In the vein of sliding newspaper revenues, I have decided to post the results reported from other newspaper properties this week:

• The Washington Post reported a 13% drop in 2007 revenues, when compared to 2006.
• McClatchy reported a revenue decline of 14% in January 2008, compared to the same month in 2007.
  • This publisher saw their greatest decline in the area of commercial advertising, which dropped by 16%.
• Gannett reported that their January newspaper advertising revenues fell by 9.2% and the company’s broadcast properties suffered a 6% decline in revenues, when compared to January of 2007.

As we mentioned in our post on Media General, newspaper properties are celebrating increases in online revenue, but the increases are not enough to cover their losses from newspaper advertising and classifieds. The rate of online growth has also slowed in comparison to previous periods, making it difficult for publishers to play overall revenue catch-up!

• At the Washington Post, online revenues grew by 11% in 2007, which was down from the 2006 growth rate of 28%.
• In January, McClatchy’s online revenues grew by 2.6% when compared to a 14.6% growth rate in January 2007.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Gannett, MCClatchy, Media General, Newspaper Revenues, Washington Post

Media General, the publisher of nearly 130 daily, community and weekly papers, primarily in Southeast USA, released their January 08’ revenue results and like what we have seen time after time from newspapers, the results weren’t pretty.

For January 2008, Media General reported revenues of $71.5 million – this equates to a decline of $6.5 million when compared to last year. The biggest decline was seen with the publisher’s classifieds. Among its large dailies real-estate classified revenues were down 37%, automotive 35% and employment revenues decreased 34%. All other media types owned by the publisher were up (broadcast and online). Increases in other areas however, were not enough to make up for the newspaper losses.

Unlike some of the other publishing groups its size, Media General has started to dabble in areas outside of traditional newspaper, but still remaining entertaining, for the purpose of user engagement. Media General has branched into the online gaming arena and so far, has seen some success with this. Their advergaming revenues were up 4% in January!

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Media General, Newspaper Revenues, Online Gaming

With many traditional newspaper advertisers using search advertising to build leads and increase sales, it is important that publishers keep current on what the search giants are doing to enhance their standing in the search game. The most recent activity is seen with Yahoo’s change to their search platform, allowing advertisers to use Yahoo plug-ins on their sites. What this means is that users who turn on a Yahoo search plug-in, created by a Web owner/Advertiser, will see enhanced listings when the publisher’s site is returned on a Yahoo search results page. The enhancements range from images, video, deeper links to the site, and additional proprietor information.

“The experience is dramatically different, and very useful to searchers,” said Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo Search.

The tools required to build the plug-ins will be released by Yahoo within the next few months and given the search craze adopted by traditional brick and mortar advertisers, the adoption of such a product should be rich.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: search, Yahoo

written by Beverly Crandon

Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., The New York Times Co., and Tribune Co. announced this morning the arrival of quadrantONE. quadrantONE is a new joint venture to sell national online advertising inventory across all of the web properties belonging to each of the participating publishers. The online market reach of Gannett, Hearst, NYT and Trib.’s new online network will be 50 million monthly unique visitors, across 27 US markets. Dana Haye, Interim CEO, quadrantONE, and senior vice president for sales of Tribune Interactive explained the benefit to advertisers by saying “Imagine placing the same ad across hundreds of local Web sites on the same day with one buy-that’s the power of this network.”

quadrantONE is undoubtedly the publishers push at retaining market relevance and combined dominance in the wake of pure play online competitors. If advertisers gravitate to the quadrantONE network and if managed accordingly by the publishers, it just might work.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Gannett, Hearst, New York Times, Publishers, quadrantONE, Tribune

When you peruse the National Press Club’s (NPC) site, its history reads like that of a traditional newspaper. It was founded in 1908… yada yada yada… strong foothold in society and so on. Through reading the people features on their site, you recognize that the NPC hasn’t had a shake up from modernization in quite a while. To put it lightly, their archaic mode makes me liken them to historic High Court officials that partook in drab conversation and had questionable taste in clothing. Nonetheless, given my impression of the NPC you understand then when I tell you that I was floored to read that they plan to now include Citizen Journalists in their ‘elite club’.

The National Press Club will open its doors to online journalist via a relationship it formed with Helium.com. Helium’s online platform houses an estimated 100,000 citizen journalists who write about anything from politics to entertainment and Helium pays their writers with a share of the advertising revenue, resulting from traffic to their articles.

It is important to note that this is the first step in resemblance to new media for the NPC and they should be commended for that. In many cases, local newspapers who have feet on the street and a supposed ear to the ground, haven’t yet grasped the concept of new media and what it means to the longevity of their products.

