State of Local

It’s important to be able to accurately judge the reach of a local news site. It’s not just the page views or unique monthly visits. It’s how vital the site is to its core users. Does it have value to advertisers? Is it a factor in the blogosphere?

When you travel into an examination of those metrics, you can rapidly find yourself getting into trouble. What seems to be accurate numbers can often be skewed, or wildly misinterpreted if you don’t pay attention to where those numbers come from and how they are compiled.

Uber-media blogger Jeff Jarvis recently took a swing at using new metrics to measure the popularity and effectiveness of the leading Democratic presidential candidates. While that might not seem like a “local news” issue, the post illustrates some of the problems all of us run into when looking at metrics such as Google searches or YouTube video view numbers.

Google searches: Here, in a chart representing December 2007 in the U.S., we see Clinton generally ahead of Obama but with her falling and then showing a resurgence. What do searches indicate? I think they can at least measure interest if not affection or affiliation.

The problem with examining search numbers is that there’s no way of determining what people are looking for and why. Someone searching for “way to volunteer for Hillary Clinton” gets lumped into the same category as someone looking for dirt on her personal life. It’s impossible to draw any sort of conclusion about what this means.
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I’m one of those folks who believes that creating local vertical blogs makes a lot of sense. If you’re a station who has covered Barack Obama for years, why not create a vertical blog with a separate URL rather than rolling the blog into your main news site?

Chicago’s Fox news has done just that, with the blog Obamatracker.com. The blog promises to be a “one stop for all you need to know if you are tracking Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.”

It’s a nice idea, but it’s definately a web 1.0 presentation. While I think it’s a great idea not to obviously point back to the main Fox Chicago web site, the blog would be improved with a better template and a place to out at least some generic house ads–even just some Google Adsense ads.
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One of the challenges for anyone dealing with local news and the web is staying on top of the newest technologies and services. Yes, there is more on the web than just Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

Here’s a quick look at five sites you should be familiar with. Not so much because you’ll use them, but because they’re a good indication of what everyone will be talking about in six months.

Qik
http://www.qik.com
It’s still in Alpha, but Qik is a piece of software that enables users to stream video directly from their cellphones to the web. It’s possible to go live with a stream from anywhere you can find a solid cellphone connection, and Qik makes it easy to integrate the streams with Twitter. The live streams are also automatically recorded for later use.

I can see a lot of uses for this on a local news site. It would allow photographers an easy way to shoot some quick video from a breaking news situation directly to the internet. I’m just starting to play around with it, and while the quality isn’t always optimal, it’s a powerful tool for lean and mean news organizations. Read More… »

BET Networks said today that the BET Digital Media Group will be launching a vertical advertising network in an effort to give advertisers more exposure to African-American Internet users.

The new advertising will allow advertisers to target African-American consumers across relevant and professional Web sites. BET’s vertical advertising network will offer Web site publishers revenue opportunities by connecting publishers to advertisers trying to reach urban and African-American consumers.

According to Jupiter Research, African Americans are likelier to respond positively to online advertising, and are the second largest online minority after Hispanics with 22.7 million users.

The trend of building vertical ad networks is continuing nationally at a brisk pace. I predict that the trend will rapidly move to local news ad markets, as local broadcast TV and newspapers sites build their own ad networks built around a select number of high-quality local web sites.

This past week, J.P. Morgan released a very detailed, and bullish, analysis of the 2008 Internet sector titled “Nothing But Net.”

Key assumptions underlying the survey:

1. US economic growth to remain fairly steady. At this point, this is becoming a contrarian view.
2. Advertiser demand for “premium” inventory will increase. Though overall CPMs may increase, industry trends we’ve seen show “premium” CPMs coming under pressure due to increased alternatives from better targeting technology (geo / behavioral) and newer publishers.

Summary:

• Total online ad market growth rate: 21% in 2008, down from 26% in 2007.
• 20% growth in “graphical” ad spend due to more UVs, higher PVs/UV, more ads per page, higher CPMs and higher sell-through.
• CPM growth rate will accelerate by 4% due to scarcity and better targeting capabilities
• Internet will continue to cannibalize Newspaper ad spend, which declined ~8% in F’07
• Large companies will continue to seek out investments in social media (e.g. MSNBC/Newsvine)
• Top 20 ad networks will earn approximately $2B+ in revenue in 2007 (~14% of the display ad market). Ad network revenue to grow 25% CAGR through 2010 (outpacing overall market).
• Acquisition and consolidation to get scale in ad network space. Motivations are: Traffic (scale), Technology (tools), Transactional (buying profitable firms)
• Mobile ads will be like video ads: A whole lot of talk, not a whole lot of $.

Alan Mutter’s blog “Reflections of a Newsosaur” should be a must-read for anyone interested in the media. He recently posted some figures about the shocking collapse of valuation among publicly-traded newspaper publishers.

I suspect most of us realize it’s been a challenging time for the newpaper industry. But these numbers are honestly scary to anyone who regularly reads a newspaper.

The market value of the American newspaper publishers entering 2008 as independent, publicly traded companies has fallen by $23 billion, or 42%, since the end 2004, the year before the wheels started coming off the industry. Nearly half the slide in the market capitalization of newspaper stocks came in 2007, when the shares lost a collective $11 billion, or 26%, of their value. Thus, newspapers lost nearly as much value last year as they did in the two prior years put together. Read More… »