Commentary

What About Print?

For all our hand wringing about the value of online advertising, the most valuable information may well be about the weaknesses of some traditional media.

Back in the early days, online media reps tried to pull a fast one: they tried to sell sites based on the unique user figures – essentially, the equivalent of circulation in print buying. They suggested that buyers should purchase the chance of a viewer to see the particular page on which their ad appeared. Of course, since we could tell what pages were viewed, we buyers instead demanded the impression metric. The reps soon caved in.

But what people sort of forgot was the stunning difference in performance we saw with our ads between the impressions approach and the “circulation” approach. There was an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency when buyers were charged only for those times a viewer actually saw the relevant page. Print buyers don’t demand to purchase print by the impression only because those numbers are impossible to track offline.

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Which gets us to thinking. What about print? How many ads did you see, never mind read, in the last newspaper you opened? Is it possible that when print buyers purchase by circulation they’re wasting enormous portions of the budget? The only studies I’ve seen about how often people actually see the average print ad were performed by either media companies or companies that sold research to media companies.

Two weeks ago, when NYT.com announced that more people were reading the online version of the newspaper than were reading the print version, this relationship came into stark contrast. While roughly the same number of people take their New York Times news from the two different media, the revenues paint a wildly disproportionate picture. Perusing the latest quarterly reports, it appears the New York Times brings in about $250 million in advertising in the course of a quarter. The NYT.com site: about $16 million.

Someone’s paying too much. Yes, I understand that there are many, many more placements in a newspaper than there are in the average online user session. And I understand that those individual placements “reach” many more people. But I think we should think long and hard about this. It well might be that an online and an offline viewers’ habits are quite similar in their news consumption. It might be that they read roughly the same amount of material and notice about a similar portion of advertising. It may be that media buyers will kick themselves in the future for not seizing this online opportunity sooner.

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