Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For years most of the larger and many of the smaller papers have leaned in one politicial/idealogical direction, effectively alienating about 40% of the population.
Craigslist, eBay, etc. have taken a bite out of the classified section that is a cash cow for newspapers.
But online advertising is further hurting the industry.
Many newspapers are cutting back, making smaller papers, consolidating efforts, etc. I read this week that just 2 years ago the McClatchy chain of newspapers was worth in the neighborhood of $5 billion and now it's around $500 million.
The readers, or former readers, of these papers will be looking elsewhere for news and information. This is an excellent opportunity for AdSense publishers to provide what they are looking for and earn a nice income at the same time.
It will probably take more than articles written by $10 freelance writers, consolidated feeds, etc., but a huge opportunity exists to those who take advantage wisely. Isn't focusing on that opportunity a lot more productive than worrying over stuck stats, "advertisers cutting back", long holiday weekends, etc?
FarmBoy
Isn't focusing on that opportunity a lot more productive than worrying over stuck stats, "advertisers cutting back", long holiday weekends, etc?
Why aren't the laid-off reporters and editors doing this, wouldn't they be better prepared than those of us who just complain about AdSense?
No, they are much LESS prepared. While the newspaper publishing business shrinks, those working in it seem to be lost as to the changes they face.
I'm in Chicago Tribune land... and they're selling the Cubs, Wrigley Field, Tribune Tower, and who knows what else just to keep a cash flow. At that rate, it will all be gone in about three years.
To produce paper needs a lot of energy.
Several times more than to reed a newspaper on a notebook.
8 kWh/kg for new paper
3 kWh/kg for recyled paper,
but this is not printing and the distribution in addition.
A notebook 20..25 Watt, all networt equipment maybe additional 15 Watt.
So 2 hours reading a newspaper on a noteobook makes 80 Wh,
An only 1/4 kg heavy newspaper around 1 kWh, the light to read not inclueded
Aren't the people who have stopped reading newspapers reading blogs? Why can't blogs make a decent profit for the effort invested?
And there's only room for one Drudge Report, just like there's only one Google.
Why aren't the laid-off reporters and editors doing this, wouldn't they be better prepared than those of us who just complain about AdSense?
No, I have often to do with journalists, they are absolut unprepared for this.
They are only trained to fill up the newspaper with something to fill the place beside the ads. (MFA made for advertising)
They have no idea how to get all the readers necessary.
[journalists] have no idea how to get all the readers necessary.Neither do I, please enlighten me. It is so easy to say, "here's a great idea, go do it." If you had any clue yourself you'd be doing it and not telling others what a great idea it is.
If newspapers that have been in business for centuries and have all the resources in the world can't figure out how to make money with their online versions it will take more than a disgruntled AdSense publisher to figure it out.
I agree it's a great idea, so is a perpetual motion machine. It's the execution that will stop you.
The fact is, people do not search for news, they don't know it's happened until they read it. So they only find you, if you happen to be in the top spots for 'News' or 'Mobile News' or whatever else.
In my experience, people reading news stories are far less likely to click an ad than somebody reading a camera review for example.
Some of the biggest bloggers I know, that focus on news, earn awful money. Well awful in my eyes. Focus solely on news and you'll not get anywhere quickly.
For years most of the larger and many of the smaller papers have leaned in one politicial/idealogical direction, effectively alienating about 40% of the population.
I'm curious as to know how this is really relevant to your post premise, aside from injecting your political bias in the mix?
Are you suggesting there's a lucrative market for "fair and balanced" right wing propaganda?
If newspapers that have been in business for centuries and have all the resources in the world can't figure out how to make money with their online versions it will take more than a disgruntled AdSense publisher to figure it out.
I make my living with AdSense.
I doubt that more than 2% of the journalists writing for a newspaper would have the abilities to do it.
They are mostly trained to write about unimportant things.
When they write their online magazine in the same style as the newspaper, no chance to make a living with AdSense.
When I look on online versions of newspapers, most time I see not very targeted ads.
When I look on my website, very targeted ads.
When I read the online advertising prices of newspapers, I find their CPM prices a joke. More CPM for far less targeted ads and for less specific visitors.
They can do this only because they have build up a reputation over 100 years or more. But I think, AdSense CPM shows the real value of ads on a web site and that newspapers will have a big reduction in CPM in the next years.
AdSense publishers are already killing newspapers. Just look at the many of us who count our traffic in millions of visitors per month and revenue in six figures. Good news for all the hard working folks like us.
My visitors a month are only 6 figures and my revenues only 4 figures, but as long as I can make my living with it, and can do something for the future of mankind, it's enough.
I can go to a big fair about cars and write many pages about the electric car and plug-in hybrid fair mentioning abnorm fossil cars not with one single word.
When I would be a journalist at a car magazine, the chief would fire me on the spot for this. The chief of a car magazine expects articles about the new 600 PS SUV and 400km/h sports car.
So how much would you figure a reasonable startup cost for such an operation would be?
That would depend on what type of operation you have in mind.
jetteroheller provided an example of one type of operation. I doubt his startup costs were prohibitive.
It sounds like you're assuming some type of large operation to duplicate what newspapers do. Their business model is suffering, I wouldn't go that route.
...the traditional newspapers all have online versions and full blown advertising staffs, why can't they make money online?
Some traditions die a long, slow, hard death.
And there's only room for one Drudge Report...
No one mentioned copying the Drudge Report's approach. But now that you bring it up, several people have and are doing well.
Why can't blogs make a decent profit for the effort invested?
Some do. Their profit isn't determined by their efforts though, it is determined by the end product. I could go out and plant 10 acres of corn today and no one will care nor pay me for my effort. Later on when I have what they want, fresh corn, that's when I get paid.
Neither do I, please enlighten me. It is so easy to say, "here's a great idea, go do it." If you had any clue yourself you'd be doing it and not telling others what a great idea it is.
This was addressed to jetteroheller, but I'm going to respond to it.
I am doing "it" and AdSense is an important component, but it's not the only component.
Consider this thread a helpful hint for anyone seeking a fresh idea. But it's just that, a hint, it's not a roadmap.
FarmBoy
[edited by: farmboy at 2:57 pm (utc) on July 2, 2008]
jetteroheller, the newspapers and media companies that own them would eagerly pay you six or seven figures to teach them how to make their online versions pay. You are wasting your time posting here, you should be pitching your ideas to the papers.
The newspapers are not compatible with my style.
I make visions for the future, an optimitic picture of the future, we have only to change completely to renewable energy
Newspapers are mostly mearchant of fear. It's all terrible, they wail around.
Online competition has drawn off newspaper advertising and revenue, but not all to the same place. Also in print you get the cover price and advertising revenue...online you only get the later.
So creating a profitable online news operation with people on the ground and doing original reporting is much harder than doing the same in print, which is hard enough.
Since the online newspaper will not get the online classified etc the way the print used to. People will use Gumtree or Craigslist instead.
You can make money from online news but it is very competitive and cut-throat with people pinching stories, pictures, cut and paste. Also endless stream of aggregators/some bloggers diluting content and further drawing off revenue.
In respect of Adsense...the biggest news topics are celebrity and world news. Celebrity has high CTR but low CPC (loads of 1 cent) and world news has a low CTR but higher CPC but suffers from lack of ads sometimes...who wants to advertise next to a story about bombing in Israel or an attack in Egypt...not many except when Google accidently matches a flight advert...so loads of ads excluded or serve irrelevant ones.
Outside of adsense people like Vibrant Media do not want their ads on breaking news, entertainment yes but not breaking world news.
Traditional banner adsvertising, branding etc goes much better on news than Adsense.
In my own company we have staff for entertainment, reviews, tech, science but few on the ground for world news. Very hard to justify the cost, so suppliment with agency wires. Analysis is perhaps one of the few hard news areas where it does usually work out, but that is after the fact.
jetteroheller Adsense does not always show the "true value", it is a CPC system and not a proper market. When you say print journalists write about unimportant things, what do you mean? Like I said above you are never going to get targeted ads for loads of hard news topics as people don;t want to be associated with terrible events...which comprise a lot of hard news.
Not an easy way to make money, imho.
[edited by: FattyB at 5:01 pm (utc) on July 2, 2008]
Also in print you get the cover price and advertising revenue...online you only get the later.So creating a profitable online news operation with people on the ground and doing original reporting is much harder than doing the same in print, which is hard enough.
The cover price covers the paper, the print and the distibution.
Orginal reporting is for a printed media much more difficult, because they have to make the articles very small, paper is expensive and heavy.
