Britney Leaves Rehab but ends up in Hospital with a Newspaper.
Sometimes Monday is full of Mondayisms. Ick - what a week, what a day. So everyone is talking about what newspapers should do to cross the gap between their current online ad revenue, and the seepage from print. I'll throw in my bulletpoints as much as I want to resist :
- Buy digg before google or yahoo does. And/Or automattic, movable type. Increase new media R+D by 400%. (google spend $350m per qtr on R+D) Partner with Y-Combinator or TechStars and pay 50% of the $6k per founder, rather buying the resultant properties 18 months later.
- Rightsize costs by 35% and create an online warchest in partnership with Private Equity joint venture. Privatise if public. Sorry more pain. Cut deep. Less so in sales tho. Blame the PE guys.
- Think about creating a hybrid between employment and sackage - Use the Weblogsinc playbook and instead of straight sacking editors, contract them to performance blog; base per word salary plus bonus for uniques/page views and ads.
- Move beyond using solely blog comments and digg this as the way to create a "conversation". Give your audience a blog. We all know anonymous blog comments do not lift the overall "quality" of conversation. Innovate in moderation and make family safe places.
- Crawl the internet for quality blogs, voices, videos, images, ratings, reviews, ads which add to the pro created, evergreen and licensed content. Small steps but u need to move quickly.
- Withdraw/Outsource/Reconfigure those categories where there are better bloggers and other content out there in global/specialist verticals that newspapers no longer own - movies, finance, sports and so on.
- Allow structured user content uploading and pinging ala Outside.in, Google Base, Technorati - with a focus on hyperlocal and folksonomic content mapped to traditional content channels.
- Create new sites that are more cutting edge than startups in Real Estate, Automotive and Employment. Maybe buy from Linkedin, Jobster, Indeed, Trulia, Zillow, Boompa to scale up.
- Develop new aggregation and filtering capabilities to match your MSM content with user generated. Buy sphere, technorati etc.
- Buy smart in the local search space. Pickup Yelp and some smart mapping plays like Wayfaring, Plazes... and integrate.
- Combine new exciting print products with online business models that work. The Twitter model applied to newspapers when people are reading on the way to and from work on public transport. Wesabe works with the business section. Yelp with the Restaurant guide. etc
- Develop a local self service hyperlocal and channel targeted ad mechanism that allows the bundled sale of targeted print, online and third party federated media like blog ads. Buy quigo, federated media, ads-click etc. Also cut a deal with Google to bundle hyperlocal and category targeted ads.
- Incentivise salesforce to better sell bundled online and offline solutions. Ensure this is made easy, with good commissions and great performance. Think Yahoo Panama, but for newspapers with a focus on local and selling more than your own properties. Own the local advertiser like you used to.
- Continue to beef up premium video coverage. Buy some quality video/audio embedding technology companies as well as create a huge distributed media revenue sharing offer ala revver, but with an AB demographic geo-targeted focus.
So on and so forth.. The biggest opportunity outside turning passive print/online audience into consumer-creators/reader-reporters is owning the local advertising sales channel (self-service, direct and agency sales) It's not like anyone else has figured out how to monetise myspace, facebook, youtube etc.
Bundling up local user generated content (from within and outside your site) and sold thru self service and your full service local sales team (with some adwords too) would be pretty compelling one stop shop for Mr Average Newspaper advertiser. It would drive up overall advertiser yields and analysts might lift your blended earning multiple enough to cover cost of this campaign.
Summary : Cut Costs. Setup a $1b internal fund + Copy what Fox Interactive did to TV/teenagers, but with a focus on the newpaper/genx:baby boomer demographic. Wash, rinse, repeat.
"Actually, I don't have a TV but I do read newspapers. But how I read them is important. I don't pick up a physical newspaper -- I'll get sent a link. The experience is very different, given to me by different people. What my friends sent to me or what other people think and send to me." In the next [Facebook] iterations, you're going to see real stories being produced. 'These people went to this party and they did this the next day and then here's the discussion that was taking place off of this article in The Wall Street Journal. And these two people went to this party and they broke up the next day.' Whatever, you can start weaving together real events into stories. As these start to approach being stories, we turn into a massive publisher. Twenty to 30 snippets of information or stories a day, that's like 300 million stories a day. It gets to a point where we are publishing more in a day than most other publications have in the history of their whole existence." (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg quoted in WSJ via Infectious Greed)
- Buy digg before google or yahoo does. And/Or automattic, movable type. Increase new media R+D by 400%. (google spend $350m per qtr on R+D) Partner with Y-Combinator or TechStars and pay 50% of the $6k per founder, rather buying the resultant properties 18 months later.
