Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 3/10/09

Media: There’s a notion that’s being pushed by various parties inthe media that would try to revitalize the newspaper industry either through printing personalized versions or bringing back the pay wall. To the second idea I say “No” and to the first I say that I already have a personalized news outlet – it’s called my RSS reader.

Social Networking: “Member communities” – loosely defined as social networking – is now more popular among young people as an online activity than email according to a new Nielsen study. Social networks are drawing people primarily away from the portals that used email access as a central selling point.

Twitter is finally upgrading its own search and trend-tracking functionality.

Facebook is said to now be a bigger traffic driver to some sites than Google. Watch out for the idea that this is a trend that can be replicated, though. The sites listed as seeing this shift are the same kind that likely get more incoming traffic from emails between friends than they do from Google as people pass along stories or items that they think their friends would be interested in.

Advertising: Unfortunately according to a new Razorfish study both portal and social networks are losing advertising dollars, at least in terms of share of spending. Entertainment sites, though, are seeing a bigger share of spending, especially as the high-quality professional video market has expanded.

I’m not sure that banners are undergoing a “creative renaissance” but they certainly are getting more sophisticated. They’re still banners, though, and will always encounter a certain amount of resistance.

Scott Monty lays out a couple simple graphs that illustrate why social networking advertising is not part of his or Ford’s online marketing strategy.

Advertising as a whole seems to be more upbeat as those creating the ads seek to make the viewer feel better than they normally do as they worry about jobs, their bank accounts and generally everything else.

Alternate cause

Brian Solis thinks the authority ranking of blogs as measured by Technorati is dropping due to increased usage of Twitter and other tools of the “statusphere.”

Or, it could be that people trying to make their own money via ad revenue and carve out a bit of ego space for themselves have simply stopped linking to the biggest blogs.

Just a thought.

Later Update: Technorati responds by saying any shift in Authority is likely due to natural fluxuations as well as their cleaner indexing system.

Pick a business model and stick with it why don’t you

The newspaper and magazine industries started off with many titles only available behind a pay wall.

The pay wall for all but a handful of pubs dropped when advertising revenue was seen as a deep pool of wealth that would last forever.

Now that we can see the bottom of that pool they want to resurrect the pay wall exactly at a moment when the average media consumer – already accustomed now to not paying for access to the online newspaper – doesn’t have nearly the disposable income they once did. There are serious stories about people who are considering going back to dial-up internet as a cost-saving move, for crying out loud. So why The New York Times or anyone else thinks people are going to happily pay for access to stories they can instead get through continuing-to-be-free blogs is beyond me.