Nearly every Web site outsources their advertising, or a portion of it, to Google Adsense. Some, like Jeff Jarvis, even advocate it as a better way for news brands to make money online.

It makes sense and it doesn’t.

Love

Adsense does one thing well: contextualized text links with absolutely zero overhead costs. Because of this, Adsense is an appealing way for publishers to make money online without having to figure out the business. Publishers need only focus on publishing.

Hate

News organizations devalue their own advertising and waste ad space by displaying Google ads on their pages, near other higher CPM ads. Why buy a site or a newspaper network at a higher CPM through a sales rep or a site’s online ad purchasing when you can buy ads on the same pages (and more sites) through Google?

The infuriating thing about Google is that you have little idea what your cut is per ad, only the CPM you can infer based on meticulously tracking revenue week to week or month to month. Only a company like Google can get away with that kind of vagueness.

Compromise

Sell your ad space first. Ignore the lure of Adsense until you need it. Adsense is a tool, not a crutch.

Use Adsense and similar services like Yahoo Publisher Network and others for remnant ad space.  If your sales staff can’t keep up with impressions on your own sites, that’s when you need to outsource. Light a fire under your reps’ butts.

Don’t run house ads. They’re a waste of time and money (Especially if your ads are served through a vendor that takes a cut per CPM) and a waste of potential money you could make through remnants. Find better ways to promote your advertising solutions. House ads are fine for print. They utilize space. Online, people won’t notice or care. Plus: “Your ad here” is pretty hilariously tacky and makes people question the value of purchasing an ad on your site. Appearances are everything.

Use multiple vendors. Track everything. If Google Adsense is giving you a lower CPM week to week than Yahoo, dump Google.

There’s a whole host of remnant sites out there (These are just a few; Some have minimum requirements, but most small dailies and small networks should be able to easily meet them):

• Burst Media
• CPX Interactive
• Google Adsense
• RealTechNetwork
• Undertone
• Yahoo! Publisher Network

Lastly, this is a corrolary to not selling all your impressions per month. If you can’t keep up, drop ad spots. There’s no need to sell 5-10 ad spots on a page if you can’t do it on every page. You’ll burn through impressions far too quickly that way. I’ll probably touch on this more in another post soon.

Ad Rates Dropped 11% In The Third Quarter, reports Silicon Alley Insider.

The title of that post is a little misleading because these numbers reported are for untargeted ad network rates, but the telling metric may be that certain sectors had some difficulties this year.

While we see more pushes towards a social networking experience within news Web sites, the better situation you’ll want to be in appears to be figuring out how sell targeted ads to your news content, which looks like it’s still in a bit of a growth market…if done right.

The social networking angle is good for generating lots of content (for better or worse) while allowing management to make staff cuts, but there is often little business strategy involved in the process at many news organizations. It’s a lot like sticking a dirty finger in a sucking gunshot wound to stop the bleeding. You need to do more by considering the macroeconomic situation’s effect in your market, the overarching audience needs and your long-term information architecture strategy when making ANY decisions.

I know I’ve been away from this blog for awhile, but in the coming weeks, I plan to talk more in depth about how we can start building strategies that account for both business and editorial simultaneously (yes, expect some long posts I’ve somehow become known for). Gone are the days of the “build-it-and-they-will-come” model.  The best situation we’ll want to see ourselves in as the market goes insane and advertisers drop like flies will be to cut the fat from our online offerings and to show new profits quickly, even if they are small.

Saw this via Romenesko this morning:

Journalists produce the news that search engines such as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. seamlessly and freely make available to anyone with a computer, Zell said during a presentation on corporate governance at Stanford University. “If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Chicago real estate maverick mused.

His answer: Not very.

Steal?

Indexing is now theft? That’s a bit ridiculous. I’d like to see if news Web sites could survive without referral traffic from search engines. I’d speculate all newspapers get on average of 15% to 25% of their traffic from search engines. Which could result in huge losses in value of Web sites in the eyes of advertisers, if these sites were suddenly cut off from the traffic generator.

But to call links with headlines (which is all Google uses) and with briefs (like Topix or Yahoo!) stealing is beyond gall. It a blasphemous misunderstanding of Internet basics.

There’s been a lot of fawning chatter the past few days about how Zell is going to save the American newspaper. Well, with that kind of attitude I’m going to have to assume his plans are actually to run it into the ground.

Noah Barron posed this question to journalists at OJR the other day:

Should we use the self-reported details that people–most often young people–post on their own social networking sites for journalistic articles?

He even answers his own question:

As a reporter, there must be special caution with regards to behavior and statements made on the Web. The Internet is still a realm of pseudo-behavior, where the stealing of music files seems categorically different to some than the stealing of a CD from a retail store.

