Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper Ad Network Shuns Google, Yahoo, MS
Ian Lamont writes "The New York Times, and the Tribune, Gannett, and Hearst companies have launched their own ad network, called QuadrantOne. It will let advertisers place ads on media sites in 27 major markets, and let them target readers by content type, demographic information, and online behavior. Notably absent from the deal: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Both Google and Yahoo have their own ad networks focused on newspapers, but, as the article says, 'if newspapers develop better ways to sell their own online ads, they may not have to share revenue with their Web counterparts such as Yahoo and Google.'"
Apparently, the news industry is hurting. But the problem is that anymore they are all the same. More and more, they all spout the same thing, and will not cover what is news worthy (bad reporting, spin, whatever). These days, I have been turning overseas to find out exactly what America is up to, and then MIGHT see the article buried about a month later. That is NOT how we are suppose to get the story. This AM got into a discussion with another about reporting and at some point it was mentioned that if not spin, then it was shoddy reporting. For the last 5 years, I have seen nothing but increasingly shoddy reporting.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That makes sense.
A big problem with Google's "content network" is that most of the ad sites have no real content. The newspaper industry at least has something worth attaching ads to. Google is taking a 50% cut of ad revenue without doing very much for it.
This may push Google ads towards the "bottom feeder" made-for-Adwords sites, especially if the news media become very aggressive about going after anyone copying their content. This will make thosse ads much less valuable; that's where the low-value clicks come from.
Open Adblock control - insert domain... and there you have it, another empty space where annoyance used to be :D
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I gleefully welcome the destruction of the mainstream media. Why? Despite touting itself as a watchdog, the media is quite possibly the single biggest enemy that "democracy" and liberty have in the United States. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that whatever can be said of Bush and Cheney, the mainstream media beats them by a wide margin. It doesn't criticize the government except a few politicians, it almost never holds corrupt and abusive government employees accountable, and it rarely provides a voice for actually holding the government by the short hairs and making it fess up.
There is a case that, for me, was the last straw. It was written in the Pilot, which is a major Virginia media outlet. I have a write up here showing how much of a f$%^ing lapdog the media was in not questioning how the police carried out this raid. The reports have only gotten worse, including it appears to be that the police conducted this raid after knowing that their own informant committed a felony against the poor guy by breaking into his home 3 days before the raid (might explain why he was trigger happy when the police raided the house 3 days later at night while he was in bed).
The media has two modes when it comes to their traditional role of watchdog: lapdog and psychotic attack dog that turns on the children. They'll either damn near cover stuff up, or make a mountain out of a molehill, when there are plenty of good examples that would get the public furious for good reasons.
What is this? Some bullshit concept of "journalist ethics and social responsibility" at work? I don't buy the corporate angle that much because if they reported half of the shit that makes it to civil libertarian blogs and kept up with it, they'd have more naturally occurring controversy to sell ads with than the law should allow.
So, I say bring it on to the mainstream media. There are plenty of lightweight media outlets that aren't barely more than Associated Press resellers, and they're going up against Craigslist, a 800lb gorilla in the classifieds market now.
Newspapers, as a medium for delivering news, are dying. However the newsrooms that create content for the papers are crucial to the journalism industry, because they don't exist in any other media. TV news is fast, get some visuals, talk to a few folks and get it all done by 6:00pm. Newspaper journalists can pour more investigation and actual news reporting into a 2 column story than some anchorbabe can read on a teleprompter in 30-40 seconds.
The newspaper has to be kept alive, and if they figure out how to successfully produce enough revenue to continue to publish on the Web, great. But when you think about how much the work newspapers do influences all the other media, you start to wonder what how the profession as a whole would suffer if newspapers died out altogether.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Online newspaper advertising as it's now done is the absolute WORST. You can barely read that damned paper without all the flashing and blinking and popovers and such garbege. As I read the paper on break at work and my employer uses IE it's especially odius.
When the Chicago Tribune got bought the first thing they did was to make the advertising worse, made the whole damned thing in Flash, with no way to right click, and every time you went back to the front page you got an intro ad.
It annoyed me so much I found the "contact" page and detailed exactly how mind bogglingly stupid they were, why, and how it cost them at least one reader, and how I was never going to buy ANYTHING any of their advertisers hawked in such an offensive manner. And didn't go back for quite a while.
Apparently their online circulation dropped dramatically after their attack of incredible stupidity, because it's back like it was.
How can you trust news from people stupid enough to annoy their audience?
-mcgrew
(and now for more annoyance, the mcgrew journal The Robyn 'Hood. An old girlfriend, a true lady (not the girlfriend unfortunately), and a couple of whores. Brought to you by Microsoft. Microsoft: takes a licking and keeps on [no carrier]
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest