In the Internet space, there are no competitors. Publishers have realized that to best serve their audiences online they must aggregate their own content, as well as the content of others, including their competitors. However, one rule of thumb remains, if you’re going to aggregate someone else’s content, you must link back to the story you’re citing.
Let’s face it. None of us want to drive traffic off our sites. However, if readers come to know our Web sites as the place where they can get all of the news and information they’re looking for, they’ll visit us daily AND hit the backspace key after reading the articles we link to.
I bring this up because a couple of weeks ago Folio: ran a story in its newsle More...
Don’t have video on your site? That’s so 2005. Or at least, that’s the popular thinking. SI.com re-launched last month with a video-heavy design (including a video box moved to the top of the page) and CarandDriver.com recently debuted a program that lets viewers take a virtual test drive.
However, turning video into a sustainable business model is proving to be a challenge. Even Google has stumbled by briefly featuring an Allstate ad in a Charlie Rose clip that blogger Scott Karp called “as interruptive, untargeted and utterly old school as anything mass TV advertising has ever inflicted on viewers.”
Video may offer a temporary spike in both viewers and advertisers but video by itself won’t keep them coming ba More...
Remember last winter when Google announced their print ad sales program? The search company bought ad space in magazines and newspapers, chopped it up into smaller sizes and began selling it to its AdWords customers. Well, Tom Phillips, with the somewhat incongruous title of director of print ads at Google, sat for an interview with Paidcontent.org’s Rafat Ali at the DeSilva + Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit last week and revealed magazines no longer fit the formula.
Phew, I think.
Newspapers, however, have become the preferred partner for their program. “One of the things we learned was high frequency was better. Daily newspapers are a better partner for us than other media,” said Phillips.
Phillips added More...
Marketing firm Outsell’s 2007 ad spending report shows that online ad spending is expected to grow almost 18 percent this year and, as I’ve said before, now is the time to monetize the Internet.
Among the findings of the report, which surveyed more than 1,000 ad executives, are that advertisers are expected to boost their spending on sponsored content by 38 percent, on trade or b-to-b Web sites by 30 percent and on Webinars by 28 percent. Advertisers are also moving their money into vertical search, to grow by 18 percent, and their own Web sites, to grow by 17 percent.
But the survey also found that advertisers are planning to reduce spending slightly on pay-per-click advertising, in part, because of the click fra More...
Yesterday I interviewed Scott Carlis, executive director of marketing at Conde Nast’s GQ, for an event marketing story for the March issue of Magazine Event Strategies. GQ really has it right. It knows its audience and it knows what its readers want and what forms of media they are most responsive to.
GQ has not one, but two Web sites, men.style.com/gq and GQ Connects. The GQ Web site is fairly traditional— chock full of editorial content and ads. But it’s the GQ Connects Web site that’s leading edge. This completely promotional site is where GQ readers can go to find out about promotions, contests and events, get style advice from an expert and download weekly podcasts.
GQ Mobile is a huge part of the GQ Connects More...
American Business Media announced the finalists for its 2007 Jesse H. Neal Awards today. Considered the “Oscars” of business journalism, the Neal Awards, now entering its 53rd year, represent the best of b-to-b journalism.
So how come “the best” always seems to be the same handful of large publishers? A look at this year’s finalists reveals some familiar names: Nielsen Business Media (seven nominations), Hanley Wood (10 nominations), McGraw-Hill (eight nominations), Crain Communications (five nominations) and Advanstar Communications (12 nominations?!?). Some of the usual magazine standbys are here as well: Ziff Davis’ Baseline (Grand Neal Winner in 2005), Nielsen’s Editor & Publisher and Advanstar’s Medical Ec More...
Fellow b-to-b magazine blogger, Paul Conley, emailed me a note about his latest post. It seems Ziff Davis’s eWeek has begun using IntelliTXT’s keyword linking technology in its Web site editorial. I’ve written about this before, as has Conley, who this time suggests that pressures stemming from owner Willis Stein’s efforts to sell Ziff Davis have resulted in a revenue-at-all-costs Web site strategy:
Ziff Davis has had a dismal performance of late in print. But online revenue has risen. And that has given investment bank Lehman Brothers, which is advising Ziff Davis on a sale, something to push. And when you have a private equity company and an investment bank both intent on boosting online revenue in the short term to hel More...
So the excitement is finally over. Maybe. Between its layoffs and the sale of 18 of its magazines, Time Inc. has had no shortage of headlines over the past few months. Whether the company is done laying off remains to be seen, but at least the question of who will buy the magazines from its Time4Media and Parenting groups has been answered. And the sale of the publications to Bonnier Magazine Group and their merger with World Publications is good news for Time Inc. and for the magazines it's shedding.
For one, it gives Time Inc. executives the opportunity to focus their full attention on repositioning the company for multimedia growth. Time CEO Ann Moore has had to deal with a tremendous amount of pressure in the past few months f More...
Talk to any smart magazine marketer, and they will tell you that working with competitors is one of their top marketing methods. They trade subscriber lists with competitive magazines and even buy booths at competitor’s industry events. Most magazine marketers understand the value of working with the other industry powerhouses, whether they have a directly competitive magazine or not. Being a part of an industry means having relationships with all associations, organizations and vendors, and if you are confident enough about your product, you won’t feel threatened by a little healthy competition.
According to the latest installment of Folio: Publishing Technology, Reed Business Information has launched a new vertical b-to-b More...
The online software options can be dizzying for publishers who are just beginning to take their sites to the next level. Amanda Hickman, a media and nonprofit specialist, offers her advice on open source software.
* I love Drupal and WordPress but probably only because I know them better than some of their peers. I know folks who work with Joomla and Plone are just as content. WordPress is (or can be if you let it) dead simple, lightweight, blogging software. Joomla, Plone and Drupal are much more comprehensive content management systems.
* http://cmsmatrix.org is a great resource for evaluating content management systems, proprietary and GPL alike.
* More...
Interesting blog commentary and reporting out there recently involving Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc. -- networks started by Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis that share a famous rivalry. The upshot? How both of these early movers in blog network business models are suffering old-media growing pains. It’s an art-imitating-life moment.
Valleywag, a Gawker Media blog, is reporting that AOL, which bought Calacanis’ Weblogs Inc. in 2005 as the first major blog M&A transaction for an estimated $25 million, is shutting down a collection of its smaller blog sites to focus attention on bigger revenue bread-winners like Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. Calacanis points out in a comment reply to the Valleywag post that “Niche blogs More...
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When Blogs Go Bad
Matt Kinsman emedia and Technology - 03/06/2007-03:00 AMFew examples of blogging gone wrong are as prominent as the recent case of Jim Zumbo, former hunting editor of Time Inc.’s Outdoor Life the second largest outdoor magazine in the U.S. In a February 16 blog post (since removed from the Outdoor Life site), Zumbo expressed his thoughts on so-called “assault rifles” by saying, “Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. As hunters, we don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them…I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist rifles.’” The response was swift, and not just from the NRA. The post generated more than 2,000 comments, most of them negative. Hunting and shooting cha More...