Even though the NPC will actively start to recruit online journalists, those hen-picked out of the Helium line up, will still need to submit an application, which will be judged by a an NPC committee.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Citizen Journalist, Helium.com, Online Journalists, The National Press Club

Belo Corporation, which began as a Texas newspaper, began trading today, but only after splitting off its newspaper business to run as its own separate entity.

At the point of the split, Belo collectively owned 21 TV stations across the US, as well as four daily newspapers. With the split of properties, the four newspapers (The Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal, The Press Enterprise, and Denton Record Chronicle) now form a separate public company called A.H. Belo, that also started trading on the NYSE this morning. The split of operations seemed to be inevitable when recalling previous press releases from Belo, which spoke to declining circulation for the newspapers. Belo circulation at one point had to be investigated for rumors of overstating circulation numbers in 2004. Overall, the newspaper group of Belo consistently seemed to be the corporation’s ‘Achilles heel’.

The new Belo (TV broadcast business) is estimated to produce $775 million in annual revenue this year and there is no doubt that they will meet expectations because for the first time, its leaders will be able to focus on one core strength - broadcasting. The same could be said about the folks now in charge of A.H. Belo. Without having to compete with their television kin, perhaps they too can start to work on new media tactics that will improve the old ones employed at their newspaper properties.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Belo, Belo Corporation, Declining Circulation, The Dallas Morning News, TV Broadcast

There have been many speculative news articles and blog posts covering the Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google saga, each with their own take of how the Microsoft bid for Yahoo will change the world. Up until now, I didn’t think any of those worthy of blogging (you, I am sure, have already read a lot on this topic, on your own), but last night I came across a blog post written by Google’s chief legal officer and then a retort from Microsoft’s legal counsel. Google, it seems, is taking the stance that Microsoft is looking to employ the same monopolistic behaviors with the internet that it once did with the PC and Microsoft, from what I can gather from the legal counsel response, indicates that with Google’s large search share, they are the once trying to control the Internet.

Something tells me this will be a long and drawn out ordeal, but if I was Yahoo! I would be feeling a little like the bell of the ball – “everyone wants to dance with me”

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Google, Microsoft, Search Monopoly, Yahoo

According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), the average number of unique monthly visitors (UMV’s) to newspaper websites grew by more than 3.6 million in 2007, making it a record year for the industry. The 2007 UMV figure is an increase of more than 6% over 2006 numbers.

Monthly unique visitors to newspaper websites averaged 62.8 million in Q4’ of 2007 and it was the largest quarter reported, since the NAA began tracking online usage in 2004.

Additional findings in the Nielsen Online report created for the NAA state that:

• Heading into the holiday season, newspaper websites experienced a record in October 2007. More than 63.2 million people visited newspaper websites that month, more than any month on record - and an 8% increase from the same period a year ago
• For the year’s fourth quarter, 39% of all active Web users visited newspaper websites, with visits averaging 44 minutes a month
• In the fourth quarter, users generated more than three billion page impressions on average, a 7.3% increase over the same period a year ago

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: newspaper sites, newspaper umv's

A report released this week, from Harris Interactive, tells the statistical results of influence and affect that lay individuals (20%), who are knowledgeable about vehicles, have on the rest of the population who is not (80%). The report further goes on to show that both the influencers and the non-influencers create their shopping list of brands, more through WOM (word of mouth), versus dealer fed advertising on TV, in magazines, classifieds or even on the Web. It is only once they have made their short list from communicating with friends and family (the influencers), that they then refer to a dealers advertisements to make their final decision on brand. It is also interesting to note that even during the final decision making period, 40% of the not so knowledgeable about cars still, went to the influencers (friends and family) to make that final brand decision.

Having an understanding of how to make the influencers loyal, early adopters a your vehicle brand, would have longer staying power in the market, versus an exorbitantly priced ad campaign, which remains fresh for the first 3 to 4 weeks it is launched. In light of these figures as publishers, there is a lot you can do, both at the dealer level and of course with OEM’s, if those relationships exist for you. Building groups on social networks for your clients is a great idea; getting popular bloggers to endorse the product also works. The bottom line is, encourage your automotive client to truly get to know what their loyal shopper looks like and have them spend some of their marketing dollars in that arena. Yes, the loyal followers may already be the converted, but this mere 20% of our population continues to heavily influence the purchasing decisions of the remaining 80%.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: automtive, buying a car, car buyers, car shoppers, vehicle purchasing decisions