Category Archives: Mobile
Can local media find a new home in real estate?
Ah, real estate. It used to be such a wonderfully profitable sweet spot for newspapers, back in the dear, now-dead days before the Web. And now it’s just a shadow of its former self.
The real estate business itself is doing okay these days, although it always has its ups and downs. It’s print real estate advertising in newspapers that’s been deeply and permanently disrupted.
The question I’m trying to answer these days is, isn’t there another model through which local media companies can play key roles in the real estate market? Read the rest of this entry
Finally — Big Data targeting on our own local media sites
For several years, local media companies have been in a nasty predicament.
We’ve worked hard for years to build sizable, high-quality local audiences on our websites. And we’ve worked hard to sell banner advertising on those sites.
But we haven’t been able to sell what savvy digital advertisers now want and expect: highly targeted impressions on our sites reaching only the individuals with the highest propensity to buy their products or services. Read the rest of this entry
Direct access — a huge disruption of local media
For local news media, the most crippling disruption served up by the Internet isn’t in news — it’s in advertising.
And it’s not just other players getting the ad spending we used to get, although there’s plenty of that going on.
The more insidious advertising disruption is that local businesses need less and less advertising than they once did. Read the rest of this entry
How to make money on mobile
Sounds like a great session for a publishers’ conference, doesn’t it? It’s a big topic for local media businesses these days, as mobile web traffic surpasses desktop traffic for more and more newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations.
That’s why I spent an afternoon searching the Web recently. Read the rest of this entry
Local retailers need e-commerce, so let’s give it to ’em
A recent email from Internet Retailer grabbed my attention.
Its purpose was to plug their new annual Top 500 Guide — a huge directory packed with stats on who’s big in e-commerce, who’s growing market share and who’s not.
But what caught my eye was their take on what’s new in the data.
For years, it said, previous guides had shown big-box stores getting drubbed in e-commerce sales by web-only e-tailers.
“But,” the email said, “…that began changing in 2013, when the chains closed the gap by growing their online sales by 16.7%, taking market share away from manufacturers and catalogers…. Read the rest of this entry
Local media need to join the fight for in-store traffic
In the local media business, whatever hurts retailers hurts us, too. They’re feeling a big hurt right now, and we need to help them fight back.
That big hurt is a steady and continuous decline in store traffic. This means loss of sales, and that leads nowhere good for them — or for local media.
After media disruption: ‘The Age of Knowing Everything’
Let’s look beyond the waves of media disruption we’re experiencing these days. Let’s try to imagine the end state, when media disruption gets done.
Wait … will it ever get done? Yes, I think so — at the time when virtually everyone on the planet, during every waking moment, has instant access at will to virtually the entire body of human knowledge. (Maybe in sleeping moments, too.) Read the rest of this entry
Media business model: Are you running the Scotch Tape store?
If you’re old enough to remember Saturday Night Live in its glory days, maybe you remember the hilarious sketches set in the Scotch Tape store at the old mall.
The bit was centered on, and got its laughs from, a ridiculously narrow business model centered on a single product, sold in a retail location that was no longer the cool place to be. (I’d love to link to a clip here, but I couldn’t find one. NBC must be closely guarding its copyright.)
Those sketches came to mind this week as I was trying to think of a metaphor for the newspaper business and its relentless concentration on news. News continues to be our industry’s central purpose and the heart of its business model for attracting audiences.
I laughed out loud when it occurred to me that we might be well on the way to becoming the Scotch Tape store, or “Scotch Boutique,” as they called it. But the idea is as painful as it is funny. Read the rest of this entry
To win in mobile: It’s a situation, not a news channel
To someone who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the newspaper industry, the hammer we have is news. And right now, the new nail is mobile.
With mobile usage exploding, our industry is determined to pound that nail with news as hard and fast as we can. It looks like a must-do, a matter of survival, and — we hope — a new opportunity to reach people, sell advertising and make money. But mobile is not the nail we think it is. Read the rest of this entry
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