Cable Companies Refusing To Give Free Content Without Upgraded Packages Are Killing Advertisers
Have you ever noted that your Cable Bill keeps going up, with less-and-less increase in quality? It used to be Cable TV was advertising free, and that's what Americans were told as our FCC made it possible for them to literally have a monopoly or duopoly and ditch all those frequencies of free TV we used to get. Today, we get more ads, and have to pay for expensive Premium Packages to get all the channels, but for the most part, it's the advertisers who lose, well along with the consumer. Of course, this isn't just happening with Cable TV, it is happening elsewhere too; magazines and newspapers and other online news. Let's talk.
There is an interesting research paper I'd like you to
read, it has to do with OPA - Online Publishers Association's view that
"pay walls" are a good business model for newspapers and magazines.
The article; "Pay Walls Working; Digital Subscriptions Driving Publisher
Growth," by Net Features (affiliate), and published on 12/13/2013. The
research states in its abstract that free content models may be coming to an
end, and that:
"Publishers are using data acquired from digital
subscriptions to drive engagement, reduce churn and enhance ad sales. The OPA
reported that 95% of digital content publishers have a paid subscription
strategy, and are leveraging these paid models as part of their overall growth
strategies. Publishers such as Conde Nast, Consumer Reports, Financial Times,
and Gannett Community Newspapers, to name but a few have pay wall models; the
success they have seen illustrates the deep engagement consumers have with the
content they love and, ultimately, their willingness to pay for it."
Wrong - these publishers are becoming less relevant
and losing the next generation of viewers for a dwindling baby-boomer
generation. It's a bad model and this may end most mainstream media that
attempts it. Of course, it's easy for me to say that now right? I mean it's January
2017 now, and in hindsight it shows that only a few publishers have done well
with pay walls; the WSJ (Wall Street Journal), NYT (New York Times), HBR
(Harvard Business Review) and a few others. But have they done as well as they
may have without the pay walls?
Here is why I say; NO. And, why our Think Tank, which
operates online, sees this as a net overall loser in the end.
On the positive side the publisher has valuable user
information for targeting advertising, but balance that with the negative side
of all those now, non-users reading ZERO ads, hurts the brand recognition of
the advertisers and their overall "number of impressions" which is
always important to companies and corporations, according to Advertising Age -
listen to their podcasts, quite good.
Indeed, I can also recommend an article in Forbes
published on January 19, 2017 titled; "How Visual Advertising Will Change
Marketing In 2017," by AJ Agrawal who noted that; "The average click
through rate of display ads across all formats and placements is a minuscule
fraction of a percent: 0.06%. Even of this small amount, over 1/2 of mobile ad
clicks are reportedly accidental," and lets' not even get into the dismal
conversion rates."
Still, for a Corporate Brand Name - it makes sense,
someone like Ford, IBM, Wells Fargo, Boeing, United Airlines, or on the actual
product side something like; Kellogg's Pop Tarts.
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