NAA: Newspapers’ Ad Declines Slim, As Online Struggles To Maintain Growth
Compared to the past three years, newspapers in Q3 had its first positive ad revenue news in quite awhile. The latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America shows that total print and online revenues fell by 5.39 percent in the previous quarter, a slight improvement over the 5.55 percent drop in Q2. To put it in further context, this was the smallest drop the industry has reported since Q107, when total print and online ad dollars slipped 4.8 percent. Online meanwhile was up in double digits, but not as high as in Q2.
Still, by itself, online ad revenues grew 10.7 percent in Q3, which not as strong as the 13.9 percent in Q2. Even print saw some improvement in Q3, falling 7.11 percent in Q3 compared to 7.62 percent in Q2.
Google says it plans to do more to fight online piracy
Google, which has been dogged by complaints about pirated content on YouTube and with its new television initiative, seems to be appealing to Hollywood with some major changes to the way it deals with copyright infringement on its search engine over the next several months, making it tougher for websites that flaunt the law and making it harder to find pirated content, it said Thursday.
"There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the Web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute," Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, said in a blog post. "It's some pretty fantastic stuff -- content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we couldn't have imagined ten years ago -- iTunes, NetFlix, YouTube, and many others --- help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world."
But along with that content are "bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright," Walker wrote.
So Google is looking to respond to those "bad apples" that violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the law that protects sites like Google if they remove infringing content when notified, faster and more efficiently.
The details are still somewhat vague, but Walker said Google will respond to "reliable" takedown requests within 24 hours and build tools to make it easier for copyright owners to submit the requests, improve tools for those who think their content was improperly removed and make it possible to search takedown requests. Google also said it will also block terms closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete, the search engine's tool that fills in the query box as you type, and prevent violators from using its AdSense product.
In what could be a major step for content creators, Google will experiment with making sites with legitimate content easier to find than sites with pirated content. That could be a game changer if Google makes pirated content hard to find on its search engine, the world's largest.
Carbon Ad Network Launches With Niche Circle of Design Sites
Carbon Ads announces the launch of its Design Circle, a collection of hand-picked publishers serving the design industry. With over 30 niche sites serving over 17 million ad impressions a month, the Design Circle speaks to a wide range of creatives: advertising and marketing professionals, print and Web designers, freelancers, creative directors and Web entrepreneurs.
Frustrated with traditional online ad services, the Carbon team, led by Fuel Brand Inc’s Joshua Smibert and Adelle Charles, hand-pick each and every publisher and advertiser, improving the advertising experience for consumers by only allowing relevant, targeted advertising of interest to the network’s readership.
Carbon advertisers, including brands such as Behance, Media Temple, Evernote and Shutterstock, take advantage of the single ad spot that Carbon requires of its publishers. These premium spots give Carbon’s ads a powerful voice and stand in stark contrast to what has become the industry norm, where multiple ads compete for attention. Additionally, the publisher selection process uses reader ‘trust and engagement’ as an acceptance criteria rightfully positioning ads as a recommended resource rather than a necessary evil.
Ads provided by Carbon’s advertisers are required to compliment the aesthetics of the publishers’ sites; maintaining design integrity and ensuring that the relationships the publishers have with their readers are respected. “To make advertising meaningful again we realized that our ads needed to be both beautiful and relevant,” says Joshua. “In that spirit, we have chosen to approve only innovative, interesting products and services which have been tested by our team or otherwise offer unique value to the Circle.”
Moving forward, Carbon is expanding into other niche Circles within the Web development, art & culture, photography and writing industries. Differentiating itself from other advertising services, that have traditionally sacrificed value and quality for volume, Carbon will continue to focus on fostering lasting relationships, in turn bringing more beautiful, relevant ads to a wider readership.
Foxwoods to Sponsor Games’ Last 5 Minutes
The last five minutes of basketball or hockey games is often the most valuable time for any advertiser to get its message to viewers, who are most likely to stay glued to their seats in the arena or on sofas at home while the game is on the line.
That is why Foxwoods Resort Casino will announce on Tuesday that it has signed a deal to be the exclusive advertiser during the last five minutes of professional basketball and hockey games at Madison Square Garden and on Knicks, Rangers, Liberty, Devils and Islanders home games broadcast on MSG’s cable sports networks.
MSG and Foxwoods say that the “Final Five” sponsorship is the first time an advertiser has bought commercial control of a specific time during professional sports games in the arena as well as on television.
It is also the latest deal between a casino and sport teams, which attract similar demographic groups, namely men in their 30s and 40s who are willing to spend a lot of money on entertainment. The Mets and the Yankees also have casinos as sponsors (Caesars and Mohegan Sun, respectively). Foxwoods is a major sponsor of the Liberty and has an alliance with the Nets.
“Our research kept telling us that their customers look like our customers in our arena,” said Scott O’Neil, the president of MSG Sports. “Of course, we’ve seen halftimes brought to you by some company. What we love is this is when fans are most engaged in the game.”
The deal is worth about $1 million a year for five years, according to an industry executive with an understanding of the agreement.
During the last five minutes of Knicks, Liberty and Rangers home games, Foxwoods’s name and logo will be shown on the scoreboard, on signs courtside and elsewhere in the arena. During broadcasts of those games, as well as home games for the Devils and the Islanders carried on a MSG network, the Foxwoods logo will be shown on the top or bottom of the screen, accompanied by an introduction from the announcer, and will be superimposed on the glass behind the hockey goals.
Television viewership is generally higher later in games that are competitive, especially those played during the week at night, as more fans get home from work. Ratings for Knicks and Rangers games last season rose about 25 percent during the last 15 minutes of the game, MSG said. Of course, in games where the result is largely decided, viewership may drop off.
Still, “the upside far, far outweighs the downside,” said Bill Sutton, a sports-marketing consultant who worked for the N.B.A.
Because Foxwoods’s sponsorship starts around when the game clock hits the five-minute mark of the fourth quarter or third period, its logo may be seen much longer than five minutes because of timeouts and other stoppages.
“You can buy a billboard for X amount a year and get Y amount of views,” said Rob Victoria, the chief marketing officer for Foxwoods. “But with the announcers doing live reads and the stadium full, it’s a way to advertise with more impact.”
Foxwoods, Victoria said, has increased its advertising in the New York area because it faces growing competition not just from Mohegan Sun, but also from gaming operations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other locations. He said that since Foxwoods started sponsoring the Liberty, the share of visitors to its casino from the New York region has increased three percentage points, to 10 percent.
Web Ad Revenue Surges 13.9% in 2010
The recession is starting to fade from memory, in the online ad world at least.
Online advertising revenue will surge by 13.9 percent to $25.8 billion in 2010 in the U.S., according to the latest forecast from industry researcher eMarketer. That’s at least the third time that eMarketer has revised its 2010 spending estimates upward. A year ago the company predicted 5.5 percent growth this year. By May of this year that estimate had swelled to 11 percent.
The next several years should be robust for the online ad space as well, according to eMarketer. Next year, spending will climb by 10.5 percent—and in fact the researcher foresees double-digit spending growth in every year through 2014 with revenue netting out at $40.5 billion.
It appears that the Web’s relatively low cost compared to other media, coupled with its reputation for trackability may be propelling more dollars to the medium during the prolonged downturn.
According to eMarketer analyst David Hallerman, “It may seem ironic, but marketers’ economic concerns are leading them to spend more for online advertising.”
