Yahoo

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.

In fact, lower-cost entrants — AOL, Yahoo/Associated Content, Demand +++ — aren’t just pests; they’re changing the economics of producing content. That’s not a small issue. It may well lead the next wave of disruption.

Are there any positive growth numbers to report? Which categories may be turning positive — maybe national or retail display ads — as the sagging economy continues to plague the traditional classified strengths of auto, recruitment, and real estate?

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.

Still: a dollar per unique compared to 12 cents a unique. As in all things web, we could say, HuffPo is being underpaid or we can say the Times is being overpaid. Whatever, that’s a delta worth knowing and exploring.

So, through thick and thin, digital marketing, with better targeting being introduced around the clock, keeps pulling dollars away from traditional media — TV, newspapers, radio, and magazines.

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.

News publishers, even as they complained about the scruffy news types, knew the business principles they were supposed to maintain, and the separation of the business and the news production. They’d reassert that point from time to time. I’d like to hear that from Carol Bartz, for example, and the heads of other newer media companies now hiring journalists.