Google

We’ve see “marketing services” grow as a business pursuit over the past couple of years. Now — as newspaper publishers have just left the “Key Executives Mega-Conference” in New Orleans, where such services led off the weekend with a three-hour session — we can characterize it as the number one new business pursuit of many U.S. newspaper chains. It’s the new initiative they are most heavily investing in. In fact, in surveying the field, I’m estimating that marketing services revenue could equal at least 10 percent of newspaper company ad revenue — pushing $2 billion — by 2016. Aspirationally, this is the third leg of newspaper revenue — after advertising and circulation revenue — publishers know they need.

Cultural misalignment. Reader misalignment. Merchant misalignment. Shopper misalignment.

Publishers searched for new models but came up short, and too many stayed the course as the world was changing. You can listen to Click and Clack and realize that lots of people, including publishers, drive ailing vehicles for way too long.

Now, though, finally, publishers and editors have been heading in for some repairs — clearly still bodywork in progress — and getting better realigned. Let’s call this the newsonomics of the body shop, the realignment of business models and mindsets.

The newsonomics of native, indigenous, and immigrant content promises a revenue evolution for both national publishers and regional ones. At a time when pricing pressure on display ads remains relentless — and even Google’s paid search rates have hit a bad patch, causing recent investor concern — this new commercial content offers a way forward to re-invigorate advertising.

Let’s start definitionally. Jay Lauf, Atlantic Media Co. vice president/group publisher and graduate of Wired (back into the days when it defined much of early Web lexicography), defines native content as content that “is native to the web.” It is “linkable, sharable, findable, able to be Facebook-liked and tweeted.” What it’s not: ad units.

Here’s what most hurts most about the new Amazon threat: It aims directly at the one category of newspaper advertising that has fared the best, retail.

Classifieds has decimated by interactive databases. National has migrated strongly digital. Retail, which made up of just 47 percent of newspaper ad revenues 10 years ago, is now up to 57 percent of newspaper totals. Now that advertising, albeit in just a few markets initially, will have to compete with Amazon-forced marketplace change.

Amazon, of course, isn’t targeting newspaper revenues. It’s targeting customers — selling more to current ones and engaging new ones. Further hits to newspaper revenue are just another unintended consequence of accelerating disruption of all business as usual.

The same-day push is built on strategies long in the making. Amazon knew its day of reckoning on its sales tax exemption would come. Like all big, smart companies with legions of lawyers and lobbyists, it delayed the inevitable, and with each delay, built market strength and cash.

Now the jig is finally up. Combine revenue-starved states and the late-arriving sense that Internet business no longer needs a societal jumpstart, and Amazon is being forced to charge sales taxes, though it negotiated their arrival with great agility. The exemption allowed Amazon an incredible price advantage, and many of us have been glad to take advantage of it. Not having to charge customers four to nine percent in sales in taxes (which land-based merchants couldn’t avoid) allowed it to provide lower prices.

Given the company’s lofty ambitions to assert news company might in the content marketplace, the company’s achievements are distinctly underwhelming. At its tender age, NewsRight is less a failure, than a non-player. As some publishers do newer deals with Facebook, Flipboard, Pulse and Samsung, as well as work through ones with Google and Apple, NewsRight sits on the sidelines. Publishers both do their own deals. The sense of industry voice NewsRight was supposed to bring has been all but silent.

What has the experience of leading Google’s latest push into local advertising taught Mayer? Google Maps, Google+, Google Ad Words Express, Google Zagat, Google Places are all meshing into Google Places for Business, meaning a better place for local merchants to invest their marketing dollars — with Google. Is the Men in Black memory eraser part of Mayer’s Google contract? Or will Yahoo, and its news partners, benefit from her recent experience?

We’d have to believe that the odds against Mayer are long. She inherits a mess, and she’s an inexperienced CEO. She knows product, but she’s not a deal-maker. She’s got the experience of one great company, but no other. The game is newly afoot though, and therein lies the serial pleasures of Yahooing

Two different strategies. Two different tablet aggregators. Yet, expect these two strategies to come together, and soon.

Expect The Wall Street Journal to start offering off-site — on Pulse and a couple of more sites — access to full Journal content for its subscribers. Expect the Times to sample for new readers, similarly to how the Journal is now doing it, with differing pricepoints for subsets of content. Expect the Financial Times, a company that has used parallel third-party distribution in its B2B business, to join in the testing as well. Expect magazine publishers to adapt the strategy for their own niche content, and maybe large, regional newspapers as well.

Add it up, and Google moves to its next stage. Paid search equals about half of digital advertising, and the Google absolutely dominates that business, with a still-astounding 82 percent market share. Since buying Doubleclick for a paltry $3.1 billion in 2007, it has moved to become the display leader, and is moving into that duopoly position with Facebook, as Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft all lose market share to those two. Connect up paid search and display and Google’s ability to dominate display, as it has paid search, becomes more of a possibility. Bigness begets bigness on the web, and in some cases (Google in search, Facebook in social, Amazon in commerce, for starters), it seems there’s not much of a second place.

let’s call it the newsonomics of small things, with a nod to Mr. Jobs and to Meinolf Ellers’ realization. Let’s focus on Small Things as opposed to Big Things — meaning traditional advertising and circulation, the long-in-the-tooth double-digit contributors to newspaper company revenues.

It would be great to replace those-end-of-lifecycle business lines with other Big Things, but those are few and far between. Google developed the Next Big Thing of paid search advertising, and continues to dominate that $40 billion global industry, with 76 percent market share in the Americas and 94 percent in EMEA, according to Covario, an large, independent search marketing agency. AT&T and Verizon replaced their cycle-ending landline business by going Triple Play, adding broadband and cable to their revenue lines. Facebook cornered the market on a little segment called global social connectivity. Newspapers have been searching in vain for two decades for such Big Things and have come up short.

So let’s touch on six Small Things — each now a small egg, at best a single digit contributor to overall revenue. Then let’s toss in a couple of Wild Things, fliers of businesses that might work.

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab We watch a conveyor belt of passing numbers, moving faster and faster. A few stand out and capture our imagination. The passing of print advertising in the U.S. has caught everyone’s attention in the last month (though we saw that passage in the U.K. two years ago). The gap [...]