http://www.completetosh.com/weblog/2009/04/20/links-for-2009-04-20/#comments

Reg Crowder
Financial & Investment Writer
http://www.RegCrowder.com

Mark Cuban has his detractors, but generally seems to raise the discourse to a more interesting level. And it’s wonder why there aren’t more similar trial-and-error ideas coming from the journalistic community itself.

My take on your post is that it covers only one of three types of advertising available to online publishers:

1) Image ads – This is really what you’re talking about when a local bank puts a mini-billboard on a Little League field wall. There is no demonstrable immediate ROI but it builds the bank’s brand. Journalistic websites don’t have a problem providing this kind of advertising, but it’s a highly competitive market because almost anyone can do it. Just turn ink into pixels.

2) Action ads – These are the time sensitive ones such as “Two Dinners for the Price of One!” at a local restaurant, or “50 Percent Off This Week Only!” at the local shoe store. Although the Web has the ability to provide such ads, you don’t see them used all that often even though they can demonstrate ROI.

3) Marketing Services – This is a huge un-tapped area. A simple example is that in a recent discussion about online advertising, a commenter mentioned that MLS was basically cleaning everyone’s clock in the Real Estate sector. My thought at the time was that although MLS provides a decent database at a broad national level, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to build a better more detailed database of listings for a local market. It seems to me to be two things hampering hampering the move into marketing services. The first is that ad sales people don’t really know enough about the marketing of the business sectors they’re dealing with. The other is that there’s a reluctance on the part of publishers to move into areas beyond the tried-and-true.

Yet another factor that comes into play with all this is the idea that there was a time once when the destiny of a local newspaper was, for better or worse, tied closely to the destiny of the community it served. One can argue that corporate media buyouts have done a lot to trash reader loyalty. Coupled with this has been a shift in the business community to a more big-box or franchise-centric model which means ad buys are less and less at the discretion of business people who understand their own local markets.

Just my two cents,

Perry

I feel however that people will always seek a place where they could meet people to whom they can relate.

Jim from the Bingo community

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