“Advertising” Items

Leveraging Web Sites for Newspaper Ad Sales

In 2005, the Newspaper Association of America [NAA] asked the Digital Futurist Consultancy to undertake a research and communication project to help newspaper companies better leverage their digital sites [the Web] to sell more advertising in their analog editions — the print product. The project was done by Howard Finberg and Leah Gentry, industry associates and friends from way back. Leah was a digital pioneer at the LA Times while I was working in Phoenix.

Here’s a taste of what we wrote for the NAA magazine, Presstime, about the project:

“Leveraging Your Web Site for Ad Sales,” a new NAA report, highlights ways newspapers can make better use of their Web sites to attract and service advertisers.

The report, produced for the Association by The Digital Futurist Consultancy, www.digitalfuturist.com, examines whether newspapers are using their sites to promote print advertising, to share their marketing and pricing data, and to provide customer service to new and existing advertisers. The report’s findings include:

  • 55 percent of the sites reviewed have an area for marketing the print edition.That still leaves lots of sites without any marketing information for potential advertisers.
  • 60 percent provide visitors with advertising rates and information about deadlines, terms and ad sizes.
  • Less than 10 percent provide a self-service area for advertisers. The report defines self-service as the ability to schedule and upload an advertisement.

We were proud of the report and saddened by the missed opportunities.

To read the full report just follow this link to the PDF.

Editor & Publisher feature page from May 5, 2003 by Carl Sullivan on spam filters, ad blockers and newspaper pop-up advertising

Spam Filters, Ad Blockers and a 2003 Warning About Pop-ups

This is a feature by Carl Sullivan in the May 5, 2003, issue of Editor & Publisher about a problem that was just coming into focus for newspaper Web sites: the filtering technologies readers were installing to protect themselves from spam and pop-up advertising were also blocking the e-mail and the ads newspapers were sending.

Sullivan opens with the e-mail news alerts newspapers sent when 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart was found near Salt Lake City in March 2003. Words like “teenager,” “kidnapped,” and “girl” tripped spam filters that mistook the alerts for pornography. Ron Currier, chief technology officer of Boulder-based PublishMail, which handled reader e-mail for more than 30 newspapers, described the result:

They bounced like crazy

The other half of the story was ad blocking. Sullivan cites a March 2003 Forrester Research study showing 14% of online consumers were using some form of ad-blocking software, up from about 1% a year earlier — with another 13% saying they hadn’t known such software existed until the pollsters asked, and would now consider installing it. The article quotes a long list of online newspaper executives on pop-ups, pop-unders, blacklists and whitelists, including Jason Krebs of NYTimes.com, Greg Schermer of Lee Enterprises, Ian Murdock of Hearst Newspapers, Ginger Neal of Freedom Orange County Information, and Jeff Webber of USAToday.com.

I was quoted twice, identified as a principal at the Finberg-Gentry consultancy — my partnership with Steve Gentry, also listed in the article as The Digital Futurist Consultancy — and as a faculty member at the Poynter Institute. The first quote follows a mention of our 2001 report for the Newspaper Association of America, which found that many publishers were generating new print subscriptions through pop-up house ads on their own Web sites:

Web publishers have to wean themselves off those or find additional ways to promote the paper. They were effective, but now’s the time to move off of them or to at least supplement them with banner and tile advertising.

Sullivan notes that we were working on a follow-up report about using the Net to promote print subscriptions, expected to be released by NAA that summer. My second quote closes the piece, alongside PowerOne Media’s David Teitler asking whether the Web would end up an advertising-supported medium at all:

Consumers recognize that there’s value in advertising. The real challenge for Web sites is to find the right visual model that conveys the message in an effective way without angering readers.

That challenge didn’t get any easier. The article also points to what became the answer for a while — contextual “sponsored links” served next to editorial content, then being tested at USAToday.com through Applied Semantics, a company Google had just purchased.

Nielsen I/PRO I/AUDIT report page for Arizona Central, July 1996, listing certified visits, page views, and top pages

Nielsen Audits Arizona Central, July 1996

This is the Nielsen I/PRO I/AUDIT report for Arizona Central for the month of July 1996. I was managing Arizona Central at the time, and this was one of the first attempts by anyone to put an independent, third-party number on what a newspaper web site was actually doing.

The point of the exercise was advertising. If we were going to sell space on the site, someone other than us had to vouch for the traffic:

This report is a standard, verifiable means for Web sites to report traffic to advertisers and media buyers/planners in order to facilitate effective placement of advertising.

