Yahoo Newspaper Consortium

Seriously, I wonder how much the Gumbo-like turns of circulation accounting will matter to ad buyers. Increasingly, across all media buying, they are focused on audience. They want to know who (gender, age, household status, region, clickstream behavior, recent buying behavior and more) and they want to target these on the fly, as the world turns, spinning ever more quickly. So audience targeting is getting to be instantaneous; a 20th of a second is what we hear it takes.

So Gannett’s decided that it’s go-it-alone, devise-its own-local-marketing strategies approach didn’t work.

For Yahoo, I think, it’s simple arithmetic. If you’ve figured out how to monetize content better than the other guys — remember Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members say they can mark up $8 CPMs to $15 and beyond, courtesy of Yahoo’s behavioral targeting technology — why not do it against content you own. With the Associated purchase, it now will own the 2.1 million articles in the database, with another 2000 coming in every day, and it can sell advertising directly against those articles, without having to do any margin-draining revenue shares.

The magic word here from a business perspective: Roll-up. Whoever figures out how to roll up major audiences and monetize them wins. J-Lab’s report holds out hope that may come about somewhat organically. History, though, teaches us that it’s more likely to come by dint of more singular zeal.

In fact, if you parse the numbers, overall ad spend in the U.S. would have been up in 2009 – a year wracked by near Depression that saw print and broadcast advertising drop by 20% and more. Online classifieds lost $920 million year over year; overall digital ad spend was down about $700 million.

The problem is at least, in part, structural. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) has estimated that it costs twice as much to manage the placement of digital ads as compared to print and broadcast.

Bartz hardly seemed like the proud captain of a news enterprise. You know, the news, it’s just so negative, so ungainly, just too darn hard to understand…The CEO of this $6.5 billion company, who is “on Yahoo all day”, is just another one of those Americans who just can’t through the Tea Party haze, and read all the intelligent prose written out there that tells us all very clearly what’s in the health care legislation, whatever we may think about it.

Charging for non-desktop/laptop access should be a new revenue stream for news publishers. The math, though, isn’t huge. Who is most likely to pay for Journal mobile? Presumably it’s online subscribers, of whom there are about a million. So $12 a year, if all of them signed up, would be $12 million. Not bad, but only about an 8% increase in reader revenue. I can’t see lots of non-subscribers shelling out $24 a year, but I may be wrong.
Better than charging just for mobile, I still think All-Access is the way to go: Get the Journal (or the Times or Guardian or ?) anyway we produce it, print, desktop, laptop, phone, e-reader, e-edition. And add a $5.95 per month charge for that. All-you-can-eat model that Americans seem to love, if if they don’t often sample the whole buffet.

Fast Flip, Google’s hardly secret visual news search product, just made its debut today. It’s a premiere that tells us lots about the swirling tradewinds in which the company now finds itself. It also marks two important milestones, one about the slow replacement of news search 1.0 and one about Google’s willingness to share its ad revenues with news publishers.

The main difference: Advance Internet is maintaining its own ad platform, currently powered by 24/7 RealMedia, and integrating with Microsoft. Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members have fully adopted the Yahoo APT platform for their ad serving businesses, creating a closer, more exclusive relationship. “We wanted flexibility,” says Weinberger, who won’t comment on what parts of the deal involve exclusivity or on the duration of the contract.