Oops Patrol: Fairfax Digital ad placement

I am sure Honda and Mazda would be rapt with this placement.

Thanks to my source(s) for this.

With oops's like this happening, I don't think 'heritage media' has too much to worry about in the short term if their digital cousins can't avoid competing vehicles running next to each other.

September Nielsen data: Yahoo!7 takes a massive hit, other players hold

Nielsen has just released September Netview data and the numbers would be causing a few sighs over at Yahoo!7

Just over 6 weeks ago Yahoo!7 PR was out in force trumpeting the success of their Olympics initiative - and with good reason - it was pretty successful.

However most insiders were more concerned with what they could do with the audience once the Olympics were over. Could they hold enough of them and bring them into the Yahoo!7 fold (be it through Mail, Messenger, Answers, News, Homepage) to become regular users.

The first warning sign would have been last month when the Nielsen data showed Yahoo!7 didn't actually add any new users in August of 08 (when compared to July) - most would have expected an incremental gain in user numbers as a result of an official Olympics alliance at the very least. It wouldn't be too bold to predict internally Yahoo!7 would have forecasted a 10-20% traffic increase.

However this would have seemed like a minor blow compared to the traffic king hit the site experienced in September, down 9% from 5.35m uniques to 4.87m uniques.

This drop mirrors the drop Yahoo!7 experience just after the 2006 World Cup. Remember, the World Cup site in 06 was a Yahoo! co-brand and the traffic fell into Yahoo's topline. However once the action stopped in Germany, the traffic left and didn't return.

On these current September numbers, Yahoo!7 has less momentum with its audience than it did pre Olympics, which is undoubtedly the worst possible outcome for the site.

You can bet the financial investment required to secure the online rights to the Olympics was a mid term initiative financially - based on using the Olympic brand as a carrot to bring new eyeballs to the site and Yahoo!7 working out a way to transition these people into long term users.

Tough questions will no doubt be asked. How has this happened? Did the company have a real plan to try and keep the Olympics traffic it generated? Why, with the number 1 TV network is this JV not generating much traction with users over 2 years in? What has happened to Rohan Lund's vision of being a leader in news, homepage, mail and search?

These are prickly questions - but it seems now globally the Yahoo! brand is being forced to address them across the board as the share price flounders. How will it address these issues it is facing in AU?

The only question I have is, what is Yahoo7's strategy? It's hard to see a real direction from an outsiders point of view.

At the same time, Yahoo!'s main competitors either held their audience in September or grew marginally.

Ninemsn and Fairfax Digital held topline audience numbers, whilst News Digital Media grew 4% (up 150k users)

Over the top taken even further

If FD keep doing this I reckon a few of their loyal users will leave.

Ad overkill to the extreme. I'm not convinced there's any real benefactor from FDTV other than FD and their EBIT - seems to bombard the user with more ads than they need, and I think advertisers might start to question their rates when ads are running on top of other ads.

Where's the content?

Yahoo!7 and other big players lose audience during Olympic period of August

New Nielsen data is out and it's big.

Yahoo!7 - who had the official Olympics presence in AU - actually lost audience numbers in August.

August 08 saw 5.35m Australia' s visit the site, down 41,000 from July.

This would be an annoyance to the Yahoo!7 management team, who rely on this Nielsen data as it's their only source of audited third party measurement to take to market. (as they don't use Market Intelligence)

It may also raise questions about the value of the Olympics to Yahoo!7 in terms of exposing the brand and their services to a new audience.

All of the main players took hits in August - ninemsn was down over 200,000 uniques, Fairfax Digital down 100,000 uniques, and News Digital down over 300,000 uniques. Relative to these numbers, the Yahoo! result doesn't look too bad ... but would still be a worry as it will raise concerns as to what the numbers will do in September without the Olympic traffic to pump it up.

It would also be a surprise for the other networks - who wouldn't have banked on them losing audience numbers of this volume as they enter the absolutely crucial back quarter.

All data sourced from Nielsen Netview, August 2008

Q4 2008: 4 thought starters

I am very interested to see what eventuates in Q4 of this year. Generally the last quarter of the year is a pretty robust period, but in 07 it moved from hunstoppable growth momentum to barely a whimper, with 2007 Q4 revenue only up 19% on 2006 Q4 revenue.

Compare this with a 67% increase form 2006 (compared to 2005) and similar increases in the previous years and this figure would have caught the attention of the main players.

Don't get me wrong, 19% YOY growth is nothing to sneeze at, but when you're used to 50%+ growth YOY it shows that the industry is maturing and the momentum off the back of the migration of spend from offline to online is slowing.

Here's 4 things I'll be keeping a close eye on across the next 3-4 months.

