Educating advertisers

It is one of the paradoxes of digital journalism that increasing the size of your audience doesn’t always result in higher income. Some of that disparity can be attributed to the fact that while advertisers want to shift their advertising budgets from offline media to online media, they also need to learn about the opportunities, Chia said. Educating advertisers about the possibilities of digital advertising is an important first step in building an effective and revenue-earning premium advertising strategy.

Educating advertisers starts with producing rate cards and media kits to fully introduce their site to advertisers. One of the key messages is that digital advertising is not a blind mass campaign, she says. Online advertising is about about measurability and being able to target specific audiences. She said:

You need to have a demographic breakdown (of the visitors to your site). That is the main product you can use to attract advertisers and convince advertisers to come and buy advertisement on your website.

To deliver better targeted and better performing digital advertising campaigns, publishers need to invest in technology that allows them to build a demographic profile of their audience. Malaysiakini has detailed information about the age, income and education of their audiences. They have information about the interests of their audience, such as whether they are into automobiles or online banking. All of this data, which is included in their media kits, provide essential demographic information to advertisers so they know who they can reach by partnering with the site.

In addition to printed media kits, Malaysiakini also has an advertising blog which provides further information about advertising packages and advertiser-focused events. These events and conferences are another way to educate advertisers and communicate to them the opportunities they have with digital advertising.

“We actually have a new media school. We discuss different topics, and we invite advertisers, agencies and advertising department staff,” she said. They sometimes charge for these conferences, particularly when they have high profile speakers who bring expertise in digital advertising campaign measurement, models and services. Some conferences are on very specific topics such as how to use measurement tools like Google Analytics.

Premium advertising strategies

One of the factors contributing to the challenge that news organisations have faced in earning advertising revenue from their digital audiences has been downward pressure on digital advertising rates. Many early stage news websites are reliant on advertising networks for their ad strategies, but falling rates over the past several years have made it difficult for news sites to earn enough revenue from digital advertising alone to cover their costs. Malaysiakini earns less than 10 percent of its advertising revenue from ad networks. Instead of relying on ad networks, they have developed premium advertising strategies based not just on the richness of the demographic data but also on providing new ad formats that appeal to advertisers.

Malaysiakini charges premium rates for premium placement on their site. “It is usually the top spot, and it has very high engagement and is very creative,” Chia says. Malaysiakini does not put ad network slots on the top of their pages because it would undermine their efforts to charge higher rates for those slots.

Premium buy advertising is sold by their own in-house sales team, and the premium pricing is for advanced campaigns. Companies allocate a lot of money to premium campaigns, she said. This is where the demographic data of their audience is key in convincing advertisers to pay more, not just for premium placement but also to reach specific audiences.

Chia says that you also need to have flexible site designs to make sure that audiences don’t suffer from “ad blindness”. Ad blindness occurs when publishers have fixed spots and formats for their advertising. After a while, audiences simply learn to ignore these areas of the site.

Be nimble

News publishers need more than just flexible designs. They also need to be nimble to keep pace with the rapid changes in digital advertising. Real-time bidding is coming to markets like Malaysia. As we’ve written about before, real-time bidding, also known as programmatic or algorithmic buying, uses site visitor data to buy, sell and display highly targeted advertising. Publishers are concerned that real-time bidding, or RTB, will put further downward pressure on advertising rates.

“RTB is one type of ad network,” Chia said, adding, “your ad will only appear to your target audience. … (RTB) is not a blind network but a highly targeted network.”

She gave the example of two computer companies, Acer and Toshiba, trying to sell their laptops. They will enter their bid price, and Malaysiakini will enter their floor price, the minimum price they will sell their advertising for. If the companies bid over the floor price, and if the target demographic visits the site, their ad will appear.

There are concerns that RTB will affect their premium ad strategy, but in this industry, when everyone launches a new technology, “we cannot escape from the new landscape,” she said. “We need to be part of it.”

With high growth and intense competition, news organisations need to stay on top of the latest developments to be competitive in the data-driven marketing era. Digital media poses business challenges, but it also requires news groups to understand key pieces of technology and terminology.

