Comments on: On the future of newspapers

By: Ann Williams

Ann Williams — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:12:48 +0000

Since the days of ABIS (when I was involved in the idustry), the precursor of the OPA, I have been amazed at how the print industry still views the internet advertising space in almost the same light as the print media advertising space.

When are the media buyers going to wake up to the fact that advertising online is no longer about eyeballs but rather about action. (See how Google and now FaceBook advertising has changed things.)

Who cares if every single internet user in the country has at some stage seen a page that has been served by an OPA member! Quantity doesn’t count anymore – it’s ultimately about who clicks through and buys from you; rather than some airy-fairy (and expensive) exercise about who, in what income/age/geographic category might have caught a brief glimpse of your branding square somewhere on a page stuffed full of other banners and buttons.

As an example let’s take a major national bank. It is much better if they got 10 000 viewers of a weekly property section with 500 who click on an ad placed there with 120 conversions into homeloan customers.

To do this the bank should be far more interested in placing an ad, on only the pages in that specific section, that promotes a great homeloan product that they have – in preference to buying 500 000 impressions to a generic bank branding ad that are scattered throughout the site.

Online advertising can be a fantastic tool in that you can get feedback so much easlier than you can usually do in print media; and one can also be so much more product specific. Online advertising allows you to go directly for results instead of only taking the first step of getting eyeballs on ads!

By: Alan Hammond

Alan Hammond — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:44:43 +0000

Thanks for a great article. However I think the 5% penetration figure is outdated. Nielsen are reporting 7.7 million local readers to OPA member websites. If we take SA’s population as 48 million that’s 16% penetration!
The more important point – that OPA Chair Adrian Hewlett often mentions – is that this figure is a little bigger than the total of people who pay income tax. So if you want to market to people who earn more than R60 000 per year internet penetration is 100%!

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:58:06 +0000

Of course whilst these media groups are on about covering the costs of quality content, they themselves are not putting that back into their staff or freelancers.
Ie; one large media house slashed word rates by more than 50% for specialist writers and photographers, “take it or leave it”
Yes, the advancement of digital brings great possibilitys, but it also leaves the door open for explotation. Something many of these media groups are guilty of.

By: Johan Nel

Johan Nel — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:30:40 +0000

All the trends are definitely heading in the right direction for digital. All the graphs we see and talk about always shows the positive hockey stick effect. I am just worried that more audience and more online users doesn’t mean more money online. Or if it does, it is a big challenge for publishers to actually make money and be profitable online. The world has hit its reset button and traditional is losing faster than we can come up with ways to replace that loss. CPM is not cutting it, e-commerce might be the way, but we have a lot to figure out in a short time. I would love to hear of examples where the online publishers are actually profitable? Currently the traditional print businesses support these digital divisions with the hope that it will be the holy grail. We need to stop hoping and actually build something sustainable.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 09:50:38 +0000

I can see a day, not too far from now, when we’ll be buying blank sheets of news print for lining our birdcages, protecting our floors from paint, and for rolling up to swat flies.

By: gisele wertheim aymes

gisele wertheim aymes — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:16:27 +0000

Latest news in, Online Advertising in UK surpasses Television. This is a real milestone in the growth and influence on the web. Considering SA only spends 3% of current ad spend online, you can see the future potential for SA. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/30/internet-biggest-uk-advertising-sector

By: Russell Bennett

Russell Bennett — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:57:38 +0000

The Web is the Way, no doubt about it. Wish it would happen faster of course – did you know it takes the equivalent of half an average-sized tree to print a single copy of a 100-page glossy mag? That’s just plain unnecessary, not to mention the toxins in the chemicals used…
.
Nice article, just up that 20-year timeframe a tad please.

By: Clive Simpkins

Clive Simpkins — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:56:17 +0000

Good article. Hope Michael Jordaan reads it!

By: justinspratt

justinspratt — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:36:59 +0000

good piece. love the Schmidt quote. sums it up perfectly.