Monday, October 5th, 2009

Social media is key for traffic referral

Some interesting new stats from online market analyst Hitwise on visitor behaviour on the web show that web users visit social media sites more than any other kind of content. (I had trouble downloading the actual data, though, so this is not backed up with first-hand research). [UPDATE: the nice people at Hitwise sent me […]

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Online advertising: there's good news and bad news

So – spending on online advertising has just outstripped spending on TV advertising in the UK. Figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers (one of the most irritating company names in consultancy, by the way), show online advertising now makes up 23.5% of UK ad spend, as opposed to TV’s 21.9%. TV has been top dog for half a […]

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Should media owners ditch journalism altogether?

An interesting piece from Fast Company examines the idea that media owners such as the New York Times and AOL can tap into a “local-advertising pot of gold” by turning over their content infrastructure to hyper-local content producers. The New York Times launched a hyperlocal community offering – called The Local – in March. Its […]

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Why the advertising model for funding print publishing is broken

Following his recent comments on Freelance Unbound, Martin Cloake has a nice post here on the changing dynamics of magazine publishing.  His thesis (roughly) is that saturation in the market forced down individual title readerships, while a fixation on keeping advertisers happy made magazines so bland that this readership deserted the sector in droves. It’s […]

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Why corporate communications should lighten up

In the course of my series on how to survive the media recession, I talked about investigating membership professional organisations in order to boost your profile. I also mentioned that I had written a free piece for the member magazine of Communicators in Business, the organisation for corporate communications writers and editors. The idea was to try […]