While the basic proposition of matching advertisers with audiences remains unchanged, in the digital world serving up highly targeted advertising has developed into the incredibly fast interchange of data and ad inventory between interconnected elements of advertising services platforms.  In plain English, as Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider says, incredibly powerful computers are running at companies such as Google’s DoubleClick and its rival Atlas that allow the buying and selling of highly targeted ads in milliseconds.

To get a strategic view of these ad technologies, we take a look at the challenges and opportunities for news organisations brought about by real-time bidding (or programmatic buying, as it is also known) in a discussion with digital advertising expert, Rodney Mayers, Chief Revenue Officer of data publishing company Proximic.

Initially one of the biggest challenges is understanding the terminology and the bewildering array of acronyms. This guide will help you make sense of it all.

Ad Exchanges – Just like a stock exchange, ad exchanges serve as an open online advertising market for buyers (publishers) and sellers (advertisers) to connect. Search advertising has captured a lot of the growth in digital advertising in the past decade fueling the development of search engines. While ruling the search engine market in many countries, Google acquired ad exchange DoubleClick, which rapidly became the biggest player amongst real-time ad networks. Google’s ad exchange helps advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network and on YouTube. By leveraging this platform, advertisers and publishers find it easier to manage and monitor ad campaigns in a multitude of formats and across thousands of websites.

Recently, major media companies such as Hearst and Condé Nast  and broadcaster NBC, all in the US, have launched their own private ad exchanges, enticing buyers with ever-more detailed data that advertisers can use to more accurately target the publishers’ audiences.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs) – Companies use DMPs to collect and analyse huge amounts of data from many different sources. DMPs are now so powerful that companies can track users and customers who visit from banners, Facebook pages, Tweets, mobile, video and even offline applications. They collect and analyse data from cookies, small files that keep website settings and also record user behaviour. For example, DMPs can allow e-commerce sites, publishers and advertisers to find out how many users who bought a big screen TV online also searched for high-end digital cameras in the past week.

DMPs consolidate user data into a centralised platform. They can be used not only for buying ad impressions, but also to help publishers achieve the long-term goal of attracting predefined targetable audiences. DMPs can help publishers gain more precise information about their audiences, which is useful not only in helping to sell more targeted, more effective advertising, but also in providing greater insight into the needs and interests of their readers or viewers.

DMPs can provide extremely useful insights, however publishers shouldn’t be misled into thinking that they are the sole source of useful audience data. “While DMPs do an admirable job creating segments based on data collected across multiple sites, publishers have their own treasure trove of data that often is under-leveraged for ad sales purposes,” says John Strabley, a media analyst writing for Business 2 Community.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) – Based on campaign goals and audience profiles, real-time bidding allows ad buyers to bid for each and every impression. This dynamic transformation is called a “bidder” which can be built into any of the above platforms. For publishers, they can keep track of all their bids and build a picture of demand down to the advertiser level. However, one thing publishers should keep in mind is that data leakage is a potential risk in RTB platforms. Other parties using DSPs (Demand Side Platforms – see below) can read the stream of pages that come through in bid requests and use that to gain intelligence on their competitors.

Real-time bidding platforms still tend to be small relative to the total online advertising market, representing just $1.1 bn out of the total online advertising market, according to technology analysis firm IDC.

Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) – SSPs provide publishers with an effective way to measure the monetization of mobile and website attention. Attention data includes a range of statistics such as how much time visitors spend on a site, the number of pages or pieces of content a visitor views per session and the percentage of return visitors to your site. SSPs allow publishers to jump into the ad exchange to make their inventory available and optimize selling of their online media space. More practically, they help publishers sell their inventory at a higher price because publishers can demonstrate more clearly how their content performs to advertisers.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) – DSPs work together with ad exchanges and SSPs. These three elements support real-time bidding because they give buyers and sellers the ability to “value inventory on an impression-by-impression in real-time,” says Ben Kneen on his site, Adopsinsider.com. According to Kneen, the interplay of these systems enables targeted ads to be bid on and served to a browser in about 50 milliseconds.

