Amid more gloomy news about newspaper advertising, this nugget on the experience of the NYT paywall to date: 100,000 subscribers signed up. What I really want to know is how many signed up for the print as well. (Since it’s actually cheaper to get the Sunday with online access included than it is to buy [...]
Writing about Patch last week got me thinking again about one of the perennial challenges that online sales managers face: Finding the right balance between simplicity and complexity in designing your sales plan. When I was publisher of the Monitor, we worked with an outside sales consultant on a couple of occasions. Before bringing him [...]
Deconstructing Patch’s business model. The prospect? Iffy.
See main post, “Patching together a hyperlocal business model.” One of the best looks at Patch’s business model comes from Ken Doctor on Seeking Alpha. The Atlantic Wire raises some key questions about the Patch model and links out to some good resources. Business Insider’s early take, “AOL’s Patch Revenue Model Makes No Sense,” has [...]
Thanks to Alan Mutter for his update on recent newspaper advertising revenue trends reported this month by the Newspaper Association of America, where he observes that the ad revenue rebound experienced by other media has largely bypassed the newspaper industry. Smaller newspapers, especially those in relatively isolated markets, probably have done better than the industry [...]
Remember CueCat? Somewhere, I’m sure I still have one of those little proprietary bar code scanners that got mailed out to millions of people in the hope that we would all use them to follow bar-coded links in printed products to online resources and offers. I loved CueCat, partly because it was a bold, even [...]
So how many people swarmed their local newspaper websites last week looking for all the Black Friday deals? Right. Unless your local newspaper offers online versions of the circulars, nobody did. That’s a problem. Online news sites are becoming increasingly irrelevant to people looking for focused shopping information, the very thing, arguably, that gave newspapers [...]