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FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Online ads to overtake US newspapers

No traditional media sector is more challenged by online than print newspapers. Between craigslist for classifieds, blogs for oped, and the speed of the web for breaking news, newspapers have to fundamentally reinvent themselves to survive. Ironically, no traditional media sector is more conducive to adaptation to the web. Radio, broadcast TV, magazines, and even cable don’t port as seamlessly to the web as the already daily, text and image oriented content of newspapers. The challenge for the newspaper business is less about product, and more about operations. They need to direct their existing staffs to stop spending time creating content optimized for print, and start start creating content for the web. Consumers still want what newspaper have to offer, they just want more choices in how they access it. Killing trees and dirty hands seem unnecessary in a world of screens and mobile devices.

In the 2007 study, published on Tuesday, VSS forecasts that online advertising will grow by more than 21 per cent per year to reach $62bn in 2011, making it bigger than newspaper advertising, which is expected to total $60bn in 2011.

Broadcast television and cable and satellite television combined will continue to take the biggest share of advertising dollars, and are forecast to reach $86bn in 2011. “The path of online advertising and newspaper advertising is a continuation of what we’ve been observing for many years, but it is finally getting to the point where the lines will cross,” said James Rutherfurd, managing director at VSS.

Yahoo! Announces Agreement to Acquire Right Media, Largest Emerging Online Advertising Exchange: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

Key Step in Executing Yahoo!’s Long-Term Strategy to Transform How Online Advertisers Connect to and Engage With Their Customers – Both On and Off the Yahoo! Network

Popularity Might Not Be Enough – New York Times

A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew’s reckoning.

And for a general-interest site, the ad rates go even lower, so traffic would need to be much higher to generate $50 million — about four billion page views a month, which would put it in the top 10 of all the sites on the Web.

Pheedo Launches Social Media Ad Widgets
This is very new and cool. Advertisers can take publisher’s feed content, embed it in a graphic ad, and run it as sponsored content across the web. Think of it as an online graphic ad/RSS/social media/content partnership/co-branded mashup.

The widgets, live examples of which can be seen on the Pheedo home page, can be populated by any RSS feed. Items in the feed are followed by buttons to tag those items in third party social bookmarking sites of the advertiser’s choice. Opera ad items in Pheedo, for example, can be tagged in Furl, Del.icio.us, Digg or Technorati – Expedia ads can be tagged in Del.icio.us, Reddit or Google Bookmarks. Any of the items can be emailed from inside the widget.

MySpace Makes $25 Million a Month in Ads

WOW. I guess $580mm was cheap.

MySpace is pulling in nearly $25 million per month in ad revenue, with a growth rate of 30% per quarter.

MySpace has grown much faster than anyone expected, says Murdoch, and they’re seeing strong growth internationally thanks to MySpace Australia, MySpace France and other spin-off sites.

Why doesn’t Wikipedia have any advertising on their site? I understand that major companies might be hesitant to run banners on a site who’s content is unpredictable and constantly changing, but what about text ads? Google AdSense alone would certainly offset much of the cost of running that (what I assume to be) massive server infrastructure. If they forgo ads in an effort to protect the integrity of the content, or something along those lines, I’d say they are short changing themselves. Wikipedia is probably best known by the general public for their factually questionable content. People don’t look to Wikipedia for the last word on a given subject, they look to them for the first word.

I think banners ads would be a perfect fit for both Wikipedia and major advertisers. Lets walk through an example of why.

1. Search Google for “sports car”.
2. What comes up first? You guessed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_car
3. That means Wikipedia gets A LOT of traffic.
4. Many people who read the full page are probably sports car enthusiasts, or at least wannabe sports car enthusiasts. In other words, the target demographic for sport car advertisers.

Seems like a banner for the Ford GT or Chevy Corvette would work well on this page. Readers have preselected themselves as having an interest in sports cars. If there is a typo, or questionable content about sports cars on the page, they certainly aren’t going to blame Ford because of the GT ad across the top. After reading whatever it is the Wikipedia community has to say about cars, they just might click through on the branding oriented banner to see Ford’s GT mini-site.

I haven’t researched why Wikipedia doesn’t have ads. I’m just reactive to their recent “please donate” campaign and the article below. Perhaps there’s somethign I don’t know. Or maybe Wikipedia needs to revisit their position on ads, or advertisers need to revisit their view of ads on Wikipedia. I think there is a great opportunity here for both parties.

Wikipeda could shut within 3-4 months: Wikimedia

In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.