DSPs submit a bid to the SSP along with an ad based on their valuation of a specific impression, determined from data about the user. The SSP picks the winning bid and serves up the ad. It is this complicated interplay of user data and bidding servers, the DSPs, SSPs and ad exchanges, that enables the near-instantaneous delivery of targeted advertising to users.

For news organisations, the key thing to remember is that the increasingly sophisticated use of user data is allowing the ever-increasing targeting of advertising. We’ll be looking at how to develop your advertising strategy in upcoming editions of the Digital Briefing.

Resources online:

• How Real Time Bidding, DSPs, SSPs, and Ad Exchanges Work by Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider
• Diagramming the SSP, DSP and RTB redirect path by Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider
• What is the difference between DSPs and SSPs? on Quora
• Demand Side Platform and why you should care by Marc Pocelli

To take advantage of this growth in internet advertising, we explore how to organise and motivate your sales team. Advertising sales is fundamentally about solving problems for your advertisers by providing them with products and an audience, at prices they are willing to pay.

In the next presentation we look at key sales concepts including:
• Calculating your potential advertising market.
• Identifying sales channels.
• Strategies for making money in print (or broadcast) and online.
• Motivating your sales force.
• Organising digital sales.

After looking at how to organise and motivate your sales teams, we look at two types of digital advertising: ad networks and classifieds. As we wrote about recently in the August Digital Briefing, ad networks can be an important source of early income as you grow traffic to your site.

Although a couple of large ad networks get the lion’s share of the attention, there are more than 300 ad networks out there, with some focused on specific platforms or technology such as mobile or video ad networks, some focused on specific geographical areas, others focused on specific themes or types of content such as the Active Youth Network and even others focused on audience behaviour online.

Ad networks help address a number of issues facing advertisers such as the large choice of publisher sites leading to an over-supply of ad space, and the difficulty of identifying high-quality content.

In the next presentation, we look at different ad network pricing models and how to choose the right ad network.

We look at classified advertising, beginning with a cautionary tale about the collapse of online classifieds as a revenue source for newspapers in the US. New online classified players such as Craigslist, Monster.com and HotJobs.com all helped to shift classified advertising from newspapers to new digital players. We look at how to develop your digital classifieds offering to prepare to defend yourself against new digital competitors.

Online classifieds include not only the “Big Three” of classified advertising – recruitment (jobs), real estates/rentals and auto – but also directories, free classifieds and calendars. Specialist classified providers that focus on dating, education or other types of products and services have also sprung up. Online classified advertising is in the early stages of development, but it still represents a potentially large market and has already attracted a number of large, international players.

We then cover several different strategies for developing your online classifieds business, including:
• Go it alone: building, selling and marketing your own classified advertising site.
• Build a network with other local media.
• Partner with a national site, which provides the technology and perhaps marketing and sales service, leaving you to focus on local marketing and sales.
• Enter into a traffic partnership, which means that you sell a traffic sponsorship deal to a national partner.

We look at examples of these strategies and how to organise your business to achieve success using one of these strategies.

Of course, digital advertising is a fast moving sector, so we also look at new developments and the future of the online classifieds.

In the final presentation, we look at how news organisations are using social media to generate revenue, either indirectly by using it to grow audiences and gain more data about their audiences, or directly by selling social media advertising.

They have aggressively developed their premium advertising sales, which deliver 10 times the revenue of advertising from ad networks.

The site boasts 2 m unique readers in four different languages, English, Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil, and Malaysiakini tells prospective advertisers that the site has more than 40 m page views each month.

But traffic alone isn’t the key to success. The site has hired measurement companies so that they know the demographics of their users, which is key for their three-to-four person sales team to attract premium advertisers. You don’t need to have as large of audience as Malaysiakini to be successful, but you do need to follow their lead in knowing the demographic details of your audience. As Chia Ting Ting, Malaysiakini’s senior advertising manager, says, that is what you sell to advertisers.

Chia also says that creative advertising development is essential in helping to counteract “banner blindness”, the tendency of online audiences to filter out commonly used advertising areas. Sites must also be prepared to develop “super-premium” advertising if they want to attract top-rate advertisers that can deliver significantly higher than the normal revenue of fixed ad spots.

The advertising mix on Malaysiakini

Malaysiakini has two types of advertising: premium buy and ad networks.

