A study by the Audit Bureau of Circulations indicates that online British-newspaper readership went up 70% in 2008. Which should be great news for those sites, if they can draw advertising.
The interesting thing is, only 36% of readers actually live in the UK. 70% of the Daily Mail’s 19.7 visitors live outside of the UK. The same goes for about 2/3 of the Guardian’s 22.8 million online readers and for the Telegraph’s 21.1 million visitors.
What does that mean for advertisers? My experience with reading French newspapers online is that most of the ads advertise goods or services I would get in France, which doesn’t do me any good. Only very few ads use IP geolocalization techniques to feed me, say, banner adds telling me how to get a France 24 satellite feed in Los Angeles.
Which means that whoever is in charge of those ads (the paper, the online ad agencies?) needs to get a grip and start using IP geolocalization. The first online paper to do it effectively might well see its ad revenues surge.
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Is geolocalization a plug-and-play technology? If so, I can't believe that papers aren't capitalizing on it.
ReplyDeleteSome of the Google-related ads are really embarrassing. I recall an LAT story on Michael Jackson that generated a Google ad for child care. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!