The Media Oxpecker: Are Web Pages Going Out of Style?

Every week we round up industry news you may have missed while you were busy winning.



  • Display ads on web pages are so last week, pshaws Anil Dash. Fashion-forward marketers know that the future of advertising is in streams:

    The vast majority of advertising online is dependent on a page-view model that users have overwhelmingly decided to abandon. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others will succeed by making in-stream advertisements that fit in with the native content of their networks. Meanwhile, page-based sites are cramming every corner and bit of white space on their sites with ads that only ever decrease in effectiveness until they are made even larger and more intrusive every few years.


    But wait. “You know what? It’s not actually that great or cool a model,” counters Choire Sicha. “It’s not terrible or damaging or anything. But the brilliant principle of Twitter is that you create your own universe. Everything that’s there is something you’ve chosen—oh, except of course those tweets from Tampax or Home Depot or some other terrifically wonderful brand.”

  • “When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work,” says David Carr on the state of the magazine industry. “Because of changes to the informational ecosystem, weeklies have been forced to leave behind the news and become magazines of ideas.”

  • Felix Salmon says that by making its paywall easy to circumvent, the New York Times treats its readers as adults and engenders more goodwill, making them more likely to pay for access:

    Here’s the thing about freeloaders: if they value what they’re getting, a lot of them will end up paying anyway. What happened when the Indianapolis Museum of Art moved to a free-admission policy? Its paid membership increased by 3%. When the Minneapolis Institute of Arts did the same thing, paid membership increased by 33%.


  • What about an events-based business model? A Philadelphia-based startup is making it work.

  • What if you could only have 50 “friends” on a social network? What if you could only “like” one thing per day? Tuhin Kumar makes a case for digital scarcity.

  • Looking for stories? ProPublica has launched a new tool that allows users to search nursing home inspection reports which contain nearly 118,000 deficiencies. They’ve also put together a tipsheet on how to use the database.

  • Google buys a newspaper ad to show why newspaper ads don’t work.

  • What does Google’s purchase of Frommer’s mean? Travel and local are two sides of the same coin, says Mathew Ingram:

    Ultimately, one person’s travel planning is another person’s local discovery. Google understands that and it wants to be the first place people turn to whether they’re looking to go around the block or around the world. We should expect to see more Frommer travel information show up in searches on Google and Google Maps, as Zagat content does now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a combined planning service that pulls the best of Zagat and Frommer’s at some point.

  • The five types of problem writer … and how to deal with each of them.

  • The case for critics who are actually critical.

  • Using outbound links as citations helped Gizmodo beat a defamation lawsuit.

  • CPMs for online video ads are trending up.

  • 5 reasons why web publishing is changing (again).

  • Your fortune says you are more likely to use your mobile device … in bed.

  • And finally, AAN-pal Baratunde Thurston on the way we market now:

    I sympathize with the marketer’s lament for a simpler time when you could just buy some TV ads a year in advance, drink a few martinis, sexually harass your secretary, and go home. Even five years ago, a home-page stunt or takeover might have sufficed. Today, the platforms you “need to be on” change every few weeks. Facebook Groups are out and Pages are in. No, Pages are out and Subscriptions are in. Tumblr is the new black, and email is actually the best social network. Tom from MySpace has returned . . . on Facebook. And what on earth is your Pinterest strategy? Oh, you don’t have one? Congratulations, you just unlocked the Irrelevant Businessperson Badge on Foursquare.