For premium buy advertising, the website charges a daily fixed rate, which guarantees the site a set amount of revenue regardless of performance. They charge roughly $6,500 for the leaderboard position on their homepage for one week.

In contrast, ad network rates are performance based, depending on CPC or CPM, cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impressions.

Last month we examined how advertising networks can provide a revenue base for a new site, but as we noted, as your site grows, ad networks will play a smaller role in your revenue mix. Ad networks now only represent less than 10 percent of Malaysiakini’s revenue, and Chia makes sure that the site does not give premium placement to ad network advertising because premium ads deliver 10 times the revenue of ad network sales.

The focus on premium advertising is integral to developing the perception that Malaysiakini is a high quality site. Advertisers also know that if they see a lot of ad network inventory that the site isn’t able to sell that advertising space, and “that will affect the brand in the market,” she said. It is important to view advertising as part of the content on your site because, as Chia says, quality advertising will reinforce the perception that you provide quality content.

This isn’t to say that Malaysiakini spurns all ad networks, but Chia makes sure that they use ad networks whose content isn’t easily identifiable. They also use ad networks that can deliver advertising from high quality advertisers, such as the government-linked companies in Malaysia like Petronas that might not otherwise advertise on an independent news site like Malaysiakini.

Growing premium advertising

To get into a position to pursue premium advertising, traffic is a major factor. Once your site reaches a certain level, you will be able to engage ad agencies to help you sell your inventory. But in addition to raw numbers, you’ll want to use web analytics and audience measurement companies to understand the demographics of your audience. “A demographic is the main product for you to sell in the advertising industry,” she said.

Your content will determine the type of readers your site attracts, and specific types of content can help attract unique audiences that advertisers want to reach. “How unique is your readership? The readers are a community you build up for your site,” she said. She gave the example of a site for mothers. Such a specialist site, or it could be a special section on your site, may attract relatively low traffic, but it attracts a unique audience that certain advertisers will want to reach.

Using the example of the motherhood site, she said that it is not enough just to target mothers with your content, but you will also need to know their age and their household income. To get this level of detailed information, you will have to hire a measurement company, such as comScore or Effective Measure, she said.

Using Malaysiakini as an example, their content is focused on politics and issues related to Malaysia. “We know that politics interest business people and highly intelligent people,” Chia said. In promoting itself to advertisers, Malaysiakini emphasises that 65 percent of its readers are managers or professionals who have relatively high incomes, an attractive demographic for advertisers.

Beating banner blindness

Chia also stresses the importance of creativity in advertising, especially in terms of providing dynamic advertising design and also in providing unique advertising experiences that will attract super-premium advertisers.

One challenge for digital advertising is that readers soon ignore ads, leading to what some call banner blindness. Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has used eye-tracking software to show how many web users completely ignore areas where advertising is commonly displayed.

In 2009, AdAge celebrated the 15-year anniversary of the first banner ad on the worldwide web. In May 1994, the age of internet advertising was born with the first banners on Hotwired.com, part of Wired magazine’s family of websites. In 1994, there were only 2 m internet users in the US, and the first advertisers included MCI, Volvo and Club Med. The reaction, especially by today’s standards was stunning, with a 78 percent click-through rate (CTR). Now the average CTR is about 0.1 percent, and on Facebook, it’s even less, dropping to half the web average, according to webtrends.

To drive continued revenue growth and beat banner blindness, Malaysiakini have created very premium ad spots they call online billboards that are not fixed and do not run everyday. To help prevent advertising blind spots, Chia also advises the tech team to change the ad location every six months.

To compete in the digital advertising market, you can’t stand still, and you need to be thinking creatively about what new products you can bring to market. “You always need to be creating new products for the advertising industry. At Malaysiakini, we think what kind of ad format or ad slot can we create that are very premium,” she said. They hope to be able to charge a daily rate of half what they now charge for their leaderboard spot for seven days.

Bringing new advertising products to market produces more inventory and can help create on-demand, premium products to attract the highest paying advertisers. Advertisers are now pushing sites to go beyond fixed positions and asking for custom advertising products. You’ll need to be in a position to take advantage of that opportunity if it arises. Chia believes that these custom, super-premium ad products will allow them to charge 100 or even 200 times the fee of traditional fixed position advertising.

