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Archive for the ‘Mainstream media’ Category

Whoosh! Blogs go mainstream. Facebook becomes ghost town?

Friday, May 1st, 2009 by John Mallen

ghost-town

Behold the rate of change in the media.  This afternoon’s breaking news from PRSA: blogs are now mainstream media (MSM). Meanwhile, Business Week this week posts a scenario projecting a possibility that Facebook.com’s  open-source move could end up siphoning its ad revenues turning the site into a ghost town.

Blogs

Blogs now reach tens of millions in this country and both readers and creators are growing, says e-marketer.comannouncing its $695 report. “Currently, 96.6 million US Internet users read a blog at least once per month, representing 48.5% of the Internet population. By 2013, 128.2 million people, or 58% of all US users, will take part.”  And bloggers, those posting at least monthly, will increase from 27.9 million to 37.6 million in the next five years, adds e-marketer.com.

Facebook

BW’s  The Tech Beat commentary suggests that in opening parts of its code to developers, the popular social marketing site could see revenues decline when the thousands of new apps allow users to tap into Facebook without going to its homepage where its ads now live.

Not so dark. “it appears that the company is planning to replace the revenues it will lose from banner ads with a new type of revenue: in-stream ads, which would appear alongside status updates and other ‘news stories’, even on third-party apps,” says BW writer Douglas MacMillan .

Banner ads on Facebook’s home page are really old fashioned “interruption marketing” whereas in-stream text ads are part of the search experience.

Both the mainlining of blogs and the possible in-stream ads in Facebook are much more than change. They’re enormous opportunity for marketers.

Photo: John Holm (foto 3116 Flickr.com)

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Posted in Advertising, Mainstream media, Social Media, Uncategorized, blogging | 1 Comment »

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Friday, April 18th, 2008 by admin

March 17 — It is changing. This morning one of our regional weekly business journals reported that the Journal Register Company (NYSE: JRC), publisher of our only daily paper as well as 26 other dailies and 327 other non dailies is facing tough times. Earlier this month they hired Lazard Freres to help devise a financial strategy and received a delisting notice from the New York Stock Exchange. Then I see a feature in The Drudge Report about an earnings loss by The New York Times for the quarter –”one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen,” the paper said. Browsing through blogs in the evening, I realized that I was as much in blogs as in mainstream media (MSM). One of them, On Line Spin’s David Morgan predicts a tough four years ahead for the newspaper business.

He wanders into a future where the hometown paper is gone, where weeklies emerge to fill the gap for local business advertising and to some degree the thirst for news. he anticipates a death spiral of offline media which must support huge overhead. And he sees their demise as an opportunity for backfilling.

Someone will have to create a vehicle for the free-standing inserts and what will local businesses do but look for media replacements to carry the in-your-face promotions.

My point is not to repeat what is being covered so well. My point is that those who need to market should be moving into the new media. The groundswell is underway as attested to by the dismal financial news.

Posted in Advertising, Mainstream media, Marketing Communications, New Communications | 1 Comment »