I/PRO built the audit from a census analysis of our raw log files, reviewed by their audit analysts, and certified the results as “an independent, accurate, and complete summary of this web site’s activity.” The affidavit language matters more than it might seem now — media buyers had no reason to trust self-reported server numbers.

The month’s totals:

VISITS … TOTAL 56,757 / AVERAGE PER DAY 1,831 / AVERAGE VISIT LENGTH 8:33 minutes

And on the content side, 381,538 pages viewed, an average of 6.7 pages per visit. The top 50 pages accounted for 299,906 pages, or 78.6 percent of everything viewed.

What those top pages were is the interesting part. Job Search, under the classifieds directory, drew 13,584 page views — a reminder of how early classifieds moved online. Alongside the standard departments (FLASH, FEATURES, FUN, comics, Dining, Destinations, the Arizona Golf Guide, the interactive TV listings, Home Buying Choices), the news pages that show up are exactly the stories of that summer in Arizona: “Phoenix bombing plot,” “Symington indicted,” and “Arizona’s Olympians.” There’s also a page titled “Tell us what you think!” — 617 views for the survey.

The visitor-by-organization table is its own time capsule. America Online alone delivered 14,143 visits, more than seven times the next name on the list, Primenet, at 1,824. Arizona State University, GoodNet, CompuServe, Netzone, Microsoft Network, Internet Direct — the local ISPs and the national online services were the on-ramps. The top 50 organizations were 60.7 percent of all site visits. Geographically, 91.0 percent of activity came from the United States, with Canada at 1.8 percent and a scattering from Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, the U.K., and Germany.

 

Cover of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau's October 1987 report summarizing the 1987 Newspaper Inventory Survey of U.S. daily newspapers

Daily Newspapers ’87: Taking Stock

An October 1987 report from the Newspaper Advertising Bureau summarizes the findings of NAB’s 1987 Newspaper Inventory Survey — a mail survey of every daily and Sunday/weekend newspaper in the United States and Canada, and the fifth in a series that began in 1967 and continued in 1974, 1979 and 1983. This volume covers local, English-language weekday editions in the U.S. only; a companion volume handled Sunday and weekend editions.

The survey’s original purpose was commercial: give advertisers and agencies a way to find newspapers carrying particular standing features, so an ad could be positioned next to the right kind of content. Later editions added questions about content, graphics and layout, positioning practices, ROP color, zoning, split runs and home delivery. The 1987 weekday inventory counted twelve kinds of sections and fifty-eight kinds of features or columns. (Pretty quaint given how ads are placed today.)

The base for the tables:

The summary tables shown are based on completed questionnaires from 987 daily newspapers representing 59% of all United States dailies and 79% of total circulation.

On content, the report found the churn of the early 1980s hadn’t slowed:

Findings from the 1987 Newspaper Inventory show that the period of rapid change in content, previously noted in the 1979 and 1983 inventories, continues unabated. Since 1983, nearly seven out of ten newspapers (69%) report substantial changes in content.

The most frequently reported changes were increased business coverage (53% of newspapers), increased sports coverage (45%), and a shift in the ratio of state and local to national and international coverage (35%).

The design numbers are the ones I keep coming back to. Eighty-two percent of newspapers — 91% of circulation — reported substantial changes in graphics or layout since 1983. More use of ROP color (61%) and conversion to Standard Advertising Units (SAU) page and column specs (60%) led the list, followed by changed mastheads, changed typefaces, more photographs, and modular front pages. And then this:

There has also been a substantial increase in use of computer graphics. In the 1987 study, 28% of responding dailies (52% of circulation) reported more use of graphics compared to 2% in 1983 (3% of circulation).

The feature tables are a time capsule. Crossword puzzles appeared in 98% of weekday circulation, spectator sports 94%, astrology 92%, TV log 92%, business and finance 89%, weather map 89%. Ninety-five percent of responding papers carried comic strips, and the typical weekday edition had three physically separate sections. Zoning was reported by 30% of dailies but 59% of circulation. The median share of weekday circulation that was home delivered: 85%.

The study was directed by Charles Lehman of NAB’s Research Department, and the report was updated by Dorothy Shea. A computerized list of editions carrying any particular section or feature was available on request — by telephone.

Reading this in 2026, what stands out isn’t just how many of these features have vanished from print (the TV log, the movie timetable, the radio log, the stock tables) but that the inventory itself was a product for advertisers — a printed, mailed, hand-tabulated database of what newspapers contained. That function moved online long ago, along with the advertising it was built to serve. The Newspaper Advertising Bureau no longer exists as a separate organization; its work eventually merged into the industry association that became the Newspaper Association of America.