NY Times Gets Innovative With Their Online Advertising

The New York Times recently has come out with a new platform for it’s online advertisers that has a few people buzzing. The way it works, is that if a story from it’s website is trending on Twitter, that’s where your ad would pop up. Only on trending stories.

The problem though is that display advertising is display advertising is display advertising. Whether it’s on Facebook, nytimes.com, or joesrandomthoughts.com. If a company generates 100 clicks from a story that’s trending on Twitter, those 100 clicks are not going to have any more value than 100 clicks from any other website.

If people purposefully went to the nytimes.com to look for something locally like people do on Google, that’d be different. Then those clicks would be worth a little more. But with display advertising, they’re spontaneous clicks. People clicking and looking at some company’s website they weren’t planning on looking. The ad made them curious and on the spur of the moment, they clicked. It doesn’t really matter what website they did the clicking on.

If I were the New York Times, I’d focus on figuring out ways to increase online website traffic as much as possible. Because more website visitors will drive the cost of the clicks down. If they can lower the cost of the click to below what the competition charges, now then there’s something valuable they can offer advertisers that other publishers can’t.

With display advertising, it’s all about the cost of the clicks and making sure those clicks are taking place in a relevant geo-targeted area. That’s it.

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