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SITES Week of October 15 to 21, 1996
Top 10
Hot [AJR/][NewsLink] Eric K.
sites Meyer,
Newspapers All the Newspapers That Fit managing
Magazines New numbers show the extent of the trend -- or is partner
it a fad? of the
Radio/TV -------------------------------------------------- NewsLink
By Eric K. Meyer on-line
Resources -------------------------------------------------- research
A S SUMMER turned to fall last year, a contributor and
ARTICLES to a popular on-line discussion group noted wryly consulting
that the growth of on-line newspapers was bound to firm,
New AJR slow. "We're almost out of newspapers that aren't is one
Digital on-line," he wrote. of
feed As spring turns to summer this year, the true several
Bylines extent of the stampede from newsprint to hypertext on-line
Take 2 has become clear. Since September, 864 newspapers experts
Archives have gone on-line, many of them within the United whose
States. views
INTERACT A total of 768 commercial newspapers are will
on-line todayin the United States. Nine months appear
Search ago, there were only 154. In September, 44 U.S. on this
site dailies were offering a full range of news and page
Reader features on-line. Today the U.S. has 197 weekly.
info full-service dailies on-line. Also on-line in the
Feedback U.S. today are 152 full-service weeklies, 23 Slides
full-service business newspapers, 26 full-service from
Take special-interest newspapers, 53 limited-service Meyer's
survey newspapers and 317 newspapers with promotional presentation
sites that contain no news. to the
SPECIAL Outside the United States, at least 337 Kansas
JobLink commercial newspapers are on-line. Of them, 169 Press
Directory are in Europe; 63 are in Canada, Mexico, the Association
Caribbean and Central America; 54 are in Asia and June 7
J-awards the Middle East; 25 are in South America; 20 are
in Australia and Oceana; and 6 are in Africa. Add Views
Trademark in more than 230 campus newspapers, and the expressed
world-wide total for Internet newspapers has are not
Research reached 1,335. Last September, the comparable necessarily
number was just a third of that -- 471. And by the those
time you read this, even these numbers may be out of
of date. Upwards of 50 newspapers start publishing AJR/NewsLink.
on-line each week.
D ESPITE SUCH RAPID GROWTH in on-line publishing,
profitability of on-line newspapers remains as
problematic in June 1996 as it was in September
1995. Local advertisers continue to express
hesitancy about advertising on-line. Hyped beyond
most people's reason, the Internet remains a
medium used by no more than 4% of the audience,
according to respected off-line polling. This is
regarded by many as grossly insufficient to make a
general-interest local publication profitable.
Moreover, non-newspapers continue staking
claims to increasingly large portions of the
on-line advertising dollar -- and to readers'
loyalties. The top on-line "newspaper" on 1995, as
voted by users of NewsLink, was not a newspaper at
all. It is Cable News Network's on-line site. No.
2 on the list was a site operated by a cable TV
program, "C/Net Central" from USA Networks.
Insiders at CNN and the new Microsoft-NBC news
combine now confidently predict that within a year
or two, CNN and MS-NBC will be carving up the
lion's share of the on-line news market.
T HE ADVERTISING MARKET also is in transition.
While some publications, following the lead of
Wired, have persisted in attempting to charge
upwards of $150 per thousand viewers of an
advertiser's message, other sites have been forced
to cut their rates to as low as $10 per thousand.
Many also have been forced to accept insertion
orders that base payment not on the number who see
the message but rather on the number, usually
between 1% and 8% of the total, who "click
through" to the advertiser's site. Advertisers
currently are paying as low as 50 cents per
"click-through," with rates of 75 cents to $1 also
being offered. Such deals are reminiscent of the
consignment commercials common during off-peak
hours in the immature medium of overnight
television and narrowcast cable. On-line
publishers: Can you say "ginsu knives"?
Meanwhile, agencies representing major
advertisers have begun placing their ads only on
sites that can deliver millions of advertising
views (or "impressions") each month. Smaller
on-line newspapers cannot compete with search
engines, meta-indexes and other non-originating
services, which can provide suitably large
audiences by virtue of their global reach. And the
one organization that could do something to
bolster the plight of smaller newspapers, the
Newspaper Association of America's New Century
Network, seems hopelessly embroiled in attempting
to compete with InfiNet as an on-line service
provider for publishers.
O VERALL, ON-LINE ECONOMICS have proved so
troublesome that at least one early on-line
publisher has withdrawn to inactive status. Many
others have trimmed staffing by two-thirds or
more. Several have continued to flirt with the
idea of selling on-line subscriptions, but as many
as have tested this path have abandoned it. Those
that do charge tend to do so for archival services
only -- services that appeal to a very limited
market, which probably is already fully
represented on-line. Projecting much growth from
this small information-seeking niche is merely to
invite a tragic repeat of the 1980s' videotext
fiasco. Information seekers, who form the bulk of
the early adopters of Internet technology, remain
seriously different from the mass audience of
casual information browsers, who are far more
likely to be swayed by traditionally crafted
pricing strategies for news.
"Microtransactions" -- what amounts to
inexpensive pay-per-view system for news --
continue to be a pipe dream of companies like
Newshare. Newshare, still without a major client
for its pay-to-read services, recently converted
its Clickshare product into an advertising
auditing tool and persuaded the Christian Science
Monitor to give it a try. Auditing tools such as
A.C. Nielsen's I/Pro have become expensive but
advertiser-required add-ons to many media sites,
even though many auditing tools are little more
sophisticated and in some cases less reliable than
the shareware server logs each site can generate
for free.
T HE PROMOTIONAL VALUE of a media web site
continues to stir considerable interest. Little
research has been done on what on-line reading
does to traditional reading, but one recent study
in Newspaper Research Journal confirmed what a
study done for NewsLink's Tomorrow's News Today
found last year: that reading an on-line edition
might actually increase the reading of the same
publication's traditional print editions. On-line
editions have considerable potential to serve as
samplers for publications that might be difficult
to obtain or, like the Christian Science Monitor,
have undue problems with name recognition.
Rather than play on a strategy of an
ever-expanding horizon of readers -- some sites,
particularly glitzy, graphics-laden ones, are
running at a 13-to-1 ratio of new users to old --
local newspapers might bewell advised to focus on
developing consumer reading habits like those they
enjoy in print. Increasingly on-line newsrooms are
accepting the original editorial judgments of
their newsprint counterparts, eliminatingthe need
for costly, duplicative editorial hierarchies.
Some derisively label this "shovelware." Others
call it being practical.
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