In 2011, according to Starboard’s estimates, Patch lost $147 million while generating a mere $13 million in ad revenue—roughly $15,000 per site. “We do not believe Patch is a viable business,” the Starboard report said.
The skepticism goes beyond AOL. In 2011, Allbritton Communications (the owners of Politico) scaled back its investment in TBD.com, an ambitious hyperlocal news site for the D.C. area. Likewise, Washington Post Co. and New York Times Co. have pulled back from their investments in online local newsgathering. Across the Atlantic, Guardian Media Group shuttered its hyperlocal experiment last year, noting that the project had proven unsustainable.
Starboard argues that cost-conscious local advertisers prefer online ads with an immediate payoff, such as Google (GOOG) search ads, where an advertiser pays only when someone clicks on an ad and can tell whether a click leads to a sale.
From a content perspective, hyperlocal sites simply aren’t essential reading. Matt Booth, head of interactive local media at researcher BIA/Kelsey, says that people tend to use a search engine 109 times a month. They visit local websites one to two times a month. And the advertising dollars follow the traffic.
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Friday, June 1
Tuesday, May 29
Newspaper Revs Sink 6.9%
The latest figures for the newspaper industry are in, and they show no evidence of a rebound or even stabilization in advertising revenues. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total ad revenues dropped 6.9% from $5.5 billion in the first quarter of 2011 to nearly $5.2 billion in the first quarter of 2012. This was due to declines in print ad revenues, which fell 8.2% to $4.36 billion over the same period. Online ad revenues edged up 1% to $816 million.
It's clear newspapers are stuck in a long-term, secular decline with little prospect of the trend reversing. The first quarter marks the 23rd straight quarter of year-over-year declines in total newspaper ad revenues, which started to slip in the third quarter of 2006
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It's clear newspapers are stuck in a long-term, secular decline with little prospect of the trend reversing. The first quarter marks the 23rd straight quarter of year-over-year declines in total newspaper ad revenues, which started to slip in the third quarter of 2006
Read more here
Crowdsourcing is transforming the science of psychology
Crowdsourcing is a way to get jobs like deciphering images, ranking websites and answering surveys done for money by online workers. Several firms offer the service, including oDesk, CrowdFlower and Elance. But by far the most popular for scientific purposes is Mechanical Turk, which is run by Amazon and is named after an 18th-century chess-playing machine in which a human secretly moved the pieces.
For many researchers, though, the appeals of crowdsourcing—bargain prices, vast supply and enormous scale—are too attractive to ignore. Indeed, the new methodology might democratise the very practice of psychology, allowing those without a laboratory or university behind them to join in as well. Gabriele Paolacci, a marketing researcher at the Rotterdam School of Management who was once in precisely that position, has started a blog called “Experimental Turk” (experimentalturk.wordpress.com) to help draft guidelines for such freelance experiments.
The revolution, then, has begun. So far, Google Scholar, a website devoted to academic matters, counts 3,000 published papers that involve crowdsourced experiments. Discussions at conferences, among psychologists, behavioural economists, political scientists, linguists and computer scientists, suggest that may be the tip of the iceberg. It would be an exaggeration to say that crowdsourcing has turned the whole world into a laboratory. But it has certainly made psychology a lot less WEIRD.
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For many researchers, though, the appeals of crowdsourcing—bargain prices, vast supply and enormous scale—are too attractive to ignore. Indeed, the new methodology might democratise the very practice of psychology, allowing those without a laboratory or university behind them to join in as well. Gabriele Paolacci, a marketing researcher at the Rotterdam School of Management who was once in precisely that position, has started a blog called “Experimental Turk” (experimentalturk.wordpress.com) to help draft guidelines for such freelance experiments.
The revolution, then, has begun. So far, Google Scholar, a website devoted to academic matters, counts 3,000 published papers that involve crowdsourced experiments. Discussions at conferences, among psychologists, behavioural economists, political scientists, linguists and computer scientists, suggest that may be the tip of the iceberg. It would be an exaggeration to say that crowdsourcing has turned the whole world into a laboratory. But it has certainly made psychology a lot less WEIRD.
Read more here
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