A question to my fellow ActiveRainer's on this question. How many of you PAY for an on-line newspaper subscription?
My guess is that many of my colleagues do not hit the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) so this might come as interesting news as many REALTORS still run newspaper ads and real estate guide (print) ads, ad nauseum. Meaning we run the ads simply to appease the demands of our listings, but we hate paying for them.
Many of you might know the two founders of Google are Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But neither one of them are the CEO at Google. That role goes to Eric Schmidt. He was one of the key speakers at the NAA show which was just held in San Diego. If you attended it, it was dismal. Most of the newspaper executives I ran into all had the "Deer in the headlights," look. Many newspapers are going bankrupt, and many of them were selling their newspaper or entertaining deals at the show. Others were trying to figure out how to stay in business by stopping their print edition and go fully electronic like the Rocky Mountain News did in February this year.
Eric Schmidt was right. Nobody wants to pay for on-line news. I guess I'm one of the few who don't mind. I pay an annual fee for Advertising Age and the Wall Street Journal and that's all. I cannot tell you when the last was that I sat down for a Sunday breakfast and opened up my local newspaper -- the Santa Fe New Mexican. There is one advantage to subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or many other newspapers on line. I don't get the crap advertisements from Lowes', Smiths and JC Penney to spill out all over the table when I get my news. I get only the news articles I want covering advertising, business, travel and that's all I want. Unfortunately, you can't customize the Sunday Edition of the Los Angeles Times in advance. Whether you like it or not, you get the Life Section. Sports, Real Estate Guide, blah blah blah.
Is it any wonder why Apple Computer took off with their iTunes service? You can buy the one song you like from Don Henley and the other 13 songs you can forget about and not pay for them. Newspapers in the traditional print media form cannot do that. Online newspapers can.
Google (last year) experimented with taking some cities and running Google AdWords in them. The results were so dismal, they stopped the program. Google also experimented with radio ads. Meaning you could scan a market for bottom feeding -- doing a media buy (to place your radio spots) in radio stations that were starving to sell their open inventory (ad slots).
In today's eat or be eaten Internet economy, many newspapers that are moving to the web have two fundamental problems facing them today;
1.) How do we make it profitable?
Many people want to read news for free on-line. So the rub is, how do we get people who used to pay for newspapers, now change their minds about paying for news on line? The problem here is the hundreds of thousands of photojournalists and writers who don't want to get grafted onto the rear end of the unemployment line. Who pay for their salaries when the newspapers go to on-line content?
2.) Copyright Protection
How do we police news stories that were posted on line for a subscription, to not have it's text copied and pasted onto a blog or somewhere else? This brought up the very real possibility of forthcoming lawsuits, as it was posed as a possibility by the Associated Press. They would threaten or file lawsuits against the sites what used it's content without written permission. So for you BLOGGERS out there, it's time to be CAREFUL about what you copy from one site and paste into your own site.
I consult with a lot of agents and brokers on real estate SEO who want to get better visibility on their websites. Incoming links from high traffic websites are a great way to do this. Getting mentioned in the electronic version of the newspaper and a text link pointed to your website is how you get more visibility.
- Bart :)
