new media etc

Study: netsurfers avoid flashy banner ads, prefer text ads

Clickz.com - An eye-tracking study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group finds Internet users avoid viewing banner ads. Text advertising is read more often than display ads, according to the research.

Banner blindness means Internet users focus on the content on a page and ignore the advertisements. This is especially true for bright, flashing ads, and other units that are not relevant to what the user is interested in reading, the researchers found.

"People are not looking at the typical blinding, graphical ads," said Nielsen Norman Group Director of Research Kara Pernice Coyne. "They are not [looking] enough time to absorb a complex ad or branding message."

There's still hope for online ads. Pernice Coyne said graphical ads with text and contrasting colors, like white text on red, is less likely to be disregarded. "They're looking at them if they're text," she said. "I hate to sound boring, but [it is best] if you can make sure your ad is something simple, text or a recognized logo, and it needs to be relevant to the page."

Pernice Coyne suggests the behavior may be due, in part, to experience with ads that direct users to sites with malicious code or other undesirable results. "There are too many unscrupulous advertisers," she said. "Users are not going to click on something they think will annoy them or hurt their system."

While the study's finding would seem to threaten the rising Internet ad spend, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), at least, isn't concerned.

"There literally have been thousands of studies now on online advertising's effectiveness," said IAB President Greg Stuart. "All the evidence is in: smoking kills, online advertising works. There is no more information to be had. We can deny the information, but that's all it is: denial."

Stuart points to the IAB's cross media optimization studies (XMOS), which demonstrates the value of online advertising. While the research doesn't observe usability, it measures the medium against other channels.

"All of those studies indicate that online advertising is effective and that in most cases it is the most cost-effective medium in a marketer's mix," said Stuart.

Stuart agrees that things could work better. "I believe very strongly that we can still continue to make online advertising work even harder," he said.

Though the eye-tracking study casts doubt on banners, it supports the effectiveness of one category: search. "People do look at sponsored links on search pages and images on search pages," said Pernice Coyne. "They really look for words that match what they are searching for. If you have a strange title to the page, people will skip over it.

"It's so important what you call your links in search results. Users don't give you a lot of chances," Pernice Coyne said.

Previous reports have shown sponsored listings can succeed beyond the first position. The NNG research finds it is important to be placed among the first few.

"In search results, people look mostly at the first few links on the page," said Pernice Coyne.

Sponsored links need to closely relate to search terms to be successful. "When you look at [the sponsored links] and they're not related to the content, users look away quickly, almost like you're slapping them on the hand," said Pernice Coyne. "These types of advertisers doing this type of advertising, I feel like they're going to ruin it very quickly. People are incredibly good at blocking things out they don’t like."

The researchers also found that people read Web pages in an F-pattern, narrowing their focus as they scroll down a page of content. Pernice Coyne said readers fixate or focus on the content at the top of a page, read a little bit further down, then give up and go back to the beginning of the same or subsequent page.

Images that appear in the middle of the page, a spot for advertisements, are considered "obstacles" and annoying.

The usability study was conducted on a group of about 230 people. Participants were asked to surf the Web to their own destinations. They were also given tasks such as finding out how to tie a bowline knot and researching getting a mortgage. Participants carried out these tasks while a camera tracked the pupil as the eye engaged what was on the screen.

Online readers will buy online

最新研究，82%看網上報紙的人會從網上購買東西；不看網上報紙的人，只有55%會在網上購物。

這個訊息非常重要，因為顯示了網上報紙對產品有促銷作用，廣告就有效了。

現代的辦報人，如果還在拘泥多賣幾多份報紙，計較無法增加買報的人數，就實在太短視了。開闢網上市場，才是正確路向。
Online Newspaper Readers Younger, Buy More, than Non-Users
By Jennifer Saba
Published: June 16, 2006

NEW YORK People who read newspapers online buy more products online, a new study from the Newspaper Association of America found. Eighty-two percent of "power users" purchase products online compared with only 55% of individuals who don't frequent newspaper Web sites.

The study conducted by MORI Research on behalf of the NAA surveyed 1,501 Internet users by phone as well as 9,576 online newspaper users via an online “pop-up” survey on 10 newspaper Web sites.

"Power users" are defined as readers who visit Web sites on an average day. The mean age of a power user is 39 compared with 42 for non-users. Forty percent are between the ages of 18 and 34. Fifty-two percent hold college degrees versus 35% of non-users.

