I Only Need 8 Jillion More Page Views to Make Rent. Call Your Friends!

In my continuing rant on how most of us are going about blogging monetization all wrong, we get this gem from AdAge.com this week. The headline trumpets that News-Oriented Websites Have a Future. First reaction: Oh thank God, my profession is saved.

We all know traditional media is hopelessly screwed, right? Right. And most of us know that online arms of traditional media agencies aren't really picking up the slack, creating a pretty worrying scenario. Especially because the last few years for media have already been looking like Fall 2008 looked for Wall Street, and now we're entering an undoubtedly horrible year for advertising with no Olympics, no election, no good one-time catalyst to give us a boost.

There is a future for media. There is a business model there. But I think I speak for most journalists when I say we're starting to feel like Moses's people wandering in the desert for 40-years. So was this headline from AdAge a coming attraction of the promised land? Hardly.

The article talked about a study called "Size Doesn't Matter" that went on to say: Oh wait, yes, it does. Here's the "good news" from the article:

"Small website operations can be self-sustaining," writes the report's author, ContentNext Research Director Lauren Rich Fine, "but life is easier at the mega traffic sites."

Whoa. Wait a minute, advertisers will pay more for an ad more people see? Groundbreaking! Here's more:

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes.

Those ambitious numbers, she continues, show how hard it is for local news sites to be really profitable, and underscore "why local papers will have trouble offsetting traditional media declines" with revenue from their websites.

The report also looks at whether the Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.

By Ms. Fine's back-of-the-envelope calculations, that kind of traffic would bring in $300 million in quarterly advertising revenues, about what the flagship paper is expected to generate in the fourth quarter.

The Times' site had 173 million page views in October, according to ComScore Media Metrix.

Problem one: Stop looking at the Web as merely a display opportunity and not a way to interact. That does not create a new business model, it just shifts one that isn't growing and is outdated. The reason sites like Google are stealing advertisers from daily newspapers is not because Google has more eyeballs. It's because Google used the interactivity of the Web to deliver a new, better way to advertise. 

Problem two: You think all the New York Times has to do is amass 1.3 billion page views a month? Great advice, because that's working so well for Yahoo and AOL right now. That is your bright future?

Problem three: They interviewed ad buyers and all they have to go on now are traditional display media products. Of course they're going to say they need scale. It's publishers' jobs to create new ad products that give them more bang for the buck and sell the advertisers on it. That's why we call it innovation.

For the sake of my industry I hope this isn't the future we're waiting on. Because it displays no innovation, no ingenuity and frankly the same lazy attitude that's gotten traditional media in this mess. "What? We need a Web site? Ok, let's throw our same stories on there and sell some banner ads. Better yet! FLOATING ADS that hover over the article someone is trying to read. Sure it's annoying and makes our product harder to actually read, but they'll have to look at the ad long enough to click that impossible-to-see 'close' button. Done."

For another point of view, I present Om Malik, below arguing that it's all about small. I don't know if he's right either, but at least it's a break from the past.