1. Emergence of the specialist

This applies for all areas of digital. Agencies. Publishers. Sales houses. Search. Display. I think specialisation and service level will become a key differentiator in a very competitive industry. Knowing your product. Understanding your audience. Understanding the brief. All fundamentals but generally missed most of the time. Agencies are going to want publisher partners who can address business problems and conceive solutions, not sell banners and medium rectangles. Clients are going to want agencies who really understand the digital space - from internet to mobile to emerging technologies, in game, video, social media etc

I also think media owners/publishers will need to do more to skill up their sales teams to truly understand their audience and their key points of difference. Portals are usually generalists in terms of their understanding of audience and context - there is an opening for specialists (like Gizmodo, Sportal, Cnet) to work with larger portals specialist areas (sport, tech, health, parenting) in terms of site representation and content syndication. The portals bring the audience to the content, the specialists extract the revenue it deserves. Being 'great at one thing' is severely undervalued in AU.

Edit: By the above what I am saying is we should start thinking about specialists selling specialist content. For me, it makes more sense for me to buy a parenting environment off someone who has experience in the area (they don't need to be a parent but they need to understand parenting) rather than a 25 year old single guy. It makes sense for a specialist who understands technology to be offering solutions to an advertiser wanting to reach this audience, not a salesperson who doesn't understand that environment. Just like it might not be feasible for an agency person to give you definitive info on ALL elements of digital media ... it's equally not feasible for one salesperson to sell 10 different environments with 10 different audiences and mindsets.

Google has employed Industry Marketing Managers whose job is to stay on top of all industry trends - essentially become an analyst - and they feed these insights to their clients. The result, more trust.

2. Service is the differentiator

Market tolerance of adops mishaps, under deliveries, misleading ad network buys, ambiguous creative specs, lack of knowledge about audience data, content etc will not be as tolerated as it's been before. The excuse 'we're such a young medium, it's a steep learning curve' is such a cop out - we need, as an industry to ensure we can deliver what we sell. As a result, revenue will move towards providers who have the above issues sorted out and have their back end in check. Everyone is going to have to work harder to earn their slice of the digital pie, and as a result we might see the first signs of some consolidation or even better, vastly improved service.

3. Forced mid-tail embrace

Mid tail consumption in AU is obvious - approximately 8% of pages viewed on the Internet belong to the big 5, and about 11% belongs to Google. What are people doing with the other 80%? They are using mid tail sites. Problem is, the dollars haven't flowed into this critical area - namely due to the market presence of the big guys, plus a lack of a great vertical network, time constraints etc. This might all change. Reason - most of the big players have increased their rate cards to levels that perhaps are above what is reasonable. This will force marketers to look elsewhere, namely the mid tail - which is far more cost competitive and generally gives you access to more engaged and credible audiences.

4. The hard TV/online cross-sell

For the 2008 Olympics, advertisers on the Olympics didn't have the choice regarding taking an online package, it was a deal mandatory. I can see this becoming more common across key in demand TV programming - inclusive deals that cover both TV and online. It's a good way for the cross media players (namely 7 and 9) to leverage their TV muscle to generate additional revenues for their online assets. With James Warburton now Chief Digital guy at 7 Media Group, I think it'll be the 7/Yahoo group that lead the charge across their key programming in the front half of 2009.

Excessive: AU Homepages Ad Count

I have voiced my concern with the volume of ads appearing on publisher homepages in the past, and today I thought it'd be an interesting time to see whether ad messages are dominating publisher homepages still.

As an agency guy, I think the less ad units a publisher has on their homepage the better. I think as an advertiser if you're forking out between 50-130k for a homepage execution, it devalues the placement for it to be surrounded by countless text ads for credit cards and debt consolidation.

Plus, I think the user deserves the frontpage to be clean and easy to navigate.

So, effectively, the publishers are failing both their stakeholders.

And you would never see the front page of a newspaper filled with ads.

Anyway - lets look at the totals for Monday 25 August.

Yahoo!7 - 16 total ads
Excessive ad units add more clutter to an already cluttered experience. Overwhelming.

ninemsn - 14 total ads
Biggest positive is that the area above the fold is pretty clean - still, a lot of text placements here.

theage.com.au - 16 total ads
Admittedly, 8 of these placements are Sponsored Links ... and the page is pretty long ... but Fairfax are squeezing every penny out of their eyeballs and advertisers.

smh.com.au - 17 total ads
We have a winner! Optus have a med rec + OTP ... as well as the Sponsored Links placements and the awesome bottom leaderboard. More finance sales pitches than a bank manager.

news.com.au - 8 total ads
Good effort. Marks deducted for news still considering the 468x