NYTimes.com: Going the way of Neilsen?
The NYTimes.com either ran out of content this morning or they don’t care about their media and advertising coverage.
According to the New York Times, there are a few news flashes:
1) Increasingly, marketers are looking to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites.
Huh 1: Thank you New York Times, anyone reading your coverage has already known this for years. However as we all know ad networks are coming under higher scrutiny now, their future still as yet undetermined.
2) Their growth could mean a lower share of advertising for portals like AOL and particularly for Yahoo, which is particularly strong in traditional display advertising.
Huh 2: Really, thank you for playing New York Times, this could not be further from the truth. While spending has certainly higher now on mid- and long-tail publishers, Yahoo and AOL are really networks as we all know who, by nature of their blend of brand and direct response marketing, can manager a higher effective overall eCPM.
This story melds to themes of this blog: the decay and degradation of newspaper brands and brand migration online have a higher impact than direct.
While I don’t think anyone would disagree with the decay of newspapers, some might take umbrage with the notion that brand, not direct, will play a major role in shaping production budgets online.
For more on that notion, see my position here.
Internet Marketing Observations 
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