The existence of small print media is mostly based on the talent of the person selling advertising. Online publishers can transfer this task to Google AdSense.
I've found, however, the traditional media type sites (newspaper and TV mostly in my case) do not want to go down without a fight - in some cases, they have stolen parts of my various sites very blatantly, in other cases they have implied that my sites are not accurate and that I am not credible (apparently credible enough to steal from, though) One told me as recently as last week that because I was a much smaller site and entity, they could do whatever they want - take all my content, rewrite it, and make it *their* story.
So unless you're prepared to be vigilant about your material and ready to defend your credibility (possibly to the point of taking legal action), I wouldn't necessarily advise it for everyone.
This is just plain wrong. It is easier as they do have a cover price and they can use their material twice...in print and online. Also content like agency coverage works in print but less well online as duplicate content issues.
So original online reporting is much harder. You try and put 20 reporters you can trust in key cities around the globe...wages, insurance etc. Then try to make it back with news site not backed with a print edition. Pretty difficult. In fact I cannot think of one of the top of my head who does this with hard news...
Plus online you have issues regards competing sites who use illegal content. EG I license photos from numerous agencies to add to our stories. Several of our peers just use the same but don't bother paying. Undermines my legit business. Far less of a problem in print where more checks and balances. So a smoother playing field in some respects maybe.
Now it is cheaper to get a few writers and rewrite or bounce off stories from Reuters, AP or The Guardian. But that is not original reporting. Original analysis is perhaps more economical as well but own set of problems with remote staff and lack of editorial guidance.
Also as I said, Adsense is not that good a fit for hard news. Branding advertising is much better.
Netmeg I find other web only publications and blogs, not newspapers or their related sites, far more likely to steal content...though maybe that is just particular to my sites.
[edited by: FattyB at 6:28 pm (utc) on July 2, 2008]
Farmboy, i think you answered your own question.
Which question is that?
FarmBoy
Fundamentally, is writing keyword loaded, adsense profitable content the kind of news that the world needs ?
I am al for making a great profit, but i sure hope that the professional News publishing world finds a way through their current hardships
I wouldn't like to read my news from some chap who got it from a web search from a search engine that got it from a blog, a blog who got it from another blog, who made it up :)
There is *huge* interest among former colleagues in learning how to do this. Trust me, everyone in a newsroom looking at a layoff or buyout is thinking about how he or she might be able to stay in the business online.
What's the secret? Online writers, the truly successful ones, work harder than anyone in the newspaper business. Building and maintaining a vibrant online community - and that's what most top online news sites are - takes an enormous amount of effort, in reporting, writing, conversing with readers and learning to manage tech.
The good news is that, when you are connecting with your readership, running an online site is the most intoxicating, exhilarating thing in the world (that's not illegal or life-threatening). The people I know who have made the switch all say that blogging, commenting and working online has rekindled their passion for journalism and made their jobs fun again.
But that possibility is darned hard to see when you're looking at all your friends being laid off and wondering if you are next. Especially if you've never mastered computers, are a little afraid of your readers and your confidence is hurting due to so many years of cut-backs and gloom from your managers. (Like so many journalists today.)
About whether people should quit moaning and grasp this Adsense opportunity.
As you said newspapers are struggling and some of their key incomes are gone and cannot be recaptured even with online presence as have went to niche companies...like classified to Craigslist/Gumtree.
So some of the important revenues that pay for the huge expense of creating original hard news are gone and so there is not a huge opportunity but rather a huge problem in how to continue to fund original reporting and on-the-ground reporting.
There is no great opportunity with Adsense in the hard news area, at least not at the moment in my experience. I make more from Adsense from running a story about Madonna getting a divorce or even a dancing dog that can count than I will about a man rampaging in a bulldozer through the streets of an Israeli town.
I am not saying you cannot make money covering that, but it is not all you are going to need to cover and the bulk of the money will not come from Adsense. Indeed I'll hazard a guess that many online versions of newspaper make far more Adsense wise in their lifestyle, tech, entertainment than they do in hard news.
If I was starting on the web again from scratch I would not start a news site and certainly not one concentrating on hard news. I do have a profitable business with a medium sized staff but it can be a hellishly competitive area with more legal and moral mines than most online businesses.
Adsense Example:
A story about the bulldozer attack in Israel
Movie Downloads Online
Download High Quality Films for Mobile Phones, PC, PSPs & More!