- Rightsize costs by 35% and create an online warchest in partnership with Private Equity joint venture. Privatise if public. Sorry more pain. Cut deep. Less so in sales tho. Blame the PE guys.
- Think about creating a hybrid between employment and sackage - Use the Weblogsinc playbook and instead of straight sacking editors, contract them to performance blog; base per word salary plus bonus for uniques/page views and ads.
- Move beyond using solely blog comments and digg this as the way to create a "conversation". Give your audience a blog. We all know anonymous blog comments do not lift the overall "quality" of conversation. Innovate in moderation and make family safe places.
- Crawl the internet for quality blogs, voices, videos, images, ratings, reviews, ads which add to the pro created, evergreen and licensed content. Small steps but u need to move quickly.
- Withdraw/Outsource/Reconfigure those categories where there are better bloggers and other content out there in global/specialist verticals that newspapers no longer own - movies, finance, sports and so on.
- Allow structured user content uploading and pinging ala Outside.in, Google Base, Technorati - with a focus on hyperlocal and folksonomic content mapped to traditional content channels.
- Create new sites that are more cutting edge than startups in Real Estate, Automotive and Employment. Maybe buy from Linkedin, Jobster, Indeed, Trulia, Zillow, Boompa to scale up.
- Develop new aggregation and filtering capabilities to match your MSM content with user generated. Buy sphere, technorati etc.
- Buy smart in the local search space. Pickup Yelp and some smart mapping plays like Wayfaring, Plazes... and integrate.
- Combine new exciting print products with online business models that work. The Twitter model applied to newspapers when people are reading on the way to and from work on public transport. Wesabe works with the business section. Yelp with the Restaurant guide. etc
- Develop a local self service hyperlocal and channel targeted ad mechanism that allows the bundled sale of targeted print, online and third party federated media like blog ads. Buy quigo, federated media, ads-click etc. Also cut a deal with Google to bundle hyperlocal and category targeted ads.
- Incentivise salesforce to better sell bundled online and offline solutions. Ensure this is made easy, with good commissions and great performance. Think Yahoo Panama, but for newspapers with a focus on local and selling more than your own properties. Own the local advertiser like you used to.
- Continue to beef up premium video coverage. Buy some quality video/audio embedding technology companies as well as create a huge distributed media revenue sharing offer ala revver, but with an AB demographic geo-targeted focus.
So on and so forth.. The biggest opportunity outside turning passive print/online audience into consumer-creators/reader-reporters is owning the local advertising sales channel (self-service, direct and agency sales) It's not like anyone else has figured out how to monetise myspace, facebook, youtube etc.
Bundling up local user generated content (from within and outside your site) and sold thru self service and your full service local sales team (with some adwords too) would be pretty compelling one stop shop for Mr Average Newspaper advertiser. It would drive up overall advertiser yields and analysts might lift your blended earning multiple enough to cover cost of this campaign.
Summary : Cut Costs. Setup a $1b internal fund + Copy what Fox Interactive did to TV/teenagers, but with a focus on the newpaper/genx:baby boomer demographic. Wash, rinse, repeat.
"Actually, I don't have a TV but I do read newspapers. But how I read them is important. I don't pick up a physical newspaper -- I'll get sent a link. The experience is very different, given to me by different people. What my friends sent to me or what other people think and send to me." In the next [Facebook] iterations, you're going to see real stories being produced. 'These people went to this party and they did this the next day and then here's the discussion that was taking place off of this article in The Wall Street Journal. And these two people went to this party and they broke up the next day.' Whatever, you can start weaving together real events into stories. As these start to approach being stories, we turn into a massive publisher. Twenty to 30 snippets of information or stories a day, that's like 300 million stories a day. It gets to a point where we are publishing more in a day than most other publications have in the history of their whole existence." (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg quoted in WSJ via Infectious Greed)
posted by redbarren at 7:25 PM
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