The research also found that 72% of newspaper online power users browse for products on sale versus 48% of non-users. Additionally, 43% of power users download coupons compared with 14% of non-users.

"Online newspaper readers are a unique class of highly engaged consumers who have made newspaper Web sites an integral part of their daily lives as they seek information, conduct research on products, and execute transactions," John Sturm, NAA president and CEO, said in a statement.

Power users are more likely to use online services: Seventy percent pay their bills online compared with 28% of non-users, for example.

The study found that power users are going to online newspapers more often than they did in 2004. Those who "visited yesterday" advanced from 12% to 16% in 2004. Twenty-nine percent visited newspaper Web sites in the past seven days.

The 10 online newspapers that participated in the study include: AZCentral.com, Boston.com, CJOnline.com, Cleveland.com, DelawareOnline.com, KnoxNews.com, MySanAntonio.com, Sacbee.com, TBO.com, and TwinCities.com.

The importance of RSS

Just An Online Minute... Growth In RSS
Wednesday, May 17, 2006

A new report from JupiterResearch finds that 63 percent of big companies plan to syndicate content via Really Simple Syndication by the end of 2006. The report "RSS Comes of Age: Budgeting, Deploying, and Measuring RSS," indicates that currently only 29 percent of large companies (with more than $50 million in annual revenues) publish content via RSS technology.

Since RSS users are heavier consumers of online media than traditional online users are, they represent a prime demographic for online publishers. The Jupiter report suggests that marketers can either modify their RSS feeds to individual users through individualized RSS (IRSS) or create traditional broadcast feeds. IRSS feeds are subscriber-centric and created in much the same way as targeted e-mail campaigns, including all of the measurement benefits associated with e-mail marketing.

The growth of RSS is underscored by the fact that 48 percent of current RSS publishers are spending $250,000 or more to deploy and manage syndicated content. However, JupiterResearch has also found that spending at this level is inconsistent with the current rate of adoption.

"Despite low perceived adoption rates and definitive measurement standards, site operators are increasing spending on RSS deployments," said Greg Dowling, senior analyst at JupiterResearch. "In order to maximize their investment in RSS, site operators should leverage emerging tools and technologies specifically tailored to RSS."

"The primary challenge to greater adoption is a lack of experience with RSS and resources to deploy it," said David Schatsky, president of JupiterKagan. "However, recent offerings from e-mail service providers and RSS service providers are lowering the barrier for feed management, deployment and measurement."

報紙要生存就要變

Quebecor行政總裁也說報紙要生存就要變，跟隨消費者的行為模式變。

Quebecor overhaul
Globe and Mail

Quebecor Inc. is shaking up the slumping Sun newspaper chain as some of its flagship dailies are increasingly being squeezed by the growth of free commuter papers, including its own publication, 24 Hours.

The Montreal-based media giant is embarking on an ambitious digital strategy aimed at breathing new life into its television, newspaper and Web operations, starting in Toronto where the company's biggest newspaper has seen its reader and circulation numbers eroding.

Quebecor chief executive officer Pierre Karl Péladeau said the model for newspapers needs to change if publications want to attract younger readers.（full speech here）In a pair of moves Tuesday, the company announced plans to link its newspaper, Web and TV network in Toronto more closely than any other company has in Canada so far.

If successful, the strategy could be spread across the company's operations.

Quebecor also installed a new publisher at the helm of its largest newspaper, the Toronto Sun, which has seen its readership and circulation erode faster than its competitors in recent months.

The company plans to stream broadcasts from its Sun TV network in Toronto over the Internet, letting viewers contribute their own video footage to news programs, while also allowing them to see inside editorial meetings at Toronto Sun offices where news decisions are made.

"I think there is no other future for conventional media . . . than to migrate to this model," Mr. Péladeau said after the presentation. "Probably this was something that [media] convergence was all about a few years ago."

The change in tack comes less than a week after industry data showed weekday readership sinking at some of Quebecor's biggest daily newspapers.

Audience numbers have fallen in both Toronto and Montreal, where paid newspapers have contributed significantly in the past to Quebecor's profit.

Circulation in Toronto has also dropped faster than at its rivals, an industry study revealed last week.

"Certainly something needs to change that will make newspapers interesting for a younger generation," Mr. Péladeau said. "Doing commodity news like the way the newspapers were doing previously is certainly not a model of the future."

