Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Here’s a great summary of why mainstream media is having so many problems, from an article today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Mainstream media as a whole, the report found, isn’t losing its audience. It just doesn’t know how to get its new online customers – or anyone else who is reading what they’re producing through online aggregators – to pay.

Actually, in my opinion, it’s also getting all of those offline advertisers (everything from “Bob’s Pet Shop” to Walmart) to spend on online advertising. Unfortunately (for mainstream media) the technical know-how and acceptance of online advertising as a way to drum up customers is dismal. I’m constantly amazed at what kind of rates local businesses are willing to pay for not-so-effective, local paper ads; but, how little they will pay for online, if they’ll even put ads there.  Anyone who doubts this should call up their local newspaper and ask for rates for a single full page or half page ad, and then compare those rates and reach with placing a banner ad or Google Adwords advertising. The problem is, rates for online advertising are way, way, way cheaper and usually performance (PPC) driven. For some businesses, you can get away with spending what you normally might for a week’s worth of local newspaper advertising to cover you for a year. That’s a lot of lost revenue to mainstream media.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Advertising, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.