Vin Crosbie's address to the WAN advertising expo is getting coverage from the Guardian and from WAN itself. WAN reported: "But on-line media produce 20 to 100 times less revenue per reader than newspapers do, he said. To put it another way, for every print reader lost, newspapers have to replace them with between 20 and 100 website readers to gain the same revenue."
I think that if you segment the users behaviorally and examine only the heavy website users, the picture changes dramatically and the revenue per user is more in line with what the overall industry generates. The problem is that the audience of heavy users is way, way too small. On some sites, more than 95 percent of the apparent monthly audience is either one- or two-time visitors. (And a big chunk of it is nonlocal Internet "drive-by" traffic that has little or no value to the advertiser base.)
Most revenue conversations tend to center on sales. I think the way to address the problem that Vin highlights is to focus on the audience and on the content/services that attract that audience. The gross unique-user numbers sound impressive, but we have to get the frequency up to a respectable figure in order to deliver value to advertisers. It's not going to be a simple or easy task in this fragmented world, but it's the right place to start.
Comments
Heavy users in print?
I have wondered if all the Web does is prove we don't have as big an audience of "heavy users" in print as we would like to believe.
Obviously, we can't prove to advertisers in print that every one of our subscribers saw their ads, or even the pages they were printed on. The Web, for better or worse, informs us about usage in that level of detail.
So maybe it's not that the Web attracts too few loyal users -- it's that it attracts the same level of loyalty as always but we just couldn't measure it before. Dunno ... just have my suspicions.
Great question ... hard to answer
It would be great if we could measure print the way we can measure Web usage ... but we would not like what we would learn. When I look at the ABC readership reports I see strong indications of print usage but the unpleasant question is "how much of the paper did you read?" And that one is not in the script.
Where is the readership?
I find the question posed by Jay extremely valuable.
Example: on our site the stories are one of the least viewed sections of the site.
My response would be: Write better stories. Write stories that are actually important to people. Spend less time at the City Council meeting and more time focusing on the hospital shortfalls in service for example. Do something in-depth. Instead of requiring two or three stories a day from our staff, why not send them on four great stories every week?