UPDATE: This fact was so fascinating, there's probably no way it's correct, as Martin Langeveld points out in his comment that kindly doesn't say, "You moron." (I had tried to view the original document, but couldn't find my way to it without having to pay for it.) Let's just say, as Martin says, that what the original document was trying to say was... and leave it at the fact that the original original document actually didn't say what the original document seemed to read as saying. The only way it made sense to me, I admit, was that the cost of most online advertising had been driven down so low that real estate was some sort of exception.
The great thing about blogs is you get to completely embarrass yourself once or twice a year, as opposed to simply making a fool of yourself with every post.
--
It really is. And so, before we get to the professionalization of reporters:
Three out of every five dollars spent on online advertising is for real estate.
Think of that.
Sixty percent of online advertising is real estate.
This same report says newspaper real estate advertising, which everyone, literally everyone, calls outmoded, will rise 16 percent this year (after falling 34 percent last year) while the amount spent on online real estate advertising, while still "pivotal," will decline further.
I don't know enough about this to really put it in any context, other than that so much help wanted and private party advertising that went into classifieds is now free that it probably explains part of this. The story notes that as more real estate advertising online becomes search-based, it will cost less.
Still.
Sixty percent of online billable ads are from one industry.
Showing posts with label classified. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classified. Show all posts
Friday, January 15, 2010
Monday, September 8, 2008
And When You Least Expect It
Kubas Consultants, which I regard as one of the potential saviors of the newspaper business, published a report that used to be free online but now is by pay (CORRECTION: It's not posted online anymore, but it's still free if you order it by e-mail, sorry); here's a link to where you can order the report, called "The Next Newspaper Sales Model." One of its major points was that one of the way Google has prospered is by not demanding that ads be placed through a representative. Indeed, almost all of its business is simply Web-page driven.
Newspapers, the report noted, have made display advertisers go through a sales representative, who hauls out a rate card -- lovingly prepared by the in-house graphics person, but with no possible interactivity -- pulls out a calculator, writes some stuff down on paper and says, "Now here's what I can do for you." It's a salesman-driven model that still works perfectly well in some areas, but increasingly clients either 1) want to simply place the ad directly at a time of their choice or 2) want the rate-card data presented as an Excel file so they can draw their own conclusions. For classified, you often have to go through the Phone Room, dictating the ad to an Ad-Viser who set it up in the system. Of the three papers I get at home daily, all offer the option of going to a Web site to place the ad, but their top-of-the-section setup ad makes clear that the phone is still the preferred method.
Except today, an interesting thing happened in the Burlington County Times. The back page of classified was devoted to a full-page house ad showing how to place your classified ad online, without benefit of human intervention. (Go here, click on map, create account, select classification, place ad.) Perhaps to support this effort, the BCT made a special ad push. Whatever the situation, today's BCT classified, at least in terms of Help Wanted, looked like we were back in the good old days. Classified display for nurses, cashiers, even a chief of police. And liner ads for many different types of jobs. Column after column. Nearly five pages of classified help wanted in a paper that has been strugging to fill three pages with classified in total.
Maybe they were giving them away. But part of the falloff of readership has been that we no longer offer job ads in any profusion. People don't buy papers just for the journalism. Newspapers will never again get column after column of national ads for aerospace engineers running in the top 50 metros. But they can get jobs for local ads drawing from a local readership that is just looking for a job in a specific area, not looking for advancement in a national hiring market.