Malaysiakini’s success shows that it is possible to rapidly grow digital advertising revenue to support your editorial ambitions. To effectively compete against not just other news organisations but other digital advertising options, you’ll want to follow Malaysiakini’s lead in developing your premium advertising offering. Build your audience, and use web analytics and audience measurement companies to understand the demographics of your audience. Then work on new advertising products to satisfy your premium advertising customers and prevent banner blindess.

Creating your account

1. If you already have a business Google account, you can use your existing username and password to sign up for AdSense. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll need to sign up for one first.

2. Choose the primary website for your AdSense account.  This will generate a code that you can use not only for the primary site you used for registration but your other sites as well.

At this point, you’ll also be asked the primary language for your site. AdSense has complete support for some 30, mostly European and major Asian, languages. For a handful of other languages such as Slovenian and Estonian, AdSense will serve ads in those languages but the user interface is available only in one of the main languages. Although you have to choose a primary language for your site, the service will serve ads in other languages on pages in those languages on your site.

3. You’ll next be asked to read and agree to some simplified terms and conditions to use the service. You must agree:

• Not to click on ads on your site nor encourage others to do so.
• Not to place ads on sites which include adult content.
• Not to place ads on sites that distribute content for copyright that you do not own.
• That you do not already have a Google AdSense account.

4. Enter your business details.  Note that the screenshot before is assuming personal details, so you will additionally need to enter the name and address of your business, making sure that the contact name and address are the same that you use on the bank account for your business. You will also be asked how you found out about AdSense and also if you want to receive email updates from AdSense, some of which promote new services and others that provide you with information on how to get the most out of your digital advertising.

After you click the button marked “Submit my application”, you’ll see a thank you message that also explains that you will receive an update on the status of your application in about a week. While you’re waiting for approval of your site, as Google suggests, it is useful to familiarise yourself with the service using their Newbie Central site for new users of AdSense.

5. A couple of days after you submit your application you should receive a follow-up email from Google letting you know that they have completed their partial review of your website.  In Google’s words, “after a new application is submitted, we’ll begin with preliminary checks on the site and the applicant’s submitted details”.

Adding AdSense to your website

Once you pass the partial review, you will need to set up your ad account and put an “ad unit” on your website for Google to complete the full approval process. An ad unit is an ad of a specific size, design and ad type. The e-mail you received about your successful partial review will contain instructions to log on to your AdSense Interface and get started.

1. Terms and Conditions. After you log in the first time, you’ll need to read and agree to the full terms and conditions for the service.

2. After agreeing to the terms and conditions, you’ll be taken to the AdSense interface, which at the moment is blank because you have not added any ads.  Click on Ad Units and the button “+New Ad unit”

3.  Now you will create the first ad unit for your website.  Each ad unit will have its own tracking code.  You can use this code on multiple places on your website to show multiple ads of the same format, but keep in mind that for reporting purposes they will all be grouped together making reporting much more difficult.

Type a name for this ad unit.  Under Ad size you will see a long list of options, starting with the sizes that Google determined to be optimal for click-throughs. Ad type has several options  – Text & image/rich media ads, Text ads only, Image/rich media ads only. For ad type, it is best that you select the option “text & image/rich media ads”, if possible.  This will allow the most ads to bid for your space, thus optimizing your revenue.  For now, you can ignore the option to create Custom channels as that is for advanced users.  For AdStyle, it will be important to pick Custom, which will allow you to choose colours that are appropriate for your site.

4. Once you’ve created your ad unit, click the button to get the ad code.  A window will pop up with code for you to copy into your website.

5. Now you need to put the ad unit code on your website so that Google can complete the approval process.  Here is an example of how it could be very simply added to the sidebar of a WordPress website. Many content-management systems, including WordPress, have plug-ins that allow you to easily incorporate AdSense ads or other ad networks into your site. Whether your CMS supports such plug-ins or not, it is important to consider the type of ads and ad units you will use when designing your site.

