Feb 11 2008
Who are your customers?
Who are the real customers of a newspaper’s website? Why, it’s the advertisers, stupid. They’re the ones that give you money.
Nobody makes money from subscriptions to websites. Even if they did, the trend is to move away from pay walls. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are two big names that have begun recently to take down their pay walls.
Yes, the game on newspaper websites is advertising. It’s not e-commerce, or customer support, or lead generation, or any of the other common reasons why websites exist. Why, then, have news organizations paid so little attention to the real customers of their websites?
Hell, it’s been more than 13 years since newspapers began doing websites and the best we have to show for it is banner ads. Guess what – banner ads don’t work, and advertisers don’t like them – because they know they don’t work, too.
Sure, newspapers have been putting a lot of energy into making their sites more “interactive”, a term they’ve totally usurped to mean something it doesn’t. In their case, it means things like video, audio-visual slideshows, Flash based presentations, and so on. Too much energy, in my opinion, but that’s for another blog. So they’ve been taking care of making the experience for their readers better.
So what have they done for their real customers, the advertisers? Sweet F-A, as they say. So what COULD we be doing? Let’s take a look at what advertisers actually want.
- Eyeballs – just like a print newspaper, the newspaper’s website is in the business of developing a readership and selling that to advertisers. This is the absolute basic and primary order of business. Everything you do on your website should be calculated on the basis of the number of eyeballs it attracts. In a world of limited resources, it makes no sense to spend large amounts of money, time or manpower making content that few eyeballs will see. Primary example? Video. But I’ll save that for another rant. For now, suffice it to say that a comprehensive traffic strategy is a must for your site and you shouldn’t even be thinking about anything else, regardless of its “cool factor”, until that is in place.
- Information on the eyeballs – you could have the best traffic in the world, but if you do not or can not communicate that to advertisers, it does you no good. Luckily, beautiful, full featured reports can be generated from your web log analysis tool and displayed on your site. You can make custom reports out of the tools that third-party vendors provide you, and email them to prospective or current clients. It’s easier to prove your web readership than it is your newspaper readership, and advertisers know that, so just give it to them.
- Variety of compaigns – and not banner ad campaigns, either. And easy to understand. And effective. Publishers have got to start using their imaginations…even if they have to collaborate with IT guys to give them the limits on imagination. Website designers don’t get the final say on your website, either. If they had their way, there’d be no ads on the site at all, because it screws up their beautiful designs. That’s not sustainable.
- Information on campaigns – advertisers need information on how their campaigns are doing – and, unlike with a print newspaper buy, it’s you that can and should give it to them. See #2 above. Think proof of ROI.
- Self-service campaigns – especially for the smaller operations, the ability to manage and build their own campaigns – without having to deal with pushy salesmen, or set up appointments, or do anything else that might force them to explain themselves to people who don’t understand their business.
I’m not saying you don’t do things to improve the reader’s online experience. But I am saying you don’t spend money on it unless it also improves the advertiser’s experience by improving ROI. Video doesn’t do that. Nope, video doesn’t help one goddamned bit with your traffic strategy.
But I’ll save that rant for another day.
Principle: know who your actual customers are.
2 Responses to “Who are your customers?”
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I’ll tell you why publishers are falling in line behind the so-called online news stars: peer pressure. I mean, come on! You’ve heard this before: all of us are cutting math. Who wants to go to that boring class? Let’s go to the mall instead. “Let’s go!” says the coolest kid in your class. Do you do what you know is right and go to math, and take that pop quiz? Or do you give in and go with them?
Some publishers give in to peer pressure for the same reasons our young people do: to fit in. Others may go along because they are curious to try something new that others are doing. The idea that everyone’s doing it may influence some publishers and, if I may add, editors and other senior managers charged with online duties, to leave their better judgment, or their common sense, behind.
Sure, you may scoff at this for being simplistic and sophomoric, but consider this: It is tough to be the only one who says no. Publisher’s aren’t paying attention to their own experience and business savvy about what is right and wrong for their websites. Hey, the coolest kid wants you to drop trough and piss up against the wall? Hell yeah!
You’re not going to be the only weenie who slinks back to class saying, “This just isn’t right”.
That being said, it can be powerful for one publisher to join another by simply saying, “I’m with you, fuck video, let’s go”.
Peer pressure definitely helps explain why publishers would put money into something that doesn’t make money. They know (and they’re right) that Internet will be the platform of the future…even if they don’t know exactly when that will happen, or how they can best capitalize on it.
They see other people doing video, including some of the best websites in the industry, and say, “Hey, we should do that too.” They think, hey, maybe we can sell ads around it, embed ads into the video, and so on, just like on TV. They’re not broadcasters, they don’t have people with experience in broadcast, and they don’t have sales people who could sell it either. The overriding sentiment is something like, “Well, we don’t know how to make money out of this web thing, and none of my peers seem to either, so lets just try stuff until something shakes out and the mud clears.”
Which would be fine if newspapers were in a position to experiment, but with profits and readership in such rampant decline, it’s not at all clear to me that money should be spent on experiments at this point without a clear business strategy.
To make matters even worse, the associations that newspapers belong to, such as community newspaper associations like the CCNA and OCNA, have taken it upon themselves to decide what is the best strategy for the web. How? By offering prizes for video and the like. It completely sideswipes the whole discussion of whether doing video is a good thing for print organizations to invest in, giving it a sort of automatic cachet. “It must be good, there’s an industry prize for it.”
And we all know how much publishers like to get prizes.
As I will argue soon, video is the absolute worst place for a print news organization to invest its resources.