The dichotomy between church and state on one side, and subscriber and advertiser on the other side is a total misunderstanding and it’s been guiding huge media businesses for a couple of years now. And it all boils down to product.
Backtracking to print ads is actually helpful in the digital world: Ads typically catered to a larger part of the revenue than subscriptions because they worked! Readers could easily flick past them, the UX was non-interrupting, but for the advertisers they were very effective. If you made an interesting ad people wouldn’t flick and you were rewarded.
Digital advertising? Not so much. The banner has n o t evolved since it premiered in Hotwrired.com 1994. How’s that for product innovation/management? And they don’t work. Readers hate them/don’t see them. (A.k.a. banner blinders) and the advertisers don’t pay enough for them, since they empirically don’t work. (The change from clicks to “impressions” in media sales is a telling tale. There were too few clicks. Surprise, there’s not enough impressions.)
To counter this lack of value, do you think media and its executives and product developers have developed the product? No!
To compensate for the poor performance of digital ads, media has tried to compensate through tracking, retargetting and “pixels”. Has it worked? No. Because it’s not an improvement on the basic product.
And now legislation in most countries will shut it down. No more third party cookies, no more cookies from 2022.
Probably, the separation led to this problem/opportunity being unaddressed for so long. Editors in chief has focused on subscriptions and events while letting the marketing department handle ads. But they didn’t handle it and the tradition is the the EIC:s voice is the loudest.
In other words, until you develop a product that readers actually accept and that deceivers value to advertisers, everything in product is moot. You used to have a product that worked, that delivered value to readers and advertisers alike, but now you don’t. So things won’t get better until you stop accepting the current form of ‘online advertising’ as a given. Because it doesn’t deliver enough value to anyone.
The dichotomy between church and state on one side, and subscriber and advertiser on the other side is a total misunderstanding and it’s been guiding huge media businesses for a couple of years now. And it all boils down to product.
Backtracking to print ads is actually helpful in the digital world: Ads typically catered to a larger part of the revenue than subscriptions because they worked! Readers could easily flick past them, the UX was non-interrupting, but for the advertisers they were very effective. If you made an interesting ad people wouldn’t flick and you were rewarded.
Digital advertising? Not so much. The banner has n o t evolved since it premiered in Hotwrired.com 1994. How’s that for product innovation/management? And they don’t work. Readers hate them/don’t see them. (A.k.a. banner blinders) and the advertisers don’t pay enough for them, since they empirically don’t work. (The change from clicks to “impressions” in media sales is a telling tale. There were too few clicks. Surprise, there’s not enough impressions.)
To counter this lack of value, do you think media and its executives and product developers have developed the product? No!
To compensate for the poor performance of digital ads, media has tried to compensate through tracking, retargetting and “pixels”. Has it worked? No. Because it’s not an improvement on the basic product.
And now legislation in most countries will shut it down. No more third party cookies, no more cookies from 2022.
Probably, the separation led to this problem/opportunity being unaddressed for so long. Editors in chief has focused on subscriptions and events while letting the marketing department handle ads. But they didn’t handle it and the tradition is the the EIC:s voice is the loudest.
In other words, until you develop a product that readers actually accept and that deceivers value to advertisers, everything in product is moot. You used to have a product that worked, that delivered value to readers and advertisers alike, but now you don’t. So things won’t get better until you stop accepting the current form of ‘online advertising’ as a given. Because it doesn’t deliver enough value to anyone.