Category: Research

Online news registration may not be working [Thanks paidcontent!].
Among the reasons offered are that there’s a lot of false information being posted and people are sharing registrations. Some ten to twenty percent of registered email addresses are bad, and no one knows how much of the demogrpahic data is phony. But newspapers seem to think they need demographics to sell ads.

“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.

Belden has released a study that says unique-user counts based on cookies are too high. Can this be news to anyone? I remember having this same conversation with my webmaster (remember webmasters?) back in 1995.

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.

The Perseus blog survey that says two-thirds of blogs are inactive has gotten a lot of attention lately.

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.

Advertising.com tells us that the best click-through rates can be found in New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Montana.

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.

According to ComScore Media Metrix, monopoly newspaper penetration of their home markets ranges from 4% of Web users in Philadelphia to 16.6% in Atlanta. I left off a couple of nonmonopoly markets and the Washington Times from the bottom, and the more-than-local Washington Post from the top of the list.

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.

Online personals aren’t content. People don’t pay to read personals–they pay to post them. Or they buy access to a poster’s contact information.

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.

Vin Crosbie have taken on the Online Publishing Association’s hype and loose interpretation of the data in their latest online content sales report. Vin was the first to cry foul on the original OPA report’s fast-and-loose definition of “online content” last year.

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.

With our per capita income, US broadband penetration should be about twice what it is. Take a look at the free executive summary [PDF] of the International Telecommunications Union’s Birth of Broadband report.

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.