blogads for the opinion makers

Can they fly? I agree with Jake Dobkin – the numbers are way off. The wrong way. Excel dude is smoking his own VC-focused PPT.

Cool idea:

Enterprises that want to get the word out about their products, services or ideas are moving quickly to new media — communicating through social networks like Twitter and by publishing their own blogs.

Of course, the challenge is getting more of the right people to see the messages. MinnPost.com is now offering an innovative solution to this problem: MinnPost.com Real-Time Ads.

For a modest weekly charge, you can show MinnPost’s readers the headlines or brief summaries of these messages you’re already creating, and watch them link to your full messages on your website.

But not quite as cool as our RSS ads, which incorporate up to 7 headlines per advertiser.

The essential problem we face: though the Times’ Baghdad bureau is a civic necessity, only a few individuals would spend $10 a year to get the Times’ Baghdad reports.

More evidence that there are twice as many publishers as the market will support. Here’s the Washington Post’s report on its own health:

The newspaper division reported an operating loss of $53.8 million caused by steep fall-offs in advertising, which are being felt across the industry. Print advertising revenue at The Post plummeted 33 percent in the first three months of this year, compared to the same period last year, and revenue at The Post’s online properties — chiefly, Washingtonpost.com — dropped 8 percent in the quarter, the first decline in ad revenue at the online unit in recent memory.

Adding insult to injury, “The newspaper division is now The Post’s third-biggest revenue-generator, providing 15 percent of company revenue.”

AP reports: “While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.’s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million.”

The online advertising pie is still growing slightly even in the recession, but the number of publishers with forks is growing much faster.

What’s older than yesterday’s gossip?

Yesterday’s gossips.

Doddering gossip doyenne Liz Smith and former rumor-monger Lloyd Grove get together at the Daily Beast to rue the revolution.

What has been the impact of Internet sites like Perez Hilton and Gawker, who are putting up items on an hourly basis?

I don’t think they mean anything either, except they mean instant success for these very, very energetic and ambitious young people. And it’s perfectly fine, but I wouldn’t give any credence to most of the stuff I read. I mean, there are no publishers, no editors, no lawyers vetting anything. This is the problem with the Internet where everybody has a voice and we’re stuck with it. We’re going to have the Internet even when we don’t have things to eat. We’re going to still have it. I’m all for it, and I’m doing it myself on the Wowowow.com site, but it’s not important. It isn’t even semi-important.

Turns out Smith was making $125k a year at the Post.

And here’s some video of Smith grousing about “these kids.”

Beware to boobtube:

Brian Primack, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who studies how teenagers’ use of media affects their health, analyzed survey data that followed 4,142 teenagers from 1995 to 2002. Teenagers who watched TV were more likely to report symptoms of depression, with the rate increasing 8 percent with every hour of TV watched.

Neil Postman’s “Amusing ourselves to death” was truer than he knew.

Reading James Surowiecki’s sneer about NYT’s bathetic advertising of its own product reminded me that I’d recently taken note of NYTimes ad running in the TV screen the back of my cab.

What unnerved me the most was the Times ad’s emphasis on “conversation”… “center of the conversation”… “get the conversation going”… and “be part of a great conversation.” All these phrases were uttered by hip-ish looking 20 and 30-somethings.

Clearly, the Times is desperately hoping to stay relevant to the under-sixty-year-olds who are turning their collective back on the Times, even as they consume and create giant new volumes of their own media (aka conversation.)

Advertising its ersatz conversations, the Times’ resembles a Baptist church trying to compete for the hearts and minds of indie rock fans by running ads declaring “hey, we’ve got great music too!”

In this month’s Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn does a great job of summing up the challenge for television networks.

On the “buy side,” the problem is what I’d call cultural attention-deficit disorder, which afflicts the consumer bombarded with choices: more TV networks (the Emmy Award–winning show Mad Men is broadcast on AMC, a channel previously known only for showing movies), more video games, more Web sites, and more ways to consume shows than ever before (VOD, DVD, PPV, etc., etc.). And all of this is compounded by the loss of the social effect: the fewer people who consume any given piece of media, the fewer people there are to tell you how awesome The Life & Times of Tim is and how you simply have to watch it. Amid the chaos, it’s difficult for a media consumer to care enough about any one thing to stick with it—and for a network trying to build allegiance to a brand, convincing anyone that what you’re showing matters becomes almost impossible.

