The Modern Journalist

Ad Networks: Two Media Types Enter, One Media Type Leaves

I’ve written about traditional media companies looking for a way to compete with Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and soon America Online, but it’s starting to look like the strategy some of the traditional giants are deploying may be the wrong tact.

Some have joined ad networks that aggregate content from several sources — and then sell ads across that network. It’s a third-party approach to advertising. And anyone who knows me understands that I’ve never met a third-party approach that I like. I’m adamant about building your own platform, your own content and then selling that content across your platform.

The Associated Press has a story today about media companies doing just that.

The problem facing most traditional media companies, though, is their insistence upon vetting all of the content on their network. Editors are loathe to put up anything that they might like. And not like can mean something as simple as copy edit errors.

This is a big deal in a professional publication. Not so much online.

We expect that our professional publications will have a certain amount of oversight to them, which is why they can never truly compete with the emerging social media space.

We (and I put myself in that category when I’m working on The Modern Journalist) aren’t concerned about such things. Time is short. People want a take on the news. They expect a certain level of professionalism. I couldn’t be an illiterate commentator and expect to generate any respect; however, a misspelling here and there isn’t so tough to swallow.

That vetting process means that these traditional companies have yet another hurdle in front of them:

But these media networks — some linking fewer than a dozen hand-picked Web sites — may have a tough time competing with the larger networks of thousands assembled by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL.

With that daunting task — how do you create with a platform technology that encourages everyone to publish, which also has an advertising arm built into it, companies (and I fell into this trap at Technology Review) started to look for affiliate advertising sites that would sell inventory from multiple networks at ridiculously low CPMs. For Technology Review, the best rate we ever secured was 1/15 of our going CPM.

Hardly a deal.

Which leaves traditional media companies in a bind. They are competing with technology companies that aren’t tied to the legacy of journalism (which, by the way, is an awful legacy of politically motivated rants, yellow journalism, advocacy journalism and today’s corporate journalism); instead, they invite everyone in.

You know, like the Web.