The Digitalists

New Perspectives on New Media

Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’

NYTimes blesses high online video CPMs, whatever they are

Posted by Daniel Granof on November 13, 2009

Trying to find actual CPMs is like being the pilot in that old helicopter joke about Microsoft .  Everyone tells you something about them (i.e. rising, falling, staying the same) without really providing any actual numbers.  Very few people know what CPM an advertiser is really paying or provide any sense of context to that number, making useful economic analysis difficult.

Case in point:  Brian Stelter’s recent New York Times article reporting that online “video ads are booming” for major news sites.    The news sites are supposedly seeing higher CPMs for their video, the article says.  But the only hard data provided is for WSJ.com:  its current rate card lists $75 (advertisers usually pay less than the rate card), up from $50 one year ago.  Of course, 2 years ago its rate card supposedly listed $90, so the trend is not exactly clear.

A few months ago Business Week revealed that Hulu was currently charging an average of $40, down from $50 at some point in the past, while Yahoo! and MSN were charging “half that,” or $20, and YouTube and video ad networks CPMs were still lower. Read the rest of this entry »

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All the Ads Fit to Print

Posted by Greg on January 21, 2009

The news that the New York Times would start running ads on its front page made me nostalgic — or whatever the opposite of “nostalgic” is — for my first job out of college. I was the production manager for a small weekly newspaper that was lightly regarded in the community it served and not-at-all regarded outside of it. Nonetheless, we all took our “journalistic mission” very seriously, and so when the original founder sold out to a British newspaper chain, and our new owners started making noises about front-page ads, we all regarded it as the end of the world.

And then one day, our sales team sold a small ad in the corner of the front page … and the world didn’t end. Our readers didn’t seem to care, and I realized that it didn’t really say anything about our journalistic integrity. (On the other hand, a few months after that, ownership brought out a “consultant” from England who was clearly meant to nudge out my boss as editor-in-chief. Within another month both of us had resigned, and the paper’s Anglicization continued apace.)

That experience — and my subsequent career migration from editorial to marketing — gave me a good insight on just how tired and irrelevant is the old debate over the edit/business divide. What I realized is that the divide is really a means to an end, the end being preserving editorial integrity. There is good reason for maintaining that integrity; once you cash in your reputation, it’s hard to get it back. But maintaining the “church/state” divide has its own set of risks.

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