Mr. Péladeau said Quebecor will spend the next six months testing the digital revamp.

Analysts have suggested the company has found itself at a crossroads where the rapid growth of free daily commuter papers over the past year, including Quebecor's own 24 Hours, has hurt its paid publications.

Weekday readership at 24 Hours in Toronto has soared more than 13.5 per cent in the past year - more than any other daily publication in that market, according to Newspaper Audience Databank Inc.

But a considerable portion of that growth has come at the expense of The Toronto Sun, analysts suggest, because the publications are both chasing similar commuter audiences.

"They were the ones that were most at risk," said analyst Carl Bayard at Desjardins Securities in Montreal. "And I think what we're seeing now is bearing that out."

Weekday readership of the Toronto Sun fell more than 17 per cent in the past year, while weekday circulation dropped 4.7 per cent. The company saw a similar slide in Montreal, where readership at Quebecor's commuter paper 24 Heures also rose faster than the company's paid publications.

"They are trying to do things to reverse the momentum," Mr. Bayard said. "The readership and the circulation figures are very poor. And that is definitely a cause for worry."

Mr. Lee is a 17-year veteran of the company who recently served as corporate controller.

One industry analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the move may suggest an increased focus on the newspaper's costs, at a time when its profit has also fallen.

The Toronto Sun recently reversed a weekday price increase from 50 cents to 75 cents in an attempt to jump-start readership.

Mr. Péladeau said the company has not considered giving the paper away, but suggested some publications may eventually take that route.

"We're not there yet. And I'm saying yet because we don't know what the future will be all about," Mr. Péladeau said.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Media sources merging
Consumers want greater access to information, Quebecor boss says.

TORONTO -- Recognizing the changing media landscape, Quebecor is converging its resources to create a new and exciting path to a successful future, its chief executive said yesterday.

Consumers of media want control over when and how they access information -- "it's empowerment," Pierre Karl Peladeau said in a keynote address to the Canadian Media Directors' Council.

Toronto's competitive media market is indicative of what is happening around the world, he said.

Consumers want access to new information and content quickly, Peladeau said, and like Quebecor, other media companies must be prepared to tackle that challenge.

"Our plan is to build on the experiences we have had so far in combining different media into successful ventures," he said, "and capitalize on the journalist skills and other strengths of Quebecor's media operations."

Quality journalism is still crucial, Peladeau said.

"I believe that great journalism -- with virtues such as independence, skepticism, tenacity in digging out a story, balance and checking for accuracy -- is now and will continue to be a valuable quality in media," he said, adding Quebecor employs more than 1,200 journalists.

"Success will be measured by being more closely connected to our consumer than ever before -- and listening intelligently to what they want," he said.

"Print continues to be a strong vehicle for advertisers," Peladeau said.

"Newspapers have enormous power to influence purchasing decisions."

Quebecor is going to be well-positioned to address those changes by converging its newspaper, TV and Internet resources, he said.

Quebecor is integrating its Toronto newspaper and television divisions for a new current affairs program on Sun TV and streaming live on canoe.ca, Peladeau said.

Among other initiatives, Quebecor will use input from "citizen journalists" with cellphone cameras and other digital technologies.

The program, to be called Canoe Live, will be launched in May, and will include reports from journalists at the Toronto Sun newsroom with interactive feedback from the street and other sources.

"We want to create a dialogue with viewers, readers and website visitors to evolve and improve the product," Peladeau said.

網站收益救電視台

wow! CNN.com的收入，已經超過電視收入！CNN看到未來電子媒體的市場在互聯網上，美國看電視的人數正在日漸萎縮，各大電視巨人現在搶的，是互聯網用家市場。（電視猶如此，報紙可想而知）

根據New York Observer比較多家傳統電視大老的電視及網站收視率，發現電視上CNN輸給對手FOX，但網上，則CNN稱王。

Quietly, on the Internet, the terms of the cable-news ratings battle have been reversed: Web audiences flock to CNN.com and MSNBC.com, while FoxNews.com trails badly.

Even more quietly, that Web traffic is rescuing the finances of the trailing networks—supplying tens of millions of dollars a month.

For all its struggles in the TV ratings, CNN is still reporting revenue growth. That’s due to money from online advertising, according to CNN.com senior vice president and general manager David Payne.

At MSNBC, the MSNBC.com Web site sometimes earns more in monthly ad revenue than the cable channel does, said Kyoo Kim, the site’s vice president of sales.

