The Onion’s CEO Orders More Pandering to Advertisers
The Onion is hurting badly. To survive, the publication must cave to advertisers, CEO Steve Hannah has declared in a memo to staff, which we’ve obtained and reproduced after the jump.
You may recall that the multimedia humor juggernaut killed two of its local print editions in May. The move came amid a “very rough first half of the year,” as Hannah puts it in his memo, and a total of $6 million in cost reductions.
About a month ago Digg announced that it would eventually launch ads into its news stream that users could Digg or bury. The new system would theoretically push advertisers to tailor their ads more to the Digg audience, which would effectively increase the efficacy for all parties. So after speaking to a Digg representative, I reached out to several of the site’s power users for a PBS article on whether the community would really accept this kind of advertising.
I’ve gone long periods without advertising on Bloggasm, but back when I was using a simple Google Adsense platform I suddenly found myself on the front page of Digg, with more than 11,000 hits an hour flowing into my site. That day I made a measly $18 in Adsense clicks; a brief traffic spike does not a fortune make.
Neiman Lab has a piece up today about how local dailies are having trouble monetizing these kind of spikes:
How an errant vowel sent 3 million people to The Wichita Eagle, and why the paper couldn’t cash in
In a single afternoon, the Yahoo link sent roughly 3 million unique visitors to Kansas.com — which typically draws no more than 800,000 uniques per month, Nick Jungman, the site’s deputy editor for interactive news, told me today. That was enough to send the Eagle’s traffic numbers zooming past its rival three hours to the northeast, The Kansas City Star.
…Like most commercial websites, Kansas.com runs dirt-cheap remnant advertising when its traffic exceeds expectations in order to fill the space without wasting local advertisers’ money. For a local news site that occasionally attracts national attention, the spikes are nearly impossible to significantly monetize. One study found the average CPM for a news sites’ remnant advertising in the fourth quarter of 2008 was $0.34 — that is, for every 1,000 people who saw an ad, the site was paid 34 cents.
A study found that females receive more than twice as many responses as males, and responses to female posts contain a significantly higher amount of relevant information.
It was widely reported recently that according to a recent report, the free classifieds site Craigslist is estimated to bring in $100 million in revenue in 2009. Most articles on the story noted that the site has significantly hurt the paid classifieds sections of newspapers because they can’t compete with Craigslist’s free ads.
But if an ad is free does that necessarily mean you will get a high quality or quantity of response? Is it possible that the free nature of the ads creates a high noise ratio that dilutes the ad’s effectiveness? To attempt to answer these questions I targeted one section of the classifieds site in which I could create several quantifiable measurements to measure the quality of the response: the dating section.
I created fake ads for straight female and males in three different cities: DC, New York and LA. All the ads for each gender were almost completely identical, with slight variations. They listed the age of the person (late 20s), the education level, and a few hobbies. The ads did not include a picture.
Once posted, I waited until each of the ads dropped off the front page of the listing (which took a little over 24 hours for most) and then reviewed all the emails. I scored the number of responses, whether they included a picture, whether they included contact info outside of email, whether they included career/education info, and whether they listed the age of the respondent.
I found that not only did females receive more than twice the number of responses (44 total compared to 21), but the quality of the response was much higher. About 47% of the responses to the female’s ad included pictures, and more than 60% included the respondent’s age. In contrast, the responses to the male ads contained hardly any information at all, and most were blatant dating website and adult services spam.
The ads I put up were mostly generic and including more information might have yielded varying results, but the study showed that all things being equal, the females will receive much higher quality and quantity of responses.
This is just one section of the site, so it would be interesting to continue on with this experiment in other sections, and then compare the number and quality of the responses that one would receive in the city dailies. Is it possible that a paid advertisement would be more effective?
Complete results from my study below:
DC Straight Female:
# of responses to ad:20
# of responses that included a picture:11 (55%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email:2 (10%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 13 (65%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 15 (75%)
DC Straight Male:
# of responses to ad:9
# of responses that included a picture:1 (11%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info:0 (0%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 3 (33%)
NY Straight Female:
# of responses to ad:19
# of responses that included a picture: 8 (42%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 4 (21%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 8 (42%)
NY Straight Male:
# of responses to ad: 7
# of responses that included a picture: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info:0 (0%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 2 (0%)
LA Straight Female:
# of responses to ad: 5
# of responses that included a picture: 2 (40%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 3 (60%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 4 (80%)
LA Straight Male:
# of responses to ad: 5
# of responses that included a picture: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 0 (0%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 1 (0%)
Internet Explorer 8 is by far the best browser Microsoft’s ever released, but most of our readers are happily using a better alternative like Firefox or Chrome. Microsoft’s not happy about this, so they’ve created an absurd piece of propaganda to win you back.
This browser comparison chart pits IE8 against Firefox and Chrome and puts IE8 on top time after time, but in very dubious categories. Each row comes with its own ridiculous set of comments justifying the seemingly meaningless checkmarks, like this note on customizability:
On a recent panel, Henry Copeland, CEO of Blogads, announced that Perez Hilton, one of the network’s most popular bloggers, would soon be offering “sponsored” tweets for select advertisers. Hilton has over 1 million followers on the micro-blogging site and can drive upwards of 20,000 clicks from a single tweet.
“Perez is a great springboard for anyone who needs a springboard onto Twitter,” Copeland said while on the panel.
I reached out to the Blogads CEO for comment and here was his response:
Thank you for your interest, as always. We don’t have any more info to share right now… I’m sorry. Give me a shout in mid-July and I can share more.
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
