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Posts tagged ‘advertising’

23
Nov

Independent printing payments

With the launch of the new Sunday Times websites (separating from The Times) fast approaching and with all this talk of Rupert Murdoch introducing charges on the various newspaper websites he owns around the world I thought I’d take a look at alternatives.

The Independent Newspaper has an interesting way of making a bit of extra cash from their website – they’re restricting printing.

OK it might seem strange to want to print a story you’ve got right in front of you on the screen but being able to print something and then take it away to read later is a useful resource.

It’s also useful to be able to print if you want to hand it out as a resource at a talk/debate or lesson – so the idea of having ‘extra’ charges for extra prints isn’t that silly.

Unfortunately, this is the internet so they have to rely on a ‘good will’ model.

They’ve got a system in placefrom iCopyright that allows them to offer you alternatives for printing within a popup – but that wouldn’t stop you just copying and pasting.

You get the choice of a ‘free print’ where you can make up to five copies using your home or office printer for free (with an ad).

You can make an Instant print on your home printer with six or more copies from 25p to £1 per copy without ads.

You can get a quote for customised prints with your own logo for more than 100 copies on high quality paper.

Or you can have 50+ copies printed by them and sent to you within two business days, these cost 75p to £1.10 per copy – again with no adverts.

So the site itself, the articles on screen are free to view (at the moment) but printing on a bulk level will cost you money. Not sure this helps them or makes any real difference – but it is different.

Go live

Another approach might be to follow the trend currently being set by the music industry and go live, take your wares to the people.

Felix from Basement Jaxx told me that where once they would go on tour to support and promote their album – now they release an album to support a tour.

Newspapers could learn from this model, and this is one I think The Guardian seem to be catching on to.

This could be as simple as having live versions of their more popular podcasts with a paying audience or it could be by hosting full conferences.

It could be by funding talks or debates in regional theatres by controversial figures or even by running quiz nights with a star host.

Whatever approach is taken, whether it be to charge for full access to a newspaper website, to charge for premium content but leave news free or to go for an alternative like printing or live events – there seems to be plenty of choices.

I think in the end the approach that works, once the world of print newspapers is no longer viable on any serious scale, will be a combination of everything but the ‘all charge’ approach currently being favoured by News Corp.

I think what we’ll see is large multimedia news sites that charge for access to premium content like popular columnists, games and media content.

This could also include business specific content like financial data, academic resources and media industry jobs.

But at the same time make news and information content available for free and funded by advertising so that your average user, who won’t see any benefit in paying for news can still give you some revenue.

from iCopyright that allows them to offer you alternatives for printing within a popup – but that wouldn’t stop you just copying and pasting.
You get the choice of a ‘free print’ where you can make up to five copies using your home or office printer for free (with an ad).
You can make an Instant print on your home printer with six or more copies from 25p to £1 per copy without ads.
You can get a quote for customised prints with your own logo for more than 100 copies on high quality paper.
Or you can have 50+ copies printed by them and sent to you within two business days.
These cost 75p to £1.10 per copy – again with no adverts.
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20
Sep

It’s not all about the money

Everytime a public organisation comes up with what is basically a good idea, something that will provide interesting content for free for the public in an easy to use way – somebody, usually somebody running a private company – jumps up and down and screams about it hurting the ‘commercial sector’.

I can completely understand a newspaper group getting a little anxious when they’ve got a big new service ready to launch, advertising in place and then someone like the BBC, the Government or another publicly funded body launches an almost identical service with tax payers money – but how often does that actually happen.

Most of the time the excuses for objecting to a cool new public service site, channel or project is that it would stop the private company from being able to create something similar in the future – thus cutting off a potential revenue stream.

But for me that is where the argument completely falls down – in most cases the public service version would be advertising free and as the commercial version would probably be advertising funded – I don’t see where the competition is?

OK so there would be a little bit of competing for eyeballs but I like to think that people are smart enough to rely on more than one source for their news and information – I use Twitter and Facebook even though Facebook is fast becoming Twitter.

I read every major newspaper website, I read more than one blog, even if they’re on the same subject and belong to several forums covering the same subject area.

What I’m saying is – why does it matter if the BBC runs a service similar to one a commercial company might run when the commercial company will live or die by advertising revenue (charging for things on the web doesn’t work unless its a mobile app) and the BBC won’t be taking advertising?

Equally why shouldn’t a local council create a local online television service to let people know what is happening in their town if they can afford it – although if they’re cutting other services I would suggest maybe thinking again?

In fact, scrap the example above as that really just seems to be about promoting the council – what councils should really be doing, and this would help local newspapers – is filming all council meetings and then providing a feed – for free – to all the newspapers, radio stations and other media in their area.

Those media services could then broadcast that feed on their sites, cut up videos/speeches to publish with articles and even be able to properly cover local council meetings without having to send a reporter – it could just be on a TV in the background in the newsroom.

This would provide local news services with free content, would allow them to have a journalist doing something else and would hopefully encourage greater transparency in local government.

If councils have the money to launch a TV service or newspaper promoting the council – surely that money would be better spent actually covering council meetings.