On Feb. 3, BusinessWeek reported that MSNBC and CNN have been beating Fox on the Web in Nielsen online ratings.
On Feb. 6, CNN supplied The Observer with its own internal traffic-tracking numbers: According to the site’s data, CNN.com had 1,313,592,095 page views in January 2006.

Those numbers translate into money. <—最緊要啦！

CNN.com charges between $9 and $30 for 1,000 page views of a display ad. (For comparison’s sake, a 30-second spot during Anderson Cooper 360 costs around $10,000, according to one television buyer. That means an advertiser would pay around $16 to reach 1,000 viewers.)

Assuming the cheapest rate, $9, and assuming a single ad per page, the site would make $12 million per month, at the very minimum.

And that doesn’t include the priciest part of Web advertising: video ads. Last month, users watched 26,862,029 clips on CNN.com, according to the network. At prices between $35 and $45 per thousand views, the 10-second ad spots attached to each clip would have brought in an additional million dollars, at least, for the network.

All of this makes up a growing share of the networks’ total yearly revenue. In 2005, CNN grossed $794 million in revenue. Fox made $574 million; MSNBC made $258 million.

Bloggers: an army of irregulars

By Paul Reynolds World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website

For many in the "mainstream media", as bloggers call us, weblogs are at best a nuisance and at worst dangerous. They are seen as the rantings and ravings either of the unbalanced or the tedious. My experience over the past few months has led me to an opposite conclusion. I regard the blogosphere as a source of criticism that must be listened to and as a source of information that can be used.

The mainstream media (MSM in the jargon) has to sit up and take notice and develop some policies to meet this challenge.

More...Most big organisations, whether in news or in business, have no policy towards blogs.

They might, as the BBC has, develop a policy towards their own employees setting up such sites (no political opinions etc), but they have nobody monitoring the main blogs and have little idea how to respond to any criticism on them.

Alternative sources

First, here are a few examples of how the bloggers have, for me, become a useful source.

Only this week, they tracked down the origin of a fake cartoon which has been fuelling the furore over the characterisation of Muhammad in a Danish paper.

One of the pictures being circulated, a very fuzzy, grey photocopy, apparently showed the prophet Muhammad with the face of a pig.

It was quickly pointed out, by bloggers and others, that this was not one of the 12 Danish cartoons.

Nobody however knew the origin of this portrayal.

Then I received an e-mail from a reader passing on a link to a blog called neandernews.

And there it was.

The picture had nothing to do with the prophet. It was a photo of the winner of a "pig-squealing" competition held last summer in the French Pyrenees. It had first been published on the MSNBC website in August.

(Update: I also have to say that bloggers found out that the Danish cartoons were in fact published in an Egyptian newspaper last October. See link to WorldNetDaily on the right.)

Another example came after Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans.

There was a lot of discussion about who was to blame for the failure of the relief effort.

Then someone sent me a photo that had been circulating on blogs of yellow New Orleans school buses inundated in their parking lot.

They had clearly not been used for evacuation as they should have been according to the city and state plan.

This showed that the mayor, praised without much stint until then, had something to answer for.

It was part of the evidence upon which I concluded that blame should be shared at all levels of government.

I also benefited from the Daily Kos site when the issue of the use of white phosphorus by the US military in Iraq was under discussion.

The Pentagon initially denied its use as a weapon but the bloggers were able to link to an article from an embedded reporter who had watched marines using it as such and to a report in an army magazine about its use in Falluja.

The examples show the collective strength of blogs.

They have an army of what Sherlock Holmes called his "Baker Street Irregulars," that is an almost unlimited number of people around the world, many of them expert on the subject under discussion, scouring sources and sending information in to an easily accessible central site which can disseminate it instantly.

Power of blogs

The other role of the blogs is to criticise and attack.

And here they have shown their power in a way that ought to make big media organisations also take notice.

Bloggers have already helped to bring down or damage two very important media figures in the United States.

One was Dan Rather of CBS News, who came a cropper after a report on "60 Minutes Wednesday" in September 2004.

The report, compiled mainly by producers with Rather in the role of the front man, alleged that President Bush had been given special dispensations when he served as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard.

The allegations were based on supposedly original documents.

However, the first crack in the case came when a blogger (from freerepublic.com according to a subsequent inquiry set up by CBS) questioned the typeface used in those documents.

