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NEW YORK (AFX) - A survey of top newspaper companies found that nearly three out of four senior executives think newspapers are missing major opportunities online because of a relative lack of cooperation among publishers.
The survey, which was released Wednesday by the American Press Institute, a newspaper industry training organization based in Reston, Va., also found only modest hopes that the industry would succeed in making such collaboration happen.
Seventy-two percent of those participating in the survey said newspapers were missing out on key opportunities online, particularly in working together to sell and deliver ads. But only 49 percent strongly agreed that newspapers are capable of successfully organizing and maintaining joint online initiatives.
Just over half, or 54 percent, believed that newspapers should form partnerships with non-newspaper companies such as Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. to pursue opportunities online.
Advertisers have long complained of the difficulty of buying advertising across groups of newspapers, since many have different ways of selling, delivering and billing for advertising, and similar problems exist online.
Television networks and online advertising giants like Google and Yahoo, by contrast, offer readily available national platforms for reaching customers as well as more simplified ways of buying ads. In the case of online ads, it's also easier to track how many people actually view the ads by counting the number of clicks they get.
John Kimball, the head of marketing at the Newspaper Association of America, said a NAA group formed about nine months ago is not yet ready to propose ways to standardize newspaper advertising, both online and in print.
"We're just beginning to understand what those standards should be," Kimball said. "One of the things advertisers mention when they talk about newspaper advertising is they accept the value of it, but they say it's complicated to buy. There are 1,500 newspapers and lots of things aren't standardized."
In print, newspapers have widely varying shapes, prices and sizes for advertising, making them more difficult to buy in large groups, Kimball said, but on the Internet there are also significant hurdles to enabling mass purchases due to the varying technologies and ad types used by various publishers.
The study presented by the American Press Institute targeted the CEO, division head or publisher as well as the top interactive executive at all of the top 25 newspaper publishers in the country. Thirty-nine of the pool of 95 people responded.
Most of the online opportunities highlighted by the executives related to advertising, including ways to jointly sell and deliver advertising. Standardizing advertising types, serving platforms, inventory monitoring and search were other potential areas of collaboration they suggested. Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be
Copyright 2006 AFX News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
