google

After reading a few articles mulling over the implications of Rupert Murdoch's purported move to pull out all News Corp content from Google News, I thought I'd share a few thoughts, especially since the 'pay wall' issue is something I deal with from day to day with a local news publication...

Online Ads - a Faltering Art

With the popularity of Google Ads and other similar ad networks, where impressions are free, and clicks cost money, it's no surprise companies are hard-pressed to make any real money with this traditionally-based advertising medium. Heck, only 16% of Internet Users actually click on ads—that's not something the accountants and marketers are excited to hear, when all their business models are based on CTRs (click-through rates). Impression-based pricing is problematic, as well, especially considering the many different techniques people have for tricking ad-impression trackers.

There are a plethora of problems with online advertising metrics, and with revenue from online advertising. There are a few areas where online advertising is extremely effective (YouTube and other video sites have a successful pre-video commercial model, which works well). But for simple news and blog pages, the flashy, arrogant and often irrelevant ads that display in and around the content are largely ignored.

I don't propose any solutions to this huge problem—especially for news companies who, in the past, received more than half their revenue through advertising dollars. However, it's necessary to acknowledge the problem.

The Google Generation

Bing, Google, Yahoo - whatever the site is, online search and aggregation is the way of the future—I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have any particular website besides the three above (or one of their sub-sites) as their homepage. The fact is, people don't use the Internet as a replacement for the morning newspaper and bagel. People browse topics that interest them, then follow a topic around to different sources, and gather more information about this topic than was ever before possible in such a short period of time.

Earlier today, Apple announced they were starting a beta service of iWork applications online, free for anyone (with a licensed copy of iWork '09) to try, called iWork.com. The premise is this: You make a document in, say, Pages, and then click a button to put it online. You let your editor/friend know the document is online, and then he or she can login to the iWork website, view the document as you created it, and put sticky notes on it. This way, the editor/friend doesn't have to have a certain application (like Word) on his or her computer to view or make notes on your document.

Apple's not the first to have a product like this—Google has had its 'Docs' suite of online writing/sharing applications for a couple years already (it's free and it also lets everyone work on the document together)—but they have the opportunity to win the Online Office Suite battle, which has barely begun.