In fact, maybe that is something the BBC could help fund with some of the ‘digital switchover money’ instead of giving it to ITV or other broadcasters.

It could be an extention of the digital democracy project but instead of it all being broadcast on the BBC – it could be part of BBC Parliament with a branding free feed offered to each of the relevant local newspapers, websites, blogs and radio stations.

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29
Jan

The future of news?

This blog post started life as a comment on the blog of Birmingham Post Journalist, Joanna Geary.

However, having gone read the comment back I thought it was worth sharing with you as well.

Joanna ponders a world ‘beyond the parasitic news model‘. How news will be funded and organised online when the bottom falls out of the ‘mainstream’ media market.

My suggestion – let it go.

It’s possible that there is no way around the problem and we have to accept that we’re moving into a new era of journalism.

Journalism, distilled.
Image by sebFlyte via Flickr

We’ve had the coffee house era, the pamphlet era, the newspaper era and maybe now we’re moving into the social era – almost back to the idea of news spreading in coffee houses – but in this case from individual bloggers talking directly about their own story.

Instead of several newspapers employing journalists to tell stories and spread news – we’re moving to a time when people tell their own stories in their own space and those stories are in turn spread by search engines and aggregators.

Each blogger, twitterer, podcaster or even message board contributor could make small amounts of revenue from their story in their space – others could make slightly larger amounts of money by sharing the stories of others in their space.

But it’s all much more social, much more democratic and on a much larger scale globally but smaller scale in terms of where the stories are held and produced.

Local newspapers could still exist as papers of record – possibly on a public service model – reporting on local politics and big issues in each area – maybe part funded by advertising and part funded by a ‘local media tax’.

Just an idea

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1
Jul

What’s all the fuss about?

There’s a mounting campaign to get Heinz to re-instate the gay kiss advert they pulled after just 200 complaints.
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21
Feb

Back door adverts

I logged into Facebook for the first time in about three weeks this morning and was confronted by a message telling me one of my friends has signed up as a fan of Marmite.

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12
Feb

Mobile Co-operation?

If you go down to the woods today – beware of a big surprise – because today’s the day the mobile companies have their cake and eat it (OK that didn’t work as well as I hoped it would).

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4
Jan

Who needs TV

Theres been a long standing relationship between big business and commercial television – the television channel shows a promotional video for a big company in between its programmes and in return big business gives the TV channel a big chunck of money.

In the new media age, the era of Generation Y, the time when those of us under 30 (or around 30) are in control of the advertising budgets and what goes on to the TV screens – the roles are almost reversed.

Well actually it isn’t a case of roles reversed – its a case of the TV station being taken out of the equation completely.

A video on You Tube can get upwards of a two million views if its good enough – taking in account the number of people that turn over during the adverts or walk out to make a cup of tea – you’d have to advertise during something like Coronation Street or Doc Martin to get those sort of views for your ad.

The cost of getting millions of views for a clip on You Tube could be anything from sod all to thousands depending on how much you spend on making the advert itself as thats the only cost.

However the chance of getting millions of views on You Tube is pretty slim – first you need to build momentum for it by getting people to talk about it in blogs or message boards and then you need to cross your fingers and hope it strikes at the heart of the fickle new media audience.

The cost of getting millions of views for an ad on ITV (during Corrie) is probably around £50,000 for 30 seconds PLUS the cost of actually making the advert in the first place (which you’d have to spend to get it on You Tube).

But – an advert during Corrie is probably guaranteed to be seen by at least 1 million of the 10 million viewers it gets on average – so you’re paying for the guaranteed view.

So if you’ve created an Ad Campaign thats pretty good and says what your business does – the normal everyday traditional advertising campaign that you see all the time – spend the extra cash and run it during Corrie (if thats your target audience).

But if you have a really good idea for CONTENT – so something that ads a little extra to society whether it be a drumming gorilla, a half hour sitcom or Danny Wallace talking about every day masterpieces (new Fiat campaign) – get it on the web and hope for hte best.

The biggest mistake though is to only have the video available through your own site – at the very least release short versions or a few full versions of the videos on all the major social video sites and MAKE THEM EMBEDDABLE.

The mistake Fiat have made with what could well be a pretty good, rampant success of a viral video series – is restrict it to their site only. If they got the well produced, very funny videos out to the wider web (with a picture of their car in the bottom corner or something) it would be seen by MANY MORE people than just putting a few banner ads on popular sites.

I’m going to keep going back to the Fiat site just to watch Danny’s Clips as he’s a funny guy but I’m not going to look at anything else on the site – but if you gave me the content in a way I could easily access then I might just take more of an interest – even if you put the info on the right hand side in the notes – or provide something ‘extra’ on your site in addition to what I can get from the You Tube clips.

Although – as the Fiat 500 looks like a pig ugly piece of crap of a car I don’t think I’d be that interested however much stuff they gave me on their site. Although I’m sure it drives wonderfuly and it does have that ‘cult’ appeal that will mean it will sell VERY well among a certain subset of society.

The same subset that loves watching You Tube videos while bored in the office – hello Fiat?