I’ll continue to argue (as I’ve been doing since ‘02) that blogs, as communities that create and consume news and opinion together, are uniquely positioned in this exploding universe as one of the few media players with centripetal force.

A friend’s 81-year-old father told me this weekend, “when the New York Times goes, I go.”

He was still kicking hard, but the same can’t be said for the Times this morning. Liquidity crunch?

Elizabeth Spiers bashes New York Mag’s doting on NYTimes.

I love David Carr’s Carpetbagger videos, but if that’s your baseline for what you consider innovation, you’re setting the bar pretty low. …

The Times has one of the best newspaper sites out there, but it’s a tallest dwarf distinction.

Newspaper holding company AH Belo announced yesterday that ad revenues were down 21% in the second quarter. That 21% is the biggest decline I’ve seen yet. (Belo publishes four daily newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News and Providence Journal.)

For broader context: here’s an article about the ill newspaper industry in the International Herald Tribune, ironically, a newspaper I used to write for. Yes, the article includes that dire phrase “since the Great Depression.”

More thoughts on the phrase “worst since the Great Depression”.

Doug Arellanes (who led the Czech team that programmed my first newspaper portal site) has a bunch of links to old TV ads from communist Czechoslovakia. As Doug paraphrases Vaclav Havel in another post : you can learn a lot about a person from his aesthetics. And you can learn a lot about a culture from its ads.

Some magazines are getting shredded in newstand sales, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Did the pixel buzzsaw finally pulverize paper?

Sales up or down for the first six months of the year versus same period in 2002:
Better Homes and Gardens -15.5%
Cosmopolitan -9.0%
Entertainment Weekly -5.5%
Fast Company -55%
Fortune -12.5%
Martha Stewart Living -18.1%
Money -28.9%
O, The Oprah Magazine 37.5%
Reader’s Digest -19.7%
Real Simple 10.1%
Rolling Stone 4%
Sports Illustrated 3.5%
Weight Watchers 11.1%

Lee Barstow pointed me to Ben Franklin’s Apology for Printers, something Franklin wrote in 1731 after an advertisement he’d taken in his Pennsylvania Gazette offended some churchgoers. He wrote: “Being frequently censur’d and condemn’d by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed, I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for my self….”

Franklin continues, “I request for all who are angry with me on the Account of printing things they don’t like, calmly to consider these following particulars: 1) That the opinions of men are almost as various as their faces… 5) … that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former almost always is an overmatch for the lattter: Hence [printers] chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.”

Finally, my favorite part: “That I got Five Shillings by [the ad]. That none who are angry with me would have given me so much to let it alone. That if all the People of different Opinions would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don’t like, as I can get by printing them, I should probably live a very easy Life; and if all Printers were every where so dealt by, there would be very little printed.” (Franklin’s essay linked from this page.)

“The internet stops nothing short of threatening the very existence of trades [magazines], in its timeliness making obsolete much of the editorial of traditional weeklies and monthlies. Many advertisers have already pulled out of their trade publications, and they will be followed by many more. Far fewer will ever return. Ad pages for b2b publications fell 30 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the Business Information Network. In comparison, consumer magazine pages were down 21 percent over the same period, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. So far this year, consumer magazines are up 3 percent in pages, while trade titles are down another 5 percent.” (Media Life.)

Over at MarketingFix., I had some fun debating the merits of the old-school online ad network DoubleClick.

From this month’s National Geographic: “Bulk benefited Indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever (weighing the equivalent of several modern elephants.) Its size let it browse tall trees and discouraged enemies. But size also brought its demise: When climate change turned this giant’s forest environment grassy, it couldn’t stoop to graze and became extinct.”

I enjoyed trading views about Salon with Robert Loch after this Marketing Fix post. My favorite riposte: “Give me profitability over premium-priced CPMs any day.” (What fun is writing if you can’t giggle at your own stuff?)