I’m a big believer in access to news stories around the world being free to access. Information about this world we live in shouldn’t be locked out of the eyes of the majority of the population. But the problem we have at the moment is that internet advertising rates are so low that it is forcing newspapers to put up paywalls to make a return on the articles they publish.
It is strange that online ads, the lifeblood of the internet are worth so much less than ads in print, television, or radio because they are much easier to track, and the people are far better targeted. However, whilst there are a limited number of television channels, radio stations, and widely read national newspapers that are produced, making ads in these mediums a relative scarcity. By contrast, there are millions of websites, making advertising inventory essentially infinite, pushing the prices downward.
You would think that these media brands would be able to leverage their history and brand to find better advertising rates, but that has simply not happened. Are readers of newspapers online worth more than readers of other blogs? Apparently this idea is a hard sell to advertisers even for broadsheets like The Daily Telegraph that has recently announced a metered paywall.
The reason it is a hard sell, is because those reading news content cover such a wide spectrum of the population that it is easier to simply target a niche blog that covers your business sector than a newspaper when the users are far less targeted. What is lacking is reader engagement with advertising.
Newspapers didn’t have to worry too much about user engagement when they were in control of the scarcity of wide-reaching advertising. With that scarcity disappeared, they need to find a new way to show advertisers that it is better for them to pay premium rates to advertise on their newspaper site online than on a regurgitated press release station like HuffPost. They need to prove to advertisers that when people are reading quality journalism, that feeling of quality rubs off on the advertisers of that page – quality by association.
The race for more content more often, is a race to the bottom in terms of quality journalism and this has been reflected in a race to the bottom with ad rates. 200 articles per day is all well and good, but if the majority of them are fluff pieces or rewritten press releases then those are empty clicks. You may have got someone to click from an interesting headline but they will close the site once they’ve worked out the piece is worthless.
Newspapers are competing for clicks from Google, but the future lies in keeping people coming back to your newspaper as their source of news on a daily basis. When you see article entitled “When is the Grand National”, then this is purely for Google clicks, and Google will soon swallow the traffic of all these empty pieces by showing the times, dates, and straight facts in the search results with no extra clicks needed. It already does this with the date for the Grand National, but to find the time you need to click. You soon won’t have to.
Paywalls are one answer to this question of declining ad rates, and metered ones like being implemented by The Telegraph allow for the continued open discussion of stories whilst those that use the newspaper, and £1.99 per month for quality journalism is good value. This will hopefully give them some breathing room to continue to reform and rebuild, but unless we start to look at advertising differently the open landscape we see today will be unrecognisable in a few years.
(Photograph courtesy of NS Newsflash)