The Eyeballs vs. Dollars Question
January 3, 2007

A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers has made a deal with Yahoo to share content, advertising, and technology, The New York Times reported. This is "another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat."

I applaud newspapers for understanding that they need to get with the Internet, but I wonder if this is the right way for them to go.

By partnering with Yahoo, they give away content - which they've already expensed - for a share of Yahoo advertising dollars. But I'm not sure if that's their main objective. According to the article, the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo is to "have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo."

Gee, that doesn't sound very profitable. But even if they figure out that dollars, not eyeballs, measure success in business, newspaper executives must develop their own back end - the relationship they have with their own readers - or they will never make any serious progress toward saving their industry.

Read this post in Early To Rise

posted by M. Masterson @ 10:01 AM,

2 Comments:

At 11:12 AM, Blogger Dylan said...

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "develop their own back end"?

 
At 2:56 PM, Blogger BlueStar said...

If I may be so bold...
Develop their own back end means that when they give away their content, they should still find a way to make money from the exchange. For example, you read a free newspaper, the free paper is paid for by the advertisers, like in TV. If the newspaper gives their content away for free on Yahoo, it would be smart for them to at least include some of their advertisers on the pages that Yahoo serves up, or some other way for the viewer to buy something from the newspaper or its advertiser. That is the "back end" side of the transaction.
Carlin
www.Seattle-HotShotz.com

 

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