Charles on… anything that comes along

Over at SiliconValleyWatcher, there’s an interesting example of what happens when you’re not able to serve as well on the web as on paper.

In Trapped inside a crumbling business model? Exposing print advertisers to online can be disastrous, Tom Foremski notes: I recently had a chat with a buddy of mine who publishes one of the best business magazines around, and it’s been doing reasonably well despite the continuing downturn in advertising.

He told me that his publication might close down its web site. Why, I asked? We lose money from advertisers pulling their ads from the magazine, he said. When their online ads get very few clicks, they then decide that the print advertising is also not getting through to the right people. So they pull all their print and online ads.

Apparently $1,000 of under-performing online advertising can thus kill $20,000 of print advertising. Though this seems to me to be the effect of marketing people who are obsessed with metrics for everything - because they can measure the “effectiveness” of online advertising so much more directly, they think that tells them about the print form too, even though I think of online and offline properties completely differently myself.

As Tom says: Big changes are ahead. That’s what I tell people who’ll listen too…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• New job, and stuff you realise (30 November 2005; score: 66.64%)
• On PR and journalism: which one's in "structural decline"? (3 May 2005; score: 41.71%)
• How to print an iTunes Gift Certificate on A5 paper (or card) (16 December 2004; score: 37%)