Re:Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefo...
by stickfigure on Friday October 12, 2018 @11:38AM
(#18202153)
$1,000 for 1,000 people to see in print
What happened is that now advertisers can measure the impact of their ads and realize they just wasted $1000. If advertising was worth $1k, ad companies would still charge it. The people getting screwed in the old system were the advertisers.
The world only sustained thousands of newspapers because physical delivery made them inherently local. The internet made the market for news national, if not global. Consolidation is natural.
Re:Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefo...
by jtbayly on Friday October 12, 2018 @12:32PM
(#18202584)
No. Advertisers were unwilling to pay the same amounts because 1. there were 100 other places where they could reach as many eyeballs for 1/10th the cost, and 2. there were indications that people's attention is completely different between screen and print, and thus the effectiveness of the ads was much lower per viewer.
I think you're mistaken there. If the model worked, then thousands of newspapers wouldn't have closed, downsized, or worse. We'd be back in the 80's when cities like Cincinnati and Chicago had FOUR real daily newspapers, and just about every single radio station had its own news department.
What happened is that the internet ad companies convinced newspapers that an ad that used to cost $1,000 for 1,000 people to see in print should only cost 10¢ for 1,000 people to view online.