People have varying views of the Yahoo!-newspaper consortium. Some think it was agreed to by newspaper CEOs without a growth story to tell, who also wouldn’t be around to see if the deals eventually paid off. Others are more generous but still skeptical and see Yahoo!’s recent challenges and a slow-moving, fragmented newspaper industry as unlikely to make good on the promise of the opportunity.
I tend to fall into the second camp much more than the first but hold out a belief that the promise of the deal can still be realized to a great degree. There are lots of mutual benefits up and down the line. But execution is the key.
Former newspaper editor and Yahoo! skeptic Alan Mutter writes about how the revenue gains of the first year of the Yahoo!-newspaper HotJobs partnership may be faltering:
The Yahoo newspaper consortium, which launched in November, 2006, was forged by Belo, Cox, Scripps, Hearst, Journal Register, Lee Enterprises and MediaNews Group. Although publishers hailed the deal at the time as “transformational,” executives now are worried about maintaining the encouraging early momentum.
“We aren’t anywhere near matching the initial gains,” says an online executive at one of the earliest publishers to partner with HotJobs. “We are struggling and I don’t see how we are going to make it.”
If this experience proves to be commonplace, it would throw cold water on the idea that hefty, double-digit advances in online sales in the next few years could help Yahoo’s newspaper partners offset an appreciable portion of their declining print revenues.
At SMX Local & Mobile Teresa Lawlor, VP of Marketing for Media News Group Interactive (one of Yahoo!’s partners) discussed how some of the company’s sites were suffering from usability issues and ROI challenges. After the company redesigned its sites (like the Denver Post), it showed marked improvements in user engagement, page views and ad clicks.
Accordingly the Yahoo!-newspaper consortium story is not just about ad sales and ad serving, it’s about the overall user experience. This is where the newspapers can help themselves the most: better user experiences, selective addition of community and better site search will all drive additional usage — a prerequisite to making the Yahoo! deal pay off eventually.
October 8, 2007 at 6:19 pm |
I believe that if a newspaper coming into this thinks that its going to be the answer to lack of local strategy and innovation then they are doomed to fail.
However if newspapers leverage this partnership and take advantage of the services that they aren’t able to compete with on their local level then they are going to see much greater results not only initially but long term.
It’s still early to tell but these numbers are telling.