codyg1985’s Think Tank

Is Google AdSense slowly killing off the publishing industry? This article argues that magazines are getting smaller and less frequent due to the decreasing revenue from traditional advertising. The argument is that the pay-per-click ads from Google and Yahoo are creating a trend that leads to businesses turning to the internet to see where the revenue is coming from.

Ad agencies 12 to 13 years ago didn’t want to know whether or not their ads had actually been read, they told us. This was simply because if an advertiser discovered that few, if any, people were actually reading their modem ad on page 113, they might just pull the ad and save their money. The entire ability to sell an ad-edit ratio of 75 percent was based on this deliberate ignorance. Ad agencies and publications alike knew that many — even most — advertising dollars were simply wasted, but it wasn’t in their interest to admit that, so they didn’t.

Contrast this to pay-per-click, which is brutally honest, where every successful ad has efficacy and advertisers have a pretty darned good idea what they are getting for their money. This reality is precisely why magazines, newspapers, and television are losing revenue to pay-per-click. It is a trend that is likely to continue, and can only result in a degradation of production standards on the print side to match the reduced revenue potential of the online business, where BS gives way to measurable, though impoverished, results.

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