For the time being, your website will have a blank AdSense unit that blends in seamlessly with your site.  Within about 4 days after you add the ad unit, Google should finalise approval for your site – and the blank units will begin to display ads.  In the meantime, there will be dead space on your site but it should match in color and style to your website so there will be minimal disruption.

If you find an issue with adding the code, check Google’s a guide to troubleshooting common AdSense problems.

Setting up payment and finances

You won’t be able to set up payment options until after your AdSense account has been given final approval. Once that happens, you can add or edit your payment contact information by selecting Account settings under the Home tab on the AdSense management site. Here, you can also enter appropriate tax information, if required.  Usually tax information fields will not be available until you’ve met a minimum threshold of payments.

After you reach the equivalent of US$10 in ad sales, you can choose how you want to be paid.  After you make that selection, you will be mailed through the post a PIN which you will use to verify your physical address.

Lastly, once you reach US$100 in ad sales, and each time you reach US$100 thereafter, your payments will be processed.  Note that receiving your payments could take up to 1-2 months.

When Microsoft bought aQuantive, online display advertising was booming and the software maker was hoping to challenge the display king at the time, Yahoo, and the rapidly rising online advertising giant Google. It’s important to remember that while Google made its name as the search engine of choice for billions of internet users, the business that drives its billions of dollars in profit is advertising – search, display and mobile. How times have changed!

In a few short years, Facebook has knocked Yahoo from its display ad throne, and the bigger challenge for the entire sector is that the returns for display advertising have been plummeting.

In looking at Microsoft’s multibillion dollar write down, Reuters looked at why the display advertising market has gone soft:

The main culprit is an explosion of advertising space offered by Facebook Inc and other websites that is outpacing steady demand. But automated online exchanges, smarter search advertising and a growing skepticism about the effectiveness of jamming ads in people’s faces have also conspired to slash prices and suck profits out of the business.

“The inventory or amount of ad spots grew so fast, it outgrew demand,” said Dave Morgan, an industry veteran and entrepreneur. “That brought pricing down massively. So a lot of display advertising really became a ghetto for bad direct-response advertising.”

It’s not just the simple law of supply (or in this case, over-supply) and demand. Studies find that sophisticated users are able to simply blank out advertising, no matter how intrusive; Reuters quoted one business saying that it had shifted from using display ads to paid search advertising, affiliate marketing and comparison shopping sites.

For news organisations, Microsoft’s failure and the decline of the display advertising market hold some important lessons:

• Target your ads to improve performance. Reuters said that while Microsoft’s acquisition failed, Google’s purchase of display ad company DoubleClick worked in part because the search giant used its technology to deliver more relevant ads through better targeting.
• Keep pace with innovative ad offerings. You don’t want to be in the position of the US newspaper industry which now captures less than a percentage of digital advertising than they did a decade ago. Many advertising innovations have come from outside of the news and media industry. It’s important to make sure make sure that your advertisers aren’t lured away by these new digital competitors.
• Consider affiliate sales and marketing. Digital can connect an interested buyer with a seller in ways that weren’t possible in other media. Buyers can easily click from ad to purchase, and if you drove them to buy, then you’ll want to capture your commission.

Digital media doesn’t simply change your editorial opportunities, it also changes your advertising opportunities – and challenges. To make the transition to a sustainable digital news organisation, you’ll want to innovate in your advertising and sales just as your newsroom makes the effort to innovate editorially.

We’ll start by looking at what Gupta says hasn’t changed, which he outlined in a recent article on GigaOm.

• The selling point of online advertising has been that it can be more measurable and more targeted. However, even now the debate rages on the effectiveness of banner advertising, Gupta said, adding: “Banner ads are reviled in many quarters, but they’ve shown remarkable resilience.”
• The industry still remains concentrated, he says, with the top 50 online ad sellers capturing more than 90% of the market. We think it could be argued, however, that an industry with 50 competitors isn’t very concentrated. Compare this to search advertising, where Google, Yandex and Baidu enjoy far greater dominance.
• The same two companies, Nielsen and ComScore, remain the top measurement companies.
• Mobile is still the next big thing in digital advertising – it was in 2004, and it still is in 2012. As we said recently, the audience is moving to mobile, but advertising still lags. It might catch up, but mobile advertising revenue won’t increase simply by copying techniques from the desktop web.

