Should Google be the standard bearer on the web?
Posted by ptobin on March 25, 2008
The way forward?
Newspapers have been told that they should act more like Google in their advertising models for their online websites. In a report by Ernst and Young it was argued that newspapers are missing out on huge profit margins due to their reliance on traditional advertising models.
But is it fair to criticise newspapers for not being websites? Or should a newspaper website be entirely distinct and operate under different guidelines to its physical counterpart? When it comes to the figures that the report details it makes a strong argument for these old, lumbering dinosaurs of the print media world to abandon their old standards and embrace the new world of online journalism.
In an article on the issue on Journalism.co.uk it says:
“The report suggested that if top newspaper websites generated the same revenue per UK unique user in 2007 as Google, which uses a Cost per Click (CPC) ad model, they could have expected ad revenues of between £120 million and £250 million each from their domestic traffic.
Instead the report suggested that many nationals total online revenues barely reaching ‘one fifth of this amount’”.
This level of money is hard to ignore yet do we want our online versions of our newspapers to be Google or do we want them to retain some of their original features, including advertising? The issue of advertising isn’t entirely that relevant to the issue of online newspapers and their content in relation to journalists but if one thing goes ‘the way of google’ where do we draw the line?
