Midwest

Could the LA Times Turn Off Its Presses?

I don't care about a liberal/conservative bend to any newspaper. That's a different argument altogether.

The amount of money that comes in from print advertising dwarfs web advertising. For most publishers, it is well under 10%. Yes, it is growing but website advertising provides measurable returns and the returns aren't looking so good.

CPM are still used by providers because they know that form of measurement obscures the difficult truth of website advertising- It may be cheap but users ignore it at a staggering level. "Hey, they saw your ad. Gimme .006 cents..." Sorry, but the click rate numbers don't add up very well.

If the LA times shuts its presses down, then I wish it good luck and I project that it will make a fraction of its former revenue levels. Website advertising is the Holy Grail of marketers, advertisers and web site owners but it is a barren wasteland. Users regularly ignore the ads and the click through rates prove that. As a result, CPMs are a useless measurement.

Meanwhile, advertisers continue to salivate over the cheap price of web based advertising but they rarely divide cost into click through into action into realized revenue.

Why? Because their corporation's web officer doesn't want the truth revealed. They know the numbers are horrible but no one really wants to know about how bad they really are. If they admit how useless online advertising is, the entire house of cards falls and advertisers find out they're throwing money out the window. Nobody wants to point out the elephant in the room.

Online advertising will not provide as much revenue as print for the foreseeable future. In fact, those that go all digital will never see revenue levels like they had in decent economic times.

Shutting down print has been a decade long promise of the web and its proponents but we've seen only an inkling of that actually happening. Why? Because there's still plenty of money to be made in print and substantial internet revenues are the things of search engines and online auction sites. Everybody else will be looking for scraps.

The Financial Storm May Very Well Kill Print Media

Yet another "Print is dead" cry from somebody on the internet.

Is print hurting? Of course it is but so is tourism. Will people permanently stop traveling for pleasure? Doubtful.

The middle class is b-r-o-k-e. Without the engine of consumer spending moving this economy forward, everybody suffers. Once companies see a realistic earnings level (not the inflated ones they've had for years now) they freak out and pull back on their ad spend. That aspect of this problem is cyclical but will bottom out at some point. Ad spending is down everywhere, including the web.

One thing that will come from this mess is that advertisers will demand greater accountability from their chosen mediums and that will be the first step in stripping bare the fact that the internet does not deliver customers like print, TV or radio does. The internet has been shown time and time again to be a very cheap way to advertise while returning very, very few customers.

Why don't websites charge based on pay per actions versus page views? Because they'd go broke while being honest. There are so few click throughs that the investment in online advertising is not worth the virtual paper it's printed on. The web is about delivering your company's product directly to the consumer, it's not an effective venue to advertise in.