Child Sponsorship
Just removed Day Will Change A Child's Life. Build A Better Future- Donate
removed for Stomach Fat
Drop 9 lbs of Stomach Fat every 11 Days by Sticking with the removed.
A story about Lindsay Lohan's alleged secret sister
Lindsay Lohan
Lindsay Lohan pictures and style news on removed
Lindsay Lohan Pictures
Thinking of buying? Compare 100s of retailers' prices at removed
Now both will usually get the same for our graphical banners but guess which one will get almost zero from Adsense...and that is using Google Hints.
[edited by: FattyB at 3:27 am (utc) on July 3, 2008]
I just get much more bang on the Web.
If we do see a deep recession the death of old media will be breathtakingly swift.
About whether people should quit moaning and grasp this Adsense opportunity.
You're twisting my words. I didn't write that and I certainly didn't mean to imply that. Although in retrospect and considering the amount of pessimism I've read in this thread, it's no surprise some might
choose to infer that.
It's not my forum and people are free to write what they want, moan all they want and choose whether or not to discuss any ideas that are presented.
-------------
In the first post in this thread, I pointed out that a large group of people haven't been getting the information & news they wanted for a long time. Now, with the newspaper industry cutting back, even more people aren't getting the information & news they want from newspapers. I pointed out that an opportunity exists. Here's what I wrote:
The readers, or former readers, of these papers will be looking elsewhere for news and information. This is an excellent opportunity for AdSense publishers to provide what they are looking for and earn a nice income at the same time.It will probably take more than articles written by $10 freelance writers, consolidated feeds, etc.,...
Other than that last vague sentence, I didn't suggest a business model. I simply presented an idea.
A few people have created straw men by making assumptions about a business model and then proceeded to tear apart the straw man.
In one way the number of "can't do it" and "it won't work" posts in this thread is sad. In another way it's amusing because (1) the specifics of "it" weren't even defined and (2) I developed a site to take advantage of part of the opportunity and the site is doing very well.
A forum or "community" where people discuss ideas, motivate each other, encourage each other, etc. is beneficial in a number of ways. Plus, it tends to attract new people with new ideas to contribute. A community with lots of negativity tends to attract even more negativity which doesn't help anyone in the long run.
A couple of people have offered their own ideas and even shared some specifics of what they have found successful. More please.
FarmBoy
There is *huge* interest among former colleagues in learning how to do this. Trust me, everyone in a newsroom looking at a layoff or buyout is thinking about how he or she might be able to stay in the business online.
Malibucreek,
That's interesting. From listening to these people, what do they think went wrong with the newspaper industry?
FarmBoy
I imagine we may be in for a period where only those able to afford it and willing to afford it , will get professionally edited and compiled news
The rest will make do with the amatuer bloggs and massively commercialised sources whose news value will be progressively degraded by the need to provide content that sells PPC advertsing
Whadya know, we'll all learn to love celeb news :) no more comercially valueless news like Earthquakes, Forest Fires 100s of miles away, people fighting inconvinient floods, t'will all just be quietly swept away by the adsense wiz
Perhaps the potentates of the free classifieds will step in to replace that which they've massively contributed to replacing with,,
I am not suggesting you cannot run a business on news, I am saying it is difficult to do so with original content/reporting.
Not a straw man, you said an opportunity for people to make a decent profit with Adsense providing the sort of hard news found in newspapers. I don't think this is true at the moment or at the very least not a like for like basis in terms of quality, orginality, reliability etc. Plus the newspapers have cut back because readership is down, but the readers are not looking for somewhere to get the information...they have already found it else they would not have stopped reading. So it is not always trying to pick up these searching readers but rather competiting with sites who already have those readers.
I am saying and demonstrating that Adsense and other contextual advertising tends, at the moment, to be a very bad fit for hard news. Not many products/companies want to be seen on the same page as a bomb, disaster, murder, war...which tend to be what the most popular hard news articles are about. Even some non-contextual campaigns want excluded from hard news.
So I don't think there is a good Adsense opportunity in quality hard news. That is not being negative it is telling it straight, how I have personally found it.
You would be better off starting an auto/tech/gaming/celebrity/lifestyle/personal finance (very popular during bad times as people check for bargains) news site than one about current affairs/world news.
[edited by: FattyB at 4:22 pm (utc) on July 3, 2008]
