Digital is Half the Business Print Ever Was
Not everyone agrees with my rather gloomy view of the world, but over in the US despite the fine words of the leaders of B2B companies, the figures show a picture of continued and accelerating decline.
Although online revenues have continued to grow, even in the US the growth is half the dollars of the decline in print. The table in the link shows a decline in the last year of $103m in print based revenues and an increase of $47m in digital revenues. This confirms this bloggers view that even when the migration is complete, business media companies are going to need to be smaller and leaner beasts than they have been in the past, and by a scale factor that few if any of the bsuiness media leaders have yet owned up to or realised.
Labels: b2b advertising, digital revenue
B2B Advertising Robust in a Downturn
American Business Media, the US equivalent of the PPA is claiming that only a third of b2b marketeers are planning to cut their ad budget in 2009, 40% will hold steady and 30% will increase their spend.
Like the PPA, ABM has a vested interest in talking the market up so we treat this with scepticism I suppose.
The mathematical implication is that we should sign up to 09 budgets that are the same ad revenue as 2008 - and that just feels hopelessly optimistic.
Labels: b2b advertising
B2B Online Could Go Ultra niche
A US review of research by Technorati, the blog search engine, claims that most Blogs carry advertising and that average revenue/year is $6000 with some of the uber blogs making $75000 a year.
The numbers are small, but growing fast. This blog, which has a mostly UK audience is much smaller and makes next to nothing from advertising. In part this is because the Google ads are often not very relevant to this very specialist audience.
As regional newspapers wrestle with the concept of ultra local advertising, is there an opportunity in b2b to learn something from this approach and to create a network of business to business specialist blogs and micro sites where the ads are sold on a "classified" model? Advertisers can match their advertising to the audience and select which blogs they wish to appear on. This opens up access to highly relevant audiences not normally available. How would you reach the audience of this blog otherwise? I don't sell ads and the Google system is not sufficently targeted for this specialist group. Only a handful of sites and blogs write about the UK B2B sector and certainly none mainstream media portals bother much with it. And yet, small though it is, there are many suppliers to our industry who would happily pay to reach you. (In case you didn't know most of you are pretty grown up execs in the b2b industry.)
Let's call this B2B idea "Ultra Niche".
The advertising is highly targeted, inexpensive and very effective. It encourages the growth of specialist writing and offers great ROI for advertisers at a low cost. It's a credit crunching idea!
In a larger way Federated Media has built a substantial business in the US using a variation of this thought.
Mmmm.
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Labels: b2b advertising, b2b blogging, B2b strategy, federated media, Technorati, ultra niche
Even less advertising in 2009
Group M (WPP) is forecasting a decline in b2b advertising of 14% next year. In case you hadn't already, I recommend a thorough review of your budget.
Running out of costs to cut? I thought so. A new radical plan is required...
In the meantime I am thinking about predictions for 2009 which I will post before the Xmas break. Any suggestions?
Labels: b2b advertising
The Future of B2B Media
This survey reports on the US b2b sector. It's not without optimism with a surprising number of CEOs prediciting revenue increases this year. Print is declining as a proportion of total revenue, events and online are up. However one CEO says,
"“We’ve seen slow customer acceptance of Internet marketing/advertising,”
This is a key issue for b2b online players. Building traffic is relatively straight forward but in most b2b sectors advertisers are lagging behind their customers in recognising the importance of the web. Coached over many years to believe in the controlled ciruclation model, advertisers are struggling to understand why they should feel confident that their customers are users of industry web sites. Audience metrics are too simplistic often being little more than a page impression count. Here in the UK our websites are often attracting audiences from around the world and from many parts of the value chain. Advertisers are geared up to promote to the UK buyer in one part of the value chain. When an advertiser books a campaign on a b2b website how does he know how much of the audience is relevant. In the most advanced markets (prinicpally IT) advertisers and agencies are beginning to demand that they only pay for UK IP addresses. They are also moving from a CPM model to a CTR model. Both issues create challenges for publishers. The headline audience stats are overstating the reach into the UK decision making community and CTR is low and in some sectors falling.
The b2b industry has always been about validated lead generation rather than simple audience numbers (remember reader enquiry cards?) but we have not yet created a commonly understood model for how to do this in online.
There are a number of things that must be done;
1) Invest in research that valildates the quality of the online audience.
2) Create new innovative and effective online inventory that converts the audience into effective sales leads for advertisers
3) Invent ways to recapture the ability for advertisers to extract brand development benefits from their advertising rather than just clicks.
4) Get a better understanding of how users make decisions and create tools that aid the decsion making process as well as simply providing news and information.
One of the interesting solutions to this problem is vertical search - a subject around which there is a lot of heat and not a lot of light. Convera are offering a method for publishers to quickly build vertical search solutions and have a number of UK clients incluing CMP and Centaur. Fast, the Microsoft owned solution for enterprise search has some installations in vertical search, most notably Zibb owned by Reed, and Nexus has a deal with Autonomy on a product called Foundography. It's early days for all these solutions but they could be the beginning of a new model which we will follow with interest
Labels: b2b advertising, convera, fast, foundography, vertical search, zibb
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