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Sports Illustrated - Tablet Demo

This collaboration between The Wonderfactory and Time, Inc. is an excellent example of how tablets will enable the creation of innovative, addictive experiences by publishers, media companies, and advertisers.

Rush to fill gaps in website revenues

Publishers including Telegraph Media Group, Independent News & Media, Johnston Press and Bauer UK are working with ad sales group Adgent 007, which specialises in selling space on UK-based websites to overseas marketers, and which claims to be able to deliver improvements in rates of 10-20 times.

Source

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/24d49cf2-9dff-11dd-bdde-000077b07658.html

UK online ad spend slows after five boom year

Figures from UK Enders indicate online advertising spending is slowing down following five years of dramatic growth. The group pared back its full-year growth forecast to 18.5%, taking the total market to £3.3bn, against initial estimates of 28%. Analyst Ian Maude said search ad spend was likely to grow strongly, up 25.4% to £2bn this year, but display ad growth of 9.8% and 7.8% for classifieds represented a “collapse” on last year’s figures of 30.5% and 54% respectively.

From the FT

Classified advertising in digital publishing

Classified advertising has long been an economic cornerstone for magazine and newspaper titles. However, the increased popularity of search marketing and independent digital classified sites like Craigslist and eBay have resulted in the rapid falling off of this previously steady source of income. Last year, according to statistics from the Newspaper Association of America, classifieds served up some $14.2 billion for newspapers. This sounds like a lot until you see that's 16.5% less than the year before. With magazines facing less immediately disruptive competition in the digital space, I'd estimate a lesser decline of around 9 percent year on year. According to ComScore, traffic to classified sites grew 23% in 2007, to more than 46 million unique visitors in July, up from about 37 million a year earlier. While. traffic has declined on some sites, among them Yahoo Classifieds, where it fell by 13 percent. But it has grown on some newer sites such as MySpace, where classified listings have jumped 33 percent since their August 2006 debut. Traffic to Facebook Marketplace, has yet to have been officially reported but I'd expect growth to similar to MySpace.

Naturally enough, hungry publishers are looking to stem the tide by bolstering their digital classified capability through third party solutions or building bespoke. Perhaps because of the overwhelming success of sites eBay, Marketplace and the like white label solutions seem in relatively short supply. I've come across across AdMomentum, Rosetta, e-classifieds, Oodle and of course there's Google's AdSense. However, clicking through their client rosters few of them (with the exception of Oodle that powers the Sun's classifieds) appear to be supplying large traditional magazine or newspaper publishers.

Nevertheless, we integrated AdSense into the Radio Times to get a sense of how much revenue it could potentially generate. AdSense automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (just like classifieds you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content. Sites earn money whenever visitors click on the links and in theory because they ads are relevant users will click more often. As ever, Google's solution is elegantly simple and integration is painless. Radio Times went live in about 3 days. Juxtaposed to the process, however, is Google's less precise answer to the question of how much money can be earned. The AdSense sites states:

How much do I get paid?

How much you earn depends on a number of factors including how much an advertiser bids on your site -- you'll receive a portion of what the advertiser pays. The best way to find out how much you'll earn is to sign up and start showing ads on your web pages.

While I appreciate that targeting ads on Radio Times is more than a little tricky , and that we're on a standard deal, I'd hazard a guess that Google are the only company making any substantial revenue here. At the end of the last financial year, Google announced that revenue through AdSense programs of $1.69 billion, a 25 percent increase over last year while the revenues we're seeing are certainly not approaching anything like what the magazine sector is used to.

So, if you're running a newspaper or magazine building your own classifieds engine might be a more lucrative solution. In theory you should be able to migrate some of your existing customers and offer a cross-media sell. The Washington Post, for example, are giving free ads in their print classified sections to those paying to post an ad on their website. While The Post lets individuals run free print ads for merchandise valued under $500, the San Diego Union-Tribune goes further, offering free print ads for seven days for merchandise and cars valued under $5,000. However, as the The Economist recently found out, it appears that Google can use it's leverage in the search market to hinder competitors to AdSense.

The Economist.com's custom built classified posting service allows you to place an advertisement on the classified section of the site. To enhance classified visability The Economist offers six placements for text advertisements at the foot of the homepage.

As with all services of this nature you're required to abide by the advertiser's terms and conditions, but nowhere are you required to ensure that your advert is relevant to the target audience. The Economist assumes that individuals or companies wanting to use this service wouldn't waste their money adverting products or services not of interest to the audience. But they were wrong because they failed to think of their classifieds service as "paid-for" links; a practise resolutely opposed by google. The effect of such a well trafficed and authoritative site linking to advertisers on their homepage has, according to Patrick Altoft, been pretty impactful:

If you check out the people buying links at the bottom of the Economist.com homepage and then do some searches on Google.co.uk for the terms they are targeting such as “loans”, “car insurance” and “travel insurance” you can see the sites that have links from economist.com are doing very well, much better than they were doing a few weeks ago.

Last month, The Economist has had its ranking value slugged by Google (down from a usual Page Rank of 8, down to a current Page Rank of 5) and Matt Wardman suggests that it might be down to the visibility of these paid for links. It seems that they have made a basic mistake of selling text links on the home page, which bear no real relation to the content of the page - and then by leaving simple “links” in place which will enhance the position of those client sites in Google.

To see an example of a large company which suffered a reduced priority in the Google rankings, read the case study on GoCompare.com over at Hitwise UK. In this case their Google traffic reduced by almost 90% over the space of a fortnight:

Robin Goad did a further update to show how quickly the traffic (had not) recovered for GoCompare.com (in 11 weeks it had recovered only slightly).