More and more, newspaper editors are deciding to stand up to free content the way fed-up parents eventually confront their freeloading kids who are hooked on venture capital allowance money — “Hey, it’s time to move out and get a job.”

It’s about freakin’ time. Of course, if the parents had worked up the courage to have that little chat before they’d sucked the family savings dry and hocked the house and the car to keep the kid happy, it might have made a difference. But I guess it’s better late than never.

And now TV — which has made the pay-for-content model so commonplace in our lives that free TV is about to disappear forever and the only complaints are about how to hook up the converter boxes — is turning on the tough love. News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer (senior hologram?) was recently quoted as saying “ad-supported content doesn’t work,” which could mean that people may have to start paying for Hulu.

All well and good, but I have a question. What if ad-supported content really does work?

(*Rubs eyes with fists*) “WhaaaaAAAA????” (*Boggle*)

First, I need to set up a few points.

First point: Hulu is basically commercial television on your computer — i.e., programming regularly interrupted by ads. The reason Miller and others say it doesn’t work is because they can track viewers and ad clicks and do the math to come up with a ratio of program viewers who respond immediately to ads. Same with banner and pop-up ads on news sites: we had x unique views, but only 0.0005x clicked on the ads, ergo ads don’t work.

Second point: ad people generally consider commercials on TV and radio and ads in newspapers and magazines to be smart investments. Companies don’t think twice about laying down leventy-zillion dollars for a Super Bowl spot, and they don’t think even once about taking out an ad in the Sunday paper or a glossy mag at whatever ad rate the publication asks for. Hey, it works, right? We took out an ad in the paper, we got a bump in people who came to the store. Ergo, ads work.

But on radio and TV and in print, you can’t track the ratio down to the individual viewer or reader the way you can online. It’s a gross estimate using very broad numbers. For timely things like coupons or President’s Day sales, sure you’ll see a relationship. But otherwise, where’s the connection? As scientists like to say, “correlation does not imply causation.” Where’s the hard proof that everyone’s shopping there today because they saw a particular ad in a particular magazine on a particular day?

So is it that ads do work — as long as you don’t look at, you know, actual numbers and stuff?

Is advertising as a business model a gigantic fraud that we’re only now clueing into?

Hmm: truth be told, I kinda like that thought. But there’s also another way to look at it: what if online advertising really does work, but the accountants are just counting the wrong beans?

Here’s why I think it’s the latter, not the former. With the obvious exception of things like coupons and discounts, ads are about the intangibles, the associations, the cumulative effect of the ad in the memory of the reader. You may not click on an ad right that moment, but after seeing the ad 27 times next to articles that interest you, or seeing the company sponsoring programs you like, the name works its way into your brain and you might click on the ad three months later — when you’re ready to see what these people are all about and maybe do some shopping there. Any ad man worth his salt will tell you that the likelihood of that person becoming a regular customer, as opposed to the impulse clicker, is much greater — and that’s the person they’re aiming for.

If you’re seeing your online ad generating only a few pennies a day from Google AdSense, it’s easy to conclude that online advertising doesn’t work. But it might be the wrong conclusion to draw. Me, I’m still leaning toward the nonprofit model for online news for the time being, but if businesses were to screw their heads back on and remember that ads take time to work, then maybe they’d be willing to pay news sites reasonable ad rates again and stop taking business advice from kids with allowances.

UPDATE: I want to work this through a little more. The biggest reason ads don’t seem to be working all that well on unwalled gardens is because good advertising is all about targeting the audience. In other words, you don’t see ads for ball bearings in Esquire or feminine hygiene products in Road & Track. But free general-interest sites like newspapers are open to everyone and their dog who feels like wandering on through. You might get one out of 50,000 visitors who just happens to be thinking about ball bearings or tampons at the moment they happen to be trolling through the site. Unless you’re a spammer, you can’t afford to pay for ad space on a site that offers that kind of weak-kneed pseudo-promise. What are you, a charity?

So putting general-interest content (like news) behind a paywall tells an adman two things about the people who pony up the subscription fee: one, they have money; two, they have interest. That means the odds of an getting a click or a site visit down the road improve markedly. Why sure, I’ll take out an ad for my ball bearings on Ball Bearing Fetish Dot Biz.

“But you’ll lose all those visitors if you put up a paywall!” Look, schweetheart, the boss can’t take link love to the bank or pay hungry reporters with unique visits. It’s Economics 101 here: who’s worth more to the bottom line — the 10 people who pay $10 a month, or the 1,250,533 people who don’t pay a @#$% penny?

“But if news is so important, shouldn’t it be free?” Listen, kiddo, unless you’re a strap-hanger who habitually reads over someone’s shoulder, you’ve always been shelling out the buck-fifty for the rag from the kid on the corner yelling “extree, extree,” or paying the neighbor’s kid to toss it on your lawn every morning. News has always been for thems what pay. It’s a business. Sure, TV news screwed that pooch for a half-century, but since even TV is behind a paywall now, I guess it means that was the anomaly, not the other way around.

(P.S. — great, now I’m going to get a spike from all the people Googling “ball bearing fetish.” Go home, people. Nothing to see here.)

(P.P.S. — is there such a thing as a ball bearing fetish?)

(P.P.P.S — know what, second thought, I don’t wanna know.)

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

Comments are disabled on this post