In line with which, Steve Outing, who in addition to yelling about stopping the presses devotes a lot of time to the issue of classifieds, noted two recent changes, in Baltimore and St. Petersburg, aimed at eliminating the classified ghetto. Among them is moving to a six-column classified format and publishing the classifieds near actual content, not just "friendly" material as has been done with auto ads for years. Outing notes that St. Pete ran its classifieds near:
"- Staff reporter piece about a resident trying to get back his abducted dog.- Staff piece about an ice cream worker for an ongoing feature, "Working Class Hero."- Daily reader-submitted photo.- "On the Move" feature of business appointments, promotions, etc.- Crossword puzzle and other puzzles.- Comics.- Horoscope.- Movie times listings (and ads from theaters).- Advice and consumer watchdog columns (including Dear Abby).- TV listings grid.- Careers Q&A feature (to accompany recruitment ads).- "On the Bookshelf" feature about home-related books (to accompany real estate ads).- Automotive feature stories (to accompany auto ads)"
Well, you can't get away from the auto features. And newspapers have always backed classifieds up against crosswords or comics. Some 40 years ago would run Dear Abby in with the classifieds. But as Outing notes, there are "reports of readers finding ads to respond to and purchasing things as a result of initially reading through the section only to play a puzzle or read the comics. Yes, newspapers have tried many times to add some content in with the classifieds, such as moving comics into the section. But for that to work, the classifieds themselves must be redesigned to be more useful and easy to scan. Editorial content alone can't do the job."
So yes, part of the reason classifieds fled to the Internet was not just that it was a better medium but that we often did a crappy job of presenting them, one based solely on our own needs. The reason classifieds were a cash cow for newspapers is that we ran them in as little space as possible, with all sorts of arcane abbreviations ("2 rms b/a rv vu S Pgh"), and then charged an arm and a leg for them; but part of the reason we did that was the difficulty of producing masses of classifieds in the hot type era.
One shudders to think of the effort involved in setting line after line of classified on linotypes, setting it all by slug, having a makeup person take all the slugs for category 203 and put them in order, filling out the holes at the end of columns, having a person whose job was to monitor that the slug ran for the right number of days and then was thrown in the hellbox -- and from day to day you would not know exactly how much space, with obits and lost cats, this all would take up. Left to its own devices, with legal ads, it could eat up the entire paper. Because classifieds were a world of their own, the paper typically left them to their own devices, such as the different column widths; most papers even had separate styles of folio lines for classified sections, for no particular reason except that the classified manager had the power to do it. And then there were the elaborate rules to prevent cross-departmental poaching by classified and display. The Baltimore Sun was once famous for where you could not run logos in classified liner ads; if you wanted your company name spelled out in big type, you had to have it set in parallel rows of characters like O's in body type. If it was a logo, it was Display and thus it was someone else's commission.
And thus classifieds developed into the jammed together, nearly unreadable, chaotic mix they were when the Internet came along and said, hey, this can be done easier, faster, more readably and cheaper.
Which it can. Classified will never be what it was, but maybe it still has a second life -- if we stop treating it as the unreadable junk in the back of the paper and treat it as content that if we presented it in a way people might actually want to read it, maybe they would. This would work a lot better for newspapers if they admitted that it was all just advertising.
Newspapers, the report noted, have made display advertisers go through a sales representative, who hauls out a rate card -- lovingly prepared by the in-house graphics person, but with no possible interactivity -- pulls out a calculator, writes some stuff down on paper and says, "Now here's what I can do for you." It's a salesman-driven model that still works perfectly well in some areas, but increasingly clients either 1) want to simply place the ad directly at a time of their choice or 2) want the rate-card data presented as an Excel file so they can draw their own conclusions. For classified, you often have to go through the Phone Room, dictating the ad to an Ad-Viser who set it up in the system. Of the three papers I get at home daily, all offer the option of going to a Web site to place the ad, but their top-of-the-section setup ad makes clear that the phone is still the preferred method.
Except today, an interesting thing happened in the Burlington County Times. The back page of classified was devoted to a full-page house ad showing how to place your classified ad online, without benefit of human intervention. (Go here, click on map, create account, select classification, place ad.) Perhaps to support this effort, the BCT made a special ad push. Whatever the situation, today's BCT classified, at least in terms of Help Wanted, looked like we were back in the good old days. Classified display for nurses, cashiers, even a chief of police. And liner ads for many different types of jobs. Column after column. Nearly five pages of classified help wanted in a paper that has been strugging to fill three pages with classified in total.
Maybe they were giving them away. But part of the falloff of readership has been that we no longer offer job ads in any profusion. People don't buy papers just for the journalism. Newspapers will never again get column after column of national ads for aerospace engineers running in the top 50 metros. But they can get jobs for local ads drawing from a local readership that is just looking for a job in a specific area, not looking for advancement in a national hiring market.
In line with which, Steve Outing, who in addition to yelling about stopping the presses devotes a lot of time to the issue of classifieds, noted two recent changes, in Baltimore and St. Petersburg, aimed at eliminating the classified ghetto. Among them is moving to a six-column classified format and publishing the classifieds near actual content, not just "friendly" material as has been done with auto ads for years. Outing notes that St. Pete ran its classifieds near:
"- Staff reporter piece about a resident trying to get back his abducted dog.- Staff piece about an ice cream worker for an ongoing feature, "Working Class Hero."- Daily reader-submitted photo.- "On the Move" feature of business appointments, promotions, etc.- Crossword puzzle and other puzzles.- Comics.- Horoscope.- Movie times listings (and ads from theaters).- Advice and consumer watchdog columns (including Dear Abby).- TV listings grid.- Careers Q&A feature (to accompany recruitment ads).- "On the Bookshelf" feature about home-related books (to accompany real estate ads).- Automotive feature stories (to accompany auto ads)"
Well, you can't get away from the auto features. And newspapers have always backed classifieds up against crosswords or comics. Some 40 years ago would run Dear Abby in with the classifieds. But as Outing notes, there are "reports of readers finding ads to respond to and purchasing things as a result of initially reading through the section only to play a puzzle or read the comics. Yes, newspapers have tried many times to add some content in with the classifieds, such as moving comics into the section. But for that to work, the classifieds themselves must be redesigned to be more useful and easy to scan. Editorial content alone can't do the job."
So yes, part of the reason classifieds fled to the Internet was not just that it was a better medium but that we often did a crappy job of presenting them, one based solely on our own needs. The reason classifieds were a cash cow for newspapers is that we ran them in as little space as possible, with all sorts of arcane abbreviations ("2 rms b/a rv vu S Pgh"), and then charged an arm and a leg for them; but part of the reason we did that was the difficulty of producing masses of classifieds in the hot type era.
One shudders to think of the effort involved in setting line after line of classified on linotypes, setting it all by slug, having a makeup person take all the slugs for category 203 and put them in order, filling out the holes at the end of columns, having a person whose job was to monitor that the slug ran for the right number of days and then was thrown in the hellbox -- and from day to day you would not know exactly how much space, with obits and lost cats, this all would take up. Left to its own devices, with legal ads, it could eat up the entire paper. Because classifieds were a world of their own, the paper typically left them to their own devices, such as the different column widths; most papers even had separate styles of folio lines for classified sections, for no particular reason except that the classified manager had the power to do it. And then there were the elaborate rules to prevent cross-departmental poaching by classified and display. The Baltimore Sun was once famous for where you could not run logos in classified liner ads; if you wanted your company name spelled out in big type, you had to have it set in parallel rows of characters like O's in body type. If it was a logo, it was Display and thus it was someone else's commission.
And thus classifieds developed into the jammed together, nearly unreadable, chaotic mix they were when the Internet came along and said, hey, this can be done easier, faster, more readably and cheaper.
Which it can. Classified will never be what it was, but maybe it still has a second life -- if we stop treating it as the unreadable junk in the back of the paper and treat it as content that if we presented it in a way people might actually want to read it, maybe they would. This would work a lot better for newspapers if they admitted that it was all just advertising.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
OK, Jeremiah, You're Back
I was going to lay off the jeremiads. But this is Bloody Wednesday 2008. The ax at Baltimore. The ax at Hartford. The ax coming for the rest of Tribune, we know. And 130 newsroom jobs at West Palm. One-hundred-thirty newsroom jobs. Estimates are, around 35 percent of the newsroom. In one swoop. At a really strong, solid newspaper.