It had not, he said, been available on typewriters at the time.

(Update: this claim has caused its own mini blogswarm with two readers saying that there was such a typewriter and that freerepublic was not the first. I will have to leave that to history. But the case illustrates how a vulnerable story can be unpicked.)

The whole story unravelled.

The other major scalp was the Chief News Executive at CNN, Eason Jordan.

He had made some remarks at a discussion in Davos in January 2005 about journalists being possibly targeted by US troops.

There was a semi-official blogger at the session (i.e. one invited by the organisers) and he set a ball rolling which gathered pace as other bloggers then accused Jordan of blaming the military unfairly.

It ended in Jordan's resignation. He was the victim of a "blogswarm".

Opinion varies as to whether this was justified or not.

Blog agendas

Of course, one has to remember that most blogs have political agendas. Many of them are on the right of the spectrum. But it is not that hard to discount the opinionating and pick out the facts.

The photo of the unused school buses in New Orleans came by way of a site called the USS Neverdock, so-called because it is always in action, I suppose.

It is run from Scotland by Marc Landers, who once served in US Naval Intelligence. He still fires with all guns.

"My motivation is to expose the bias in the BBC's reporting," he told me. "We are at war unlike any we've been in before and facing an enemy who wants one thing - to wipe out western civilization. The BBC, through its biased reporting, has sided with the enemy."

USS Neverdock is one of three main sites in the UK that monitor and usually attack the BBC from the right.

Another is called, simply enough, Biased BBC. One of its leading lights, Andrew Bowman, says that one of his major complaints is "the politically-correct institutional group-think (and sometimes plain ignorance) that comes across in a lot of the BBC's news and current affairs output."

He also opposes the compulsory licence fee that funds the BBC.

A third site, which specialises in detailed textual analysis of BBC and other media reports, is called The American Expatriate, who is Scott Callahan, a banker living in London.

"Since moving to Britain I've noticed that coverage of America is especially poor, not just in an opinionated way (eg America is an ignorant place, full of bible bashers etc) but even at times in a strictly factual sense. As an American living in Britain with a rather different take on Americans, American life and American politics than that of the media here, I thought that I was in a position to provide some corrective commentary," he said.

There are some leftwing sites, the main one perhaps being Medialens whose motto is "correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media."

Run by journalists David Cromwell and David Edwards, Medialens has "media alerts" on the big issues of the day as it sees them. A recent one concerned the reporting of climate change.

It criticised, among others, The Independent [British newspaper]: "The Independent is feeling the heat from public criticism of its adverts pushing foreign travel, cars and endless consumerism."

In fairness, it also quoted an Independent editor who dismissed such critics as "a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms."

So, unlike some sites, it does seek debate.

I have taken to intervening in some of these sites if and when I am personally criticised and sometimes to defend the BBC in a general way.

Otherwise the comments go unanswered. I found that one rapidly develops a very thick skin and I can now understand how politicians can cope with criticism.

If the mainstream media does not respond, it will suffer. The same is even truer of businesses, whose products can be disastrously damaged by web-based attacks.

The principle is: the broader the attack, the less the effect.

It is when the criticism is detailed and pointed that it can hit home.

And with the growth of blogs, such detailed criticism is being made more and more often as the sniper fire from the bloggers targets individual stories and interpretations.

If the MSM does not respond, it will suffer. The same is even truer of businesses, whose products can be disastrously damaged by web-based attacks.

If the criticism is fair it must be answered, directly to those making it. Remote, computer-generated responses are counter-productive.

And mistakes must be quickly corrected. If the criticism is unfair, then the MSM has to know about it early on and develop defensive tactics.

Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and Global News Division (who runs a blog himself) accepts that the BBC needs to do more.

"The BBC should proactively engage with bloggers. This is a new issue for us. Some departments look at blogs, though haphazardly. But it pays dividends. The BBC is a huge impersonal organisation. It needs to come out from under its rock," he says.

As for using blogs as a source he says: "The key is careful attribution. It would be a big mistake for the MSM to try to match the blogs, but they can teach us lessons about openness and honesty. The MSM should concentrate on what it can do - explain, analyse and verify."

Study: netsurfers avoid flashy banner ads, prefer text ads

Online readers will buy online

The importance of RSS

Sponsored Clicks Increasingly Important

報紙要生存就要變

網站收益救電視台

Bloggers: an army of irregulars

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