson correctly points out, an examination of how the Web has evolved to cover technology news reveals the Net’s potential for covering other topics as well.”The state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert,” Johnson said. “Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: There is more volume, diversity, timeliness and depth.”That is what can and should happen to the local news — and toward that end, Johnson has started Outside.in, a local news Web service. Bright Light Resource limitations make it difficult for a single newspaper in Los Angeles or New York to cover every relevant story of local interest. When the Web takes over, however, there can be multiple blogs and companies competing to provide coverage, and the information becomes much broader and richer.This transition from a top-down method of news reporting to a more distributed system won’t be easy at first — and, like the horse-and-buggy drivers of 100 years ago, many old-school journalists will find themselves looking for a new job.Yet this change, a clear form of creative destruction, will create a more responsive and richer world of media with more stories and more ways of organizing and validating those stories than ever before.Before sounding the alarm or dipping further into public funds, politicians, bureaucrats and would-be saviors should note that not all newspapers are dying. The Bristol Press did, in fact, find a new owner — without a government bailout that could well have influenced the way that publication covered the news.Although papers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News have ceased distribution in print, the news itself will thrive in better form. Such an outcome is a bright light for the future of democracy. Politicians should let it happen, and they can help the transition by increasing the transparency of government.
Social Networks: From Media to Monetization to Multiplatform
Social networking sites like Facebook are growing fast, and they mostly rely on ads for revenue. Bringing in more advertisers is an important step because this market is not being monetized effectively, writes Parks Associates’ Kurt Scherf. Monetization inefficiencies abound, mainly because brands treat advertising in social media the same as they treat advertising in traditional media.Social networking has left an indelible mark on consumers in terms of the way they connect and interact with each other. Sites such as Facebook are adding users at an incredible rate, and the online dating site Match.com reported good growth in the latter stages of 2008.Parks Associates has found the percentage of broadband households using social networking sites is about the same across the U.S., the UK, and other major Western European countries. In the U.S., the percentage of consumers using social networking and social media sites will grow from 20 percent in 2008 to 30 percent in 2013.
Social Media A recent trend in social networks is the growth of social media — with users sharing personal content such as photos and videos. Today, fewer consumers engage in social networking, which requires creating and maintaining personal pages, but their level of engagement with social media is increasing.This trend is important in the evolution of the social media market because it promotes a higher level of consumer engagement and paves the way for advanced social media advertising strategies, both of which will attract more advertisers to the market. Monetization Challenges Bringing in more advertisers is an important step because this market is not being monetized effectively. Consumers are generally reluctant to pay for social media, so companies rely mostly on ad-supported models. However, monetization inefficiencies abound, mainly because brands treat advertising in social media the same as they treat advertising in traditional media, by using the same strategies and the same ad formats. The best social media advertising strategies are diverse, combining a variety of media (video, blogging and gaming) and platforms (PCs, TVs and mobile).The absence of appropriate measurement metrics also affects advertisers. Traditional online advertising campaigns are measured using the level of user interaction with the ads — click-through rates that report how many times users click a banner. However, there are few metrics today that measure how a user’s interaction with social media, such as posting blogs or remixing videos, corresponds with brand awareness, brand lift, or an increase in sales. The metrics that do exist today, such as “views” for online video, are not measured consistently. A lack of uniform metrics complicates determining the return on investment (ROI) for advertisers, thus precluding their willingness to include social media in their advertising mix. Experience As consumers integrate social media into their everyday lives, they want to augment their experience by accessing media from different platforms, specifically mobile phones and TVs. The most popular activity on the mobile phone remains direct media sharing, such as sending photos to friends. Secondary media sharing, such as visiting photo and video-sharing sites or social networks, is popular as well. Most of the large sites, including MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, have mobile versions, optimized for viewing on a mobile phone. Mobile phones, especially smartphones, are becoming much more media-friendly as well, offering larger screens for better viewing, more convenient input methods, and cheaper data plans.Although significantly younger and less developed compared to PC and mobile social media consumption, social media consumption on the TV is gaining in popularity. It allows consumers to augment their entertainment experience by injecting social elements, such as recommendations and live comments, into traditional media consumption. Given the appeal of extended access to social media, the question is not if but when these applications will arrive on connected TVs. Parks Associates’ data indicate features that complement search and discovery of programming will be the first to find traction as social-networking-on-the-TV features.
