“During the just-completed third quarter, airline revenue from Internet bookings probably will top 20% for the first time,” reports the WSJ. Unfortunately, what airlines thought was a tool for reducing costs has turned out to be exactly that… for consumers.

“Eighteen to thirty-four: for decades, conventional advertising wisdom has attached the adjective ‘coveted’ to this slice of the viewing audience. According to an analysis by the former NBC News president Lawrence K. Grossman, advertisers pay an average of $23.54 to reach 1,000 viewers in that age bracket, versus $9.57 per 1,000 over the age of 35.”

Nick Denton writes: “we launched Gizmodo in August as an experiment in commercial blogging. Within three weeks, Microsoft had Gizmodo down on their list of online influencers, pinged Pete, and invited him over to Redmond. Whatever your thoughts on Microsoft’s software, the company’s marketing machine is extremely impressive. Of course, Pete now feels he has to be a little rude about Microsoft, just to show he can’t be bought.” Mitch Ratcliffe notes Gizmodo’s disclosure that travel expenses were covered by Microsoft and kvetches that another four bloggers invited to the event made no such disclosure.

Yes, it’s healthy for bloggers to disclosing their biases. As I’ve argued before, well-marked advertising serves to unambiguously articulate the relationship between the writer and the sponsor. Yep, that’s what we’re trying to do with Blogads. “Establishing a clear space and format for advertising will clarify what is flogging and what is blogging.”

This can work to all everyone’s advantage: readers get full disclosure, the blogger gets a clean consciousness and some cash, the advertiser gets face-time with readers and some loyalty-ruboff.

To provide some context: although few people realize it, plenty of journalism is fueled by gratuities and complimentary relationships with advertisers. Often this means that good news gets highlighted and bad news gets ignored. The practice is rarely reported: newspapers don’t like to wash each other’s dirty laundry in public and reporters like to keep their jobs. Here’s one instance, as recorded in The New York Times. Dean Singleton, who runs 46 daily newspapers and 81 nondaily newspapers in the US, once “upheld the firing of a reporter who had failed to file a news story consisting of an advertiser’s news release verbatim, and instead added accurate details that wound up making the advertiser look bad.”

In Europe, many newspapers and magazines publish articles as a quid pro quo for advertisements. As editor of the Budapest Business Journal, I once spent six months in Hungarian court after we documented the willingness of a half-dozen leading local publications to publish articles for cash. It turns out no one was bothered by our accusations; the practice was common knowledge among professionals, and the cynical public assumed the press was rotten anyway. We heard later that what landed us in court wasn’t our report; it was that we failed to catch one of the biggest offenders and therefore appeared to be participating in some obscure political vendetta.

(Update: Nick Denton offers additional color in this new post.)

Olivier Travers, editor of Scifan, is tired of losing affiliate commissions to skimmers. “This weekend I’m going to experiment with, and most probably implement, those scripts that lock out infected users. I’m not going to sit there idly when thieves rob us out of our commissions while Sophie and I bust our asses building the best database about SF/F books out there.”

Here are outtakes from my Wednesday interview with Craig Calder, NYTimes.com marketing VP.

Calder offered up the new data and a generous dollop of context. As someone who has spent six years badgering newspaper folk to embrace the web, I enjoyed his story.

As I noted yesterday, the site generated 85,000 new home delivery starts in 2001, up from 25,000 in 2000. Through September 30 this year, they’ve generated another 58,000. (My calculator annualizes that to 77,000.)

‘We were their most cost-effective and efficient means of acquiring subscribers,’ said Calder. Since online subscriptions are charged to a credit cards, people aren’t canceling, he notes.

‘We work very closely with the circulation department,’ he said. ‘Even if you are not ready to subscribe today, when you do get to that point, you have a great affinity for the brand and product.’

I asked Calder to rate the relative importance of different strategies within the total marketing effort. He said NYTimes.com’s e-mail newsletters accounts for 30% of marketing return, headline distribution deals are 40%, keyword targeting with Overture and Google is 10%, and search engine optimization is 10%. The last 10% is miscellaneous experiments.

E-mail newsletters The site now sends out 3.5 million ‘Today’s Headlines’ e-mails, up from 1 million in January 2001. Niche newsletters range from 85,000 for ‘In Advertising’ to 290,000 for “Book Digest.” Eight of 12 newsletters have 150,000+ subscribers.

NYTimes.com launched the ‘Sophisticated Shopper,’ a compendium of ‘special offers’ this summer and already has 101,000 users. These users were acquired through in-house promotions like banners and notes to the 2 million people who accept e-mail updates from the site. All NYTimes.com e-mail technology is managed in-house, he said.

Headline distribution The site recently negotiated a deal to run headlines on AOL for free. In addition, NYTimes.com pays Altavista, Yahoo, MSN and Netzero between 1 and 3 cents per click for visitors referred by headlines posted on those sites.

Nothing conveys the brand more succinctly than a headline, he said. ‘This is much more effective than two years ago when we were paying 25 cents a click for banners,’ Calder said.

Search engines NYTimes.com has devoted attention to its appearance in search engines, but the site’s performance is constrained by registration and padlocked archives. Calder did not have figures on the initial impact of News.Google.

After achieving operating profit for each quarter since Q2 2001, NYTimes Digital is on track to achieve an operating profit for the year in 2002. Combined with the staff of Boston.com, NYTimes Digital has 220 staff, with 15 of those involved in marketing. Calder said the site does not release figures for what it spends on online marketing.

A new study shows that: “High-affinity audiences are more valuable to advertisers. They demonstrate brand loyalty and a willingness to pay more for products they perceive to be of higher quality.”

When you next hear a journalist smear webloggers, ezinists and other thin media moguls as news recyclers, recall this article.

The nut: “in the past four months, three major articles and numerous broadcast stories have covered collegiate sex writers, portraying their work as controversial, buzz-worthy and part of a growing campus trend.” The college sex columns are moldy news. The buzzing torrent of coverage seems to have been triggered by a June article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The point, however, is not that these news services are doing something bad. It is that they are excelling, and we should study their strategy.

First, recycling a story makes economic sense: it conserves publishing resources.

Second, news is relative. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it ain’t news. Conversely, information is “news” as it reaches each new audiences. The end of WWII was still news to Japanese soldier Hiroo Onada when he emerged from the Phillipine jungle in 1974.

Third, publishers can only aim to serve some of the people most of the time. Good editors realize that each story only hits 2-20% of their readership. Even within a tight demographic, passions and interests just aren’t that congruent. So a publication is only doing a bad job if a) most of its readers have already heard a story and b) those people are sick of it.

Finally, most of us don’t really absorb what we read. For example, how many of your relatives have seen 10 articles about blogs but today still claim never to have encountered the word?

So part of a publisher’s duty is to make sure his/her audience members miss nothing they, as a pseudo collective, care about. And this means lots of recycling.

The same goes for the weblogger’s responsibility to her audience. In fact, because we blatantly link to sources, webloggers are more credible and useful than institutional peers. (Confession: I’m only guessing that the articles mentioned above did not site The Chronicle of Higher Education or recognize that college sex columns are years old.)

Yes, it may be silly to be the 98th person to blog Daypop’s top link. But if your audience cares about the topic, you should do it. And at least you’ll know you aren’t dumber than thick media.

The article I cite above was blogged first by Jim Romenesko.

Although he doesn’t use words like “blogonomics” or “thin media,” Nick Denton offers a nice distillation of their economic logic and the social forces against them: ” one weblog item has about one hundredth the editorial cost of a commissioned article. The content management software is nearly free. The message to traditional publishers is this: you don’t need 200-500 people to run your online operations; you could manage with a tenth of that. And that is the one message the online executives, intent on protecting their jobs, don’t want to learn.” Here’s more on thin media.

Daily visits to NYTimes.com hit new highs in September, with an average of 1.28 million unique users visiting the site each day, Craig Calder, New York Times Digital VP for marketing, told me yesterday.

The September tally represents a 10% jump over the previous high of 1.16 million in October 2001. (See graph below.)

The jump in daily users puts the site’s daily readership solidly beyond the newspaper’s 1.2 million weekday circulation. An average of 1.3 million unique daily users is projected for October, Calder said. Summer months are always slow, he said.

I talked to Calder because I had been looking at the site’s published traffic figures, which ran only through August. These suggested that the site had hit a ceiling around 1.1 million unique daily users. This would have correlated with the sideways drift in US Internet user figures.

Figuring I could either blog “the plateau’ or do some fact checking, I decided to contact New York Times Digital. If traditional media can interview bloggers, why not vice versa?

NYTDigital spokesperson Christine Mohan put me in touch with Calder, who delivered the numbers. Calder attributed the growth both to increased value delivered to the site’s pool of registered users and to the public’s demand for reliable information in stressful times.

Cannibalization is not an issue, says Calder. On the contrary, the site is ‘critical to newspaper’s growth in national markets and younger user groups,’ he said.

‘As a whole, the newspaper industry is challenged by fact that readers are getting older and aren’t reaching a whole generation brought up on AOL and CNN. We’ve been extremely successful in offsetting this,’ Calder said.

The paper’s typical reader is 45, while the site’s average reader is 35, said Calder. And while 85% of the website’s users come from outside the New York designated marketing area, 44% of the daily’s readers are inside the area.

Since January, NYTDigital has been examining the overlap between site users and the newspaper’s readership and found that only 8% of site users are also print subscribers.

Growth in daily usage of the site comes because NYTimes.com is wringing more visits from its pool of nearly 11 million registered users, said Calder. A year ago, NYTimes.com aspired to attain an 18% retention rate, meaning that 18% of the site’s total registered users visited the site at least once in a given month. Today, retention is 30%, Calder said.

The site generated 85,000 new home delivery starts in 2001, up from 25,000 in 2000. Through September 30 this year, the site generated another 58,000. (My calculator annualizes that to 77,000.)

I’ll type up more notes on this later.

(Note: After I posted, Christine Mohan supplied new information about print reader median age and footprint. I’ve updated the copy above.)

Newspaper columnist James Lileks describes how he felt when the paper’s Internet connection broke and he was unable to read blogs:
“I felt cut off from the world. It was as if my window had been bricked up. I needed to know what was going on out there. Keep in mind that I had this feeling in a newspaper, where I had access to every wire service on the planet.” Yep, reading the news without blog context is like listening to an old Sony portable radio versus sitting in the midst of an orchestra. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)