Gupta gives a good overview of online advertising and it’s interesting to see how much has remained relatively constant over much of the past decade.

One thing that has changed is that ads can more effectively target people in your audience. The better targeted the ads are, the better they perform, which means that you’ll earn more revenue to support your journalism. We’ll post another blog soon to look at some of the things that Gupta says have changed, such as new advertising technologies.

With the time visitors spend on each page decreasing in many countries – down to 40 seconds per page according to comScore – advertisers want to be sure their ads are getting maximum attention. For news publishers, the temptation is to place more and more ads on the page because the yields are so low, yet for advertisers the returns fall dramatically.

You can test your own site with a free clutter test – just add a webpage address, click the test button and the algorithms calculate how cluttered your page is. With results ranging from 16% (Google) to 86% (Yahoo), the test creators say you should aim for a score of below 50. Anything more than that and readers are likely to miss important links and may spend less time on the page.

Clearer, easier to read websites are definitely in demand by audiences. Services like Flipboard, the iPhone app that takes pages with any amount of clutter and delivers it in a clean magazine lay-out, have built their business on the appeal of uncluttered design.

The research also showed that website users spend twice as long on pages featuring ads from a single advertiser and that cleaner design delivers higher ad recall.

Key findings:

• Clean pages enhance ad and site perception: Uncluttered sites are seen as more useful and more trusted; ads on these sites are more engaging.
• Ads are always seen in a clean setting: Eye-tracking technology showed that 100% of respondents viewed ads on clean pages, compared to only 76% on cluttered, multi-advertiser pages.
• Dwell time increases on clean sites: Those who saw ads in a clean environment spent 6.4 seconds viewing it, compared to 3.2 seconds on cluttered pages.
• Less clutter means higher recall: The cleaner the design, the higher the ad recall.

Think about this research when you’re designing your website. And when you speak with advertisers you can use this research and a clean design as a selling point and as a way to differentiate yourself in the market.

Reuters reported that overall in the US, digital advertising revenue for newspapers grew only 1% in the first quarter of 2012, making it their fifth consecutive quarter of declining digital advertising revenue, according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the New York Times, digital advertising dropped by 2.3%, but it was much worse at the Washington Post, which saw digital advertising plummet by 7% at its flagship newspaper site and also Slate.com.

A flood of excess advertising space, the rise of electronic advertising exchanges that sell ads at cut-rate prices, and the weak U.S. economy are all contributing to the slowdown, publishing executives and observers say.

However, this is not just about US newspapers getting lower rates due to a glut of advertising inventory or the downward pressure on rates due to advertising exchanges. US newspapers actually capture a smaller slice of the digital advertising pie now than they did in 2003. While digital advertising revenue has galloped ahead rising from $7.3bn to $31.7bn in 2011, US newspapers share of digital advertising has hit an all-time low. In 2003, newspapers managed to capture 16.7% of all digital advertising in the US – not a great number, but respectable. However, by 2011, US newspapers managed to grab only 10.3% of digital advertising

Why are newspapers capturing less of the digital ad spending? Reuters says that while newspapers used to be one of the best ways to deliver an audience to advertisers, the industry doesn’t have the same advantage in the digital content market that it had in print. From Reuters’ analysis:

Advertisers “are buying audience instead of context and they don’t care what sites they are on,” said Gordon McLeod, president of Krux, a company that helps websites interpret data.

The lessons for news organisations making the digital transition in any country is two-fold. The first, that we’ve mentioned previously on the Knowledge Bridge, is that advertising shouldn’t be the only source of revenue for your digital business. Most companies that have succeeded in digital have done so by building a range of digital sources for revenue including dating services, digital marketing services, events and even niche digital services such as holiday-home booking businesses.

Secondly, as Rick Edmonds at Poynter pointed out, news organisations have been urged to stop selling their advertising inventory through ad exchanges. Instead, news organisations should develop ways to develop more targeted ads and develop other “premium-priced ad placements”. Fundamentally, the lesson is that advertising innovation is as important for your long-term sustainability as editorial innovation.