One big difference between web and print advertising January 20, 2009
Posted by SteveatLFPress in News.trackback
I had a bit of an epiphany today in thinking about advertising on the web and how it differs from print advertising.
With a newspaper the number of pages printed each day is largely dictated by the number of ads that are sold. I see the layout thumbnail sheets every day. The editors are told how many pages they will have at their disposal, where the ads will be placed, and how many ‘holes’ they need to fill with content.
With the web that paradigm is flipped. The editorial side of the business dictates the size of the product, the readers dictate how many ads will be displayed as they surf the site, and sales reps are the ones who have to fill the ‘holes’.
The game has changed.
In print if an ad is not sold, then a page may not get printed. Either that or editorial has more space to fill. On the web any time a page is clicked an ad is displayed – whether one is sold or not. The advertising team is the group challenged with the task of filling the holes.
Couple this with the fact that there are no wasted ads on a web site and this is a big change. (Unlike radio or TV, where an ad at 2:00 AM may not been seen or heard by anyone, an ad on a web site only displays because someone clicked to request a page.)
Some of you may have a ‘duh’ reflex in reaction to this – as if I had just stated that the world is round – but for me it captures succinctly one fundamental difference between print and web.
Now to ponder what that means for sales reps and how it changes the nature of their job.
@SteveatLFPress
I think some of this is whats wrong with print newspapers. They’ll sacrifice a story because they don’t have ad space to sell around it. It may not be an important story, but someone reading would likely find value in it.
If everything got published online THEN a print version made, a story that got cut can still be read, and maybe even create revenue via the traffic to an ad on that page.
If I were to build a paper from scratch that would be the way I’d do it. Maybe use the stats on the story and a tiered system of print ad sales to determine story vs. ad placement.