Print magazines saw a 0.5% lift in advertising revenue in the first quarter, to $4.13 billion from $4.11 billion in the first quarter of 2012, according to the latest report from the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB). Ad pages declined 4.8% to 31,137 in the first quarter from 32,708 a year earlier. It was the first gain in almost two years.
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Friday, April 12
Wednesday, April 10
Google Turns to Big Data to Unmask Human Traffickers
Despite all their manpower, law enforcement, anti-trafficking task forces, and policymakers know surprisingly little about the illegal cross-border flow of humans forced into the sex trade or into slave labor or cut open to have their organs extracted. Google (GOOG) believes Big Data can turn the tables on these crime gangs.
The search giant announced on April 9 that it will award a $3 million grant, part of its Global Impact Award program run through its Google Giving philanthropic arm, to a trio of anti-trafficking organizations.
Crunching data like this, and being able to match it with similar data across borders from other trafficking emergency hotlines, could build a clearer, more timely picture of where the human-trafficking-related crime is originating and how law enforcement and victims rights groups can intervene.
Read more at Business Week
The search giant announced on April 9 that it will award a $3 million grant, part of its Global Impact Award program run through its Google Giving philanthropic arm, to a trio of anti-trafficking organizations.
Crunching data like this, and being able to match it with similar data across borders from other trafficking emergency hotlines, could build a clearer, more timely picture of where the human-trafficking-related crime is originating and how law enforcement and victims rights groups can intervene.
Read more at Business Week
Pandora Hits 200 Million Users
Pandora has announced hitting the 200 million user mark in the U.S. The online radio service streams 200 million songs before 10 a.m. every day.
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Monday, April 8
Newspaper Ad Revs Drop Again
Newspaper advertising revenues have been dropping steadily for some years now, and the end of 2012 brought no respite for publishers. For the full year, total ad revenues -- including niche publications, direct marketing and nondaily publication advertising -- fell 6.5% from $27.1 billion in 2011 to $25.3 billion in 2012. Focusing on the combined Sunday and daily ad revenues, including both print and online, total revenues slipped 6.8% from $23.9 billion to $22.3 billion. The latter figure is just 45% of peak newspaper revenues of $49.4 billion in 2005, equaling a 55% decline in seven years.
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Magazine Ad Pages Slip
Print advertising is dwindling at consumer magazines. The Publishers Information Bureau released figures showing total magazine ad pages fell 4.9% from 33,673 in the first quarter of 2012 to 32,023 in the first quarter of 2013. Of 213 titles tracked by the PIB, 107 (50%) experienced ad page declines in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012.
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How paywalls are evolving
It’s often easier to persuade people to subscribe to sports content than to entertainment content, even as it’s easier to sell ads against entertainment content than it is against sports content. So it does make sense to keep entertainment free, and put some kind of paywall around sports.
What’s impossible to calculate, of course, is the long-term opportunity cost of driving away people who want to read your content but aren’t willing to pay...the act of putting up a paywall is the act of “essentially harvesting revenue from a loyal long-term audience” — people who have been reading the publication for years, and have turned it into a habit they don’t want to give up. That’s fine, as a short-term means of maximizing revenues. But it’s dangerous in terms of getting new loyal readers. Which is one reason why online media startups almost never have paywalls: they want as many people as possible to discover them.
My expectation, then, is that newspaper paywalls will become both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly expensive over time — but that paywalls are not going to migrate very quickly out of the newspaper world and onto the rest of the internet. In a dying industry, the sensible thing to do is to maximize your revenues before you die. Paywalls might well make money for newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t dying. Quite the opposite.
Read more at Reuters
What’s impossible to calculate, of course, is the long-term opportunity cost of driving away people who want to read your content but aren’t willing to pay...the act of putting up a paywall is the act of “essentially harvesting revenue from a loyal long-term audience” — people who have been reading the publication for years, and have turned it into a habit they don’t want to give up. That’s fine, as a short-term means of maximizing revenues. But it’s dangerous in terms of getting new loyal readers. Which is one reason why online media startups almost never have paywalls: they want as many people as possible to discover them.
My expectation, then, is that newspaper paywalls will become both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly expensive over time — but that paywalls are not going to migrate very quickly out of the newspaper world and onto the rest of the internet. In a dying industry, the sensible thing to do is to maximize your revenues before you die. Paywalls might well make money for newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t dying. Quite the opposite.
Read more at Reuters
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