SAYATA

A lot of blogs and Cable News have been in a chatter about Rupert Murdoch of late. Mr. Murdoch has been trying to figure out how to get revenue from his many media properties online. He has been trying to work out a deal with Microsoft / Bing and threatening to block google from indexing his sites.

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When the Atlanta Journal Constitution, that is owned by Cox Inc., first set up an internet property, it was a paid subscriber property. Before the newspaper began losing interest / readership, they were in fact able to leverage their customer base to upsale to the paid subscriber website. Additionally to read older articles, you had to pay to access their archive. The paid subscriber property is now free. They instead try to gain revenue through ads and "partnerships." I haven't lately found an article to give me the archive / pay / subscribe message. I am really not sure of the status of their archive system.

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There is a website called newslibrary.com / newsbank.com that archives articles from various news sources. You may have read an article in an online newspaper that points you there to pay to read the rest of the article if it is older than 7 days or so and is part of their archive. At the time of this writing they charge $2.95 per article or $19.95 a month which includes 50 articles. At the time of this writing they rank 90,507 on Alexa in USA and 404,946 in over all Alexa Traffic Rank.

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One of the flaws of Drupal Content Management system was that there was not a good way to restrict individual content to user role. An add-on now extends Drupal where you can restrict content to signed in and user role set users. Rupert Murdoch is not the only one who realizes that all content can't be viewed as mousetrap cheese to get traffic from the search engines and try to increase views of advertisements. If a website can not even "up sale" content with the only price being a quick, simple, registration and log-in then what is the value of that content? Magazine / Newspapers ad rates have always been based on subscriptions to the Magazine / Newspaper. There is a valid reason for that.

Through the years I've read on different boards with people complaining that they get plenty of traffic but they aren't converting. Well, content sites are notoriously bad about converting ads into revenue.

- some people bypass ads and go directly to site being advertised
- some people unknowingly have software on their computer that hijacks links so that the viral spammer gets credit for the sale
- some people have computers configured so that tracking does not work
- people are on the site to read the content, right then, and they don't have time to check out the ads. Depending on how the site does their ads, they might not be able to find the exact ad back on the content site and so they go to search on the search engine with key words remembered from ad. I try to make sure users can always find my ads on sayata or related websites.

Newspaper and Magazine Ads have an established record to help build brands. Newspapers sales pages have historically driven traffic to stores. For large online newspapers, what people pay for ads has to be based on unique user/subscriber views and perhaps a lesser amount per unique casual visitor view that is much more difficult to quantify. Contrary to Google, Paid Clicks are not the way to pay for ads on content sites. On print newspapers the ads have always added value to the newspaper where people go back to the newspaper to look at the ad several times if it is something they are interested in. This same type of value has to be created, by ad placement, on the online version of the paper/magazine as well.

Google's system punishes advertisers who do not have enough clicks to impression. The Advertiser should not be punished but rather the cost of an ad should be based on same formula for everyone.

For a major content site the ad fee should be based on unique views as I described. For smaller sites like Sayata, even with all the tracking problems, we probably do best with commission ads and by directly operating our own stores. But still, even though we are small, we have to try to create a subscriber base to add value to our sites. To simply make all of our content open for bots and non loyal visitors is simply not smart. I say this as someone who hates to subscribe to sites as much as anyone.

We sign in to all sorts of social networking sites and bookmarking sites, but we don't sign in to content sites. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I would be sort of shocked if content sites don't work to change this during the coming year.