Good lord. Outsourcing copy editing to India in Santa Ana was bad enough. By the end of the day it was almost a minor annoyance.
At Follow the Media, Philip Stone weighs in on the Orlando redesign. He quotes his son, who lives in Orlando. (Well, why not. I'd quote my son, except he lives in D.C.) His son doesn't dislike the redesign (almost no one in Orlando seems to have, which is good); he finds some of it attractive; he just says, well, who cares.
"... 3) The newspaper is still outdated about 5 minutes after it is dropped off the delivery truck.
“Unfortunately, issue number 3 remains the real problem. The Sentinel has obviously tried to boost its reader base with a new format. The format is not the problem, it never has been. The problem, not just with the Sentinel, but with newspapers in general, is that they cannot compete in a world that is fast paced, information rich, and saturated in opinion. ... My generation, as well as future generations, will be able to access information literally on demand, in full color, and then be able to, just as easily, get as many different viewpoints on that in a span of minutes. How on earth does a newspaper, printed hours before, compete with that?
“Today’s society is not one that relies on their city paper to educate them on what happened yesterday; we are a generation that insists upon immediate and detailed media that allows us to know news as it is happening. It is for these reasons that the Sentinel, and papers everywhere, can give themselves all the makeovers they wish to give, but at the end of the day the makeover will suffer the same result as the content within it -- it will be old news.”
Stone concludes: "So, still no sale to the 30-something!"
OK, pick up your morning newspaper. Look at the stories in it. Ask yourself: By 9 a.m., how many of these stories have advanced in any significant way, if at all, beyond what was in the newspaper?
Not many, particularly on the local level, but that misses the question perhaps, so here's another: How many stories have happened between the start of the press run and the time you read the newspaper, that because they happened during that time then were not included in the newspaper?
Probably even fewer, unless Mugabe killed himself at night or something. So maybe the newspaper should just cede that arena and concentrate on things that don't change much. Many have tried to. The younger Mr. Stone is saying two things, though:
1) I don't care what happened then. Tell me what's happening now. Even if it's the same thing as what happened then.
2) Tell me what people think now about what happened.
Maybe that's the point of "the conversation." At the mid-point of the day today it was about outsourcing copy editing to India. By the end of the day it was that and newspapers making drastic cutbacks. By tomorrow morning it will be about groups like ACES protesting what's happening by starting the site "Why Editing Matters" and ACES co-founder Pam Robinson's eloquent plea at http://www.wordsatwork.blogspot.com/. And perhaps Alan Mutter will have posted something. And Romenesko will have posted something. And the conversation will go on and on in my social network, which is largely journalism junkies and copy editing advocates.
And what newspapers have sold as their strength in this new world -- their ability to analyze, to look deeply at an issue -- well, maybe Joe Blo said that when the newspaper came out in his breathtaking analysis, but by this time Jane Smith has already reacted to Joe Blo's comments, so the story is Jane Smith and then what Jack Frack thinks of Jane's comments, and someone will have a statement on that soon. So your analysis is old news! Why should I read it in print? Hell, why should I read it at all? I might as well read Jack Frack. But the conversation shifts with the wind. It's so full of so much of which so much is so little. Including this blog. If the conversation takes the place of the newspaper, the newspaper has very little place in the conversation. The newspaper is not the same as the conversation, because the newspaper is finite and the conversation is endless. We can't compete with infinity.
But the cuts at Baltimore and West Palm and Hartford are not coming because of the conversation. They're not coming because Philip Stone's son doesn't buy the Orlando Sentinel, redesign or not. They're coming because we lost help wanted and real estate classifieds and competing department stores, and papers can barely meet payroll. And we didn't lose those because our journalistic content was out of date. We lost them because they were cheaper and easier to use online and we used classified as a cash cow. People like Keven Stone will simply not be our readers. Not everyone is Keven Stone. Let's figure out who our readers and advertisers will be.
