Newspapers: An Online Marketing Category Unto Themselves

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

This is an interesting read about newspapers. It seems that maybe newspapers have figured out the game. That leaves open the question of the future: What will it become?

I think online news is a great new marketing channel for a lot of businesses and it puts newspapers into a whole new category unto themselves. They aren’t directories because they provide a service. The service is delivery of news. We could honestly see getting back to providing free news in an unbiased reporting style. Then again, it could open up a whole new door of yellow journalism as well. Whatever the case, online newspapers will need to survive financially and that will mean advertisers.

Since newspapers can’t be classified as directories, yellow pages, portals, or fit into any other classification of online marketing, that leaves us with putting them into their own unique category. We’ll call it Online News Delivery.

The Online News Delivery model can introduce a whole new schemes of advertising. You could very well see the news brought to you by pay per action type ads, including audio and video as well as pay per click, along with display advertising. You’ll likely see a big rise in pay per thousand-view ads. But something else you might see is a sponsored article type advertising where a particular advertiser pays to sponsor an article or a series of articles. And that will bring up a whole new question: Will those sponsorship skew the editorial stance of the news?

I hope not. But I can see where this will benefit companies with Search Engine Optimization. If a story is about green building and ecological concerns related to real estate construction, for instance, an online company that specializes in building green houses could benefit by sponsoring that article. The link from that particular story to the advertiser’s website could have more link weight than an ad for that company in other areas of the news. And that’s where the potential conflict of interest comes in. Search Engine Optimization aside, will the news agency then feel compelled to skew the news in favor of the sponsoring company?

I’ll leave that question for the journalist ethics philosophers. I just wanted to point out a potential new advertising model that could see benefits in Search Engine Optimization for the advertiser if done properly. What do you think?