“Our view is that we need help from you: We’ve got to pay for what we do, we’ve got to convince advertisers into looking at us and tell them that these are the demographics we now know about our readers,” [Atlanta Journal-Constitution ombudsman Mike King] said. “The old standard — advertising geared to people who live in the areas we cover — doesn’t work anymore.”

But Google built the largest, fastest-growing advertising business on the Web without any demographics at all. And a huge chunk of that business is never touched by a sales person.
The other part of the justification is that it’s becoming more expensive to publish a newspaper on the Web. That’s weird. It should be getting cheaper.

I’ve used cookies to count users on MediaSavvy, but I’ve never told anyone what this number is, or believed it myself.

Underlying dissatisfaction with this crude method of counting users is no doubt one of the many information issues that are driving news sites to user registration. While I’m unenthusiastic about registration as a method of gathering useless demographics, it does help create countable and measurable identities for users.

Cyberatlas does a good job of comparing Perseus’ study to The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) Blog Census, which shows that two-thirds of blogs are active.

The big difference is that Perseus took the easy way out and only looked at hosted blogs, while NITLE took the trouble to gather a reasonable sample. It appears that NITLE has missed a lot of blogs that Perseus counted.

The two surveys’ blog counts are striking. NITLE measures 1.4 million and Perseus estimates that total is 4.1 million. In any event, the number of bloggers, active and otherwise, is in the millions.

There is some great information on the NITLE site that is worth checking out.

Source: Advertising.com, via emarketer.com

What is a marketer supposed to do with that information? Target his ads to the smallest, poorest states in the country? I’m trying to imagine why this information is useful. This is consistent with a quote on Digital Deliverance about how companies compulsively collect worthless information.

Don’t target your customers by where they live. Target them by what they do.

Given that major metros typically have around much higher penetrations of their home markets — especially among Internet users — this is a pretty pathetic performance for a free product. Local newspaper sites have plenty of useful local information, yet they can’t muster 20% of their home markets.

The era of repurposed online newspapers must end if newspapers are going to defend themselves against smaller, hungrier rivals.

Clay Shirky calls it communication. I’d call it advertising. But, I suppose paid communication is advertising, isn’t it?

Whatever you do call it, observers increasingly agree that the Online Publishers’ Association shouldn’t count it as paid content. The good news is that the OPA is finding a much more skeptical audience this year than in the past.

Their information is so good and so useful that it’s a shame to see them get use the same dopey definition of content. No doubt they will continue to do so as long as news outlets report their big market size number uncritically.

Rafat Ali ridicules the following hopeful statement in the report: “While slowing growth is indicative of a maturing market, we may also be in the midst of a quiet period during which content providers are readying new premium paid services for an increasingly receptive public.” He also has come around to the conclusion that online dating services don’t belong in the online content market.

We need a new definition of online content sales.

There’s a great graph (Figure 3 on page 9 of the executive summary) that shows we’re lagging behind the adoption curve that the rest of the world seems to be riding.

What forces are retarding the implementation of broadband in the US?. Clearly, it’s not content, as the copyright holders would have us believe. There’s more US-developed content than anything else on the Net.

The ITU believes the single most important driver of broadband penetration is competition. It makes you wonder why the FCC thinks eliminating competition is the best way to get the telco’s to deploy fiber optic networks.

Most of the data show that the demographic differences between content buyers and everyone else are meaningless. They’re the tiniest bit younger, a little more heavily represented among people with incomes over $100,000 (like buyers of everything else), and their households are smaller (probably because they’re younger).

The real difference is behavioral. Internet content buyers spend about twice as much time on the Net and view more than twice as many pages. And they’re a little more likely to have broadband service (about 60% versus 50% for all Internet users).

The most interesting fact is that they spent less on conventional ecommerce ($235/quarter vs. $315/quarter) than the average online buyer.

This data confirms my thesis that demographics are meaningless to Internet marketers. Internet content buyers look like everyone else on the Net. We should be looking at behavior.

• The core online content market grew a respectable 14% between the first half of 2002 and 2003. The OPA’s definition on “content sales” is still too expansive my taste. They include personals (up 77% since 2002), streaming audio and video, games, credit repair, fantasy sports, and greeting cards. Core online content, in my analysis, includes business content, research, and general news. This market was $255 million in the first half of 2003, or about a third of the OPA’s content market.
• General news is flat at about $35 million/year.
• Online advertising is an order of magnitude larger than online content. The Interactive Advertising Bureau hasn’t released their numbers for the first half of 2003 yet, but it’s likely to be more than $3 billion.
• Subscriptions dominate the online content market. About 88% of the market was subscription-based. Because the OPA doesn’t break this out by category, it’s hard to know how this applies to the core content market.
• Single payments under $5 are less than $15 million/year (8% of total single payments which are 11.5% of the approximately $1.5 billion/year market). The OPA calls these “micropayments”. I’d call them “minipayments”.
• Revenue per content buyer has been stalled at just under $25 for nearly two years. All growth in revenue comes from the conversion of Internet users into content buyers. This isn’t too surprising. It’s more than they pay for the daily newspaper. It’s about what most people pay for Internet access. It’s about half what they pay for local telephone, long distance, cable, broadband, or mobile service. Does anyone think that it will ever be greater than any of these?
• The average content buyer spent $.25 on single payment content in the first half of 2003.

Conclusions: The market for online content will stagnate if content sellers can’t continue to find new buyers. Publishers of general news and information are misguided if they think that selling subscriptions or archives will ever be a serious business. Meanwhile they risk conceding their core markets to free, advertising-financed competitors if they pursue it.