Good lord. Outsourcing copy editing to India in Santa Ana was bad enough. By the end of the day it was almost a minor annoyance.
At Follow the Media, Philip Stone weighs in on the Orlando redesign. He quotes his son, who lives in Orlando. (Well, why not. I'd quote my son, except he lives in D.C.) His son doesn't dislike the redesign (almost no one in Orlando seems to have, which is good); he finds some of it attractive; he just says, well, who cares.
"... 3) The newspaper is still outdated about 5 minutes after it is dropped off the delivery truck.
“Unfortunately, issue number 3 remains the real problem. The Sentinel has obviously tried to boost its reader base with a new format. The format is not the problem, it never has been. The problem, not just with the Sentinel, but with newspapers in general, is that they cannot compete in a world that is fast paced, information rich, and saturated in opinion. ... My generation, as well as future generations, will be able to access information literally on demand, in full color, and then be able to, just as easily, get as many different viewpoints on that in a span of minutes. How on earth does a newspaper, printed hours before, compete with that?
“Today’s society is not one that relies on their city paper to educate them on what happened yesterday; we are a generation that insists upon immediate and detailed media that allows us to know news as it is happening. It is for these reasons that the Sentinel, and papers everywhere, can give themselves all the makeovers they wish to give, but at the end of the day the makeover will suffer the same result as the content within it -- it will be old news.”
Stone concludes: "So, still no sale to the 30-something!"
OK, pick up your morning newspaper. Look at the stories in it. Ask yourself: By 9 a.m., how many of these stories have advanced in any significant way, if at all, beyond what was in the newspaper?
Not many, particularly on the local level, but that misses the question perhaps, so here's another: How many stories have happened between the start of the press run and the time you read the newspaper, that because they happened during that time then were not included in the newspaper?
Probably even fewer, unless Mugabe killed himself at night or something. So maybe the newspaper should just cede that arena and concentrate on things that don't change much. Many have tried to. The younger Mr. Stone is saying two things, though:
1) I don't care what happened then. Tell me what's happening now. Even if it's the same thing as what happened then.
2) Tell me what people think now about what happened.
Maybe that's the point of "the conversation." At the mid-point of the day today it was about outsourcing copy editing to India. By the end of the day it was that and newspapers making drastic cutbacks. By tomorrow morning it will be about groups like ACES protesting what's happening by starting the site "Why Editing Matters" and ACES co-founder Pam Robinson's eloquent plea at http://www.wordsatwork.blogspot.com/. And perhaps Alan Mutter will have posted something. And Romenesko will have posted something. And the conversation will go on and on in my social network, which is largely journalism junkies and copy editing advocates.
And what newspapers have sold as their strength in this new world -- their ability to analyze, to look deeply at an issue -- well, maybe Joe Blo said that when the newspaper came out in his breathtaking analysis, but by this time Jane Smith has already reacted to Joe Blo's comments, so the story is Jane Smith and then what Jack Frack thinks of Jane's comments, and someone will have a statement on that soon. So your analysis is old news! Why should I read it in print? Hell, why should I read it at all? I might as well read Jack Frack. But the conversation shifts with the wind. It's so full of so much of which so much is so little. Including this blog. If the conversation takes the place of the newspaper, the newspaper has very little place in the conversation. The newspaper is not the same as the conversation, because the newspaper is finite and the conversation is endless. We can't compete with infinity.
But the cuts at Baltimore and West Palm and Hartford are not coming because of the conversation. They're not coming because Philip Stone's son doesn't buy the Orlando Sentinel, redesign or not. They're coming because we lost help wanted and real estate classifieds and competing department stores, and papers can barely meet payroll. And we didn't lose those because our journalistic content was out of date. We lost them because they were cheaper and easier to use online and we used classified as a cash cow. People like Keven Stone will simply not be our readers. Not everyone is Keven Stone. Let's figure out who our readers and advertisers will be.
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