Thanks to Daniel for the link to this New York Times piece about newspapers’ online ad sales. Some points…
After 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million…
Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter…
Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million…
Large papers… can sell premium ad space… for $15 to $50 for every thousand impressions. But these and other papers of all sizes have increasingly relied on middlemen — known as ad networks — to sell less desirable space, typically for around $1 for every thousand impressions…
There are now more than 300 networks, most offering custom ads, and they are popular venture-capital investments and acquisition targets…
Some sites unaffiliated with newspapers have also limited inventory and banned ad networks, and many report good results…
Front Porch Forum works with a limited ad inventory and we do not use ad networks.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more