Let’s ignore the misconception that copyright infringement is stealing (when it is technically copying) for a second and focus Noah’s original argument: That journalists must use special caution when reporting on “pseudo-behavior.”

I touched a bit on keeping virtual personalities separate in my last post. Even though I tend to keep all of my profiles as open to the public as the application allows, I still focus my content on those networks to the audience on that network. I’m famous to 15 people with each of those applications, to turn Warhol’s phrase for my own purposes.

Sure, my mother-in-law, feeling snoopy, could sign up for a Facebook account and try to spy on me. For quite some time, employers searching the Internet for prospective employees has been all the rage in the news media. But, that doesn’t mean what I put on those networks isn’t me.

When you hang out with your more-apt-to-party friends and they convince you to get naked and run around your house while singing the National Anthem in falsetto, that’s a behavior you wouldn’t just up and do at grandma’s house or work. See, like advertising on the Internet, it’s all about context, baby! Simply because you feel comfortable swearing at your siblings, but not your parents, doesn’t necessarily mean swearing is “pseudo-behavior.”

(more…)

I’ve learned something this week. Profile aggregators are a pain. All of them.

I went through these profile aggregators:

claimID
Explode
FindMeOn
Iceflake
Lijit
Metathings
Mugshot
Naymz
onXiam
Opinity
Ozmozr
Profilactic
ProfileFly
ProfileLinker

At best they’re simple bookmark lists sitting on a Web page. At worst, they’re needless headaches. Most of them are useless, many of them don’t work as advertised and half of them are bad copies of another aggregator on the list.

It’s easier to share videos with youtube. It’s easier to stay in touch with colleagues and classmates with linkedIn and Facebook respectively. It’s easier to share photos with the world on flickr. Great! I love applications that do those things and do them well. But copy cats are starting to annoy the crap out of me.

I’m seriously wondering if there’s even a reason to aggregate the content I create into one place. The great thing about Web 2.0 isn’t that it’s all about me. It’s that it’s all about my content. With all these fancy social applications, I can target my content to people I want to target it at.

My professional network on LinkedIn doesn’t need to see photos of me hanging out at a bar with friends. My family, whom I share photos with on flickr, doesn’t need to read my wall at Facebook. Hell, they don’t even need to know I have a facebook to begin with.

Separation is, in fact, a good thing.

Jerimiah Owyang, recently made a post on his blog about his media consumption diet which got me thinking of my own habits:

Web: Like Jerimiah, I take in almost all of my media consumption from the web. Granted, I work for a news company’s Web site. But even my own personal reading comes in digital form. I use Google Reader for most of my feeds, though I still have an old MyWay account I check up on now and again. Increasingly, I simply follow links sent to me from friends through IM or del.icio.us.

Music: Again, like Jerimiah, I listen to Pandora mostly at work, though I’ve started playing around with last.fm. The office also streams music on Fridays, usually with some kind theme like Power Ballad Friday (ugh). At home or anywhere else, it’s my iPod and my hard drive.

TV: I still watch TV. I worked in TV for years, so it’s ingrained in me to sit in front of the boob tube for hours on end. I don’t have cable, though. And I refuse to pay the outrageous prices for it. So, if I miss an episode of The Office or LOST, I’ll grab it from iTunes. In fact, I missed both of those shows this week. I better go grab them. Actually, come to think of it, I usually wait for the DVD.

Communication: I own a cell phone. It doesn’t even have a camera on it. I use text messaging sparingly (like if I’m in a loud bar or I just want to drop a message to someone I know is busy at the moment). I don’t access the Internet via my phone often, unless I’m so far removed from civilization I can’t find a baseball score. I have a few computers (a G4 at work, a Windows desktop at home and a Viao laptop that I hate), but rarely use email outside of work. Mostly, I stick to gTalk for online communication.

Movies: I rarely, rarely go to the theater. I don’t even rent DVDs often. I go to the library and check them out.

Magazines: I read magazines on and off. I go through phases with subscriptions. Usually, I just hang out at the library and read through whatever piques my interest. I actually have a few digital subscriptions through Zinio. They were free from freebizmag.com. I doubt I’d pay for digital magazines.

Newspapers: I work for a newspaper, but hardly read it beyond making sure the days news is on the site. I hate dailies pagination. I hate the pyramid style of writing. If you see me with a paper, it’s usually a free alternative weekly I’ll pick up when I’m traveling and even so, I can’t stand it.

Jerimiah missed books in his post. I don’t read books as often as my wife or keep track of them at librarything. I try to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 a year. Most of which are non-fiction regarding politics or culture studies.