Emma Hartley

London Telegraph

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

If you want to get to grips with the scale of the challenge facing the newspaper industry, consider this slightly amazing piece that was published in Advertising Age a couple of days ago.

It describes at some length and in jolly detail (as do the various links from it, which are also worth following) the ways in which those massive cyber success stories YouTube and Twitter are believed to be losing money hand over fist, currently surviving only on the largesse of venture capitalists and Google (which recently bought YouTube despite it being loss-making). Zillions of hits every day, the confidence of their users and unrivalled niches on the internet have apparently failed so far to create the conditions for monetisation (the dread word).

That’s what newspapers are up against. It’s a cultural problem. YouTube is indispensible for viral marketers, the music industry and people who love videos of cute fluffy creatures being tickled. Yet there are very few adverts on it – not even the bog standard Google ones, which is really quite hard to understand. Surely if people are prepared to put up with ads on Facebook they wouldn’t mind on YouTube, especially if it were a “use it or lose it” situation.

Full story here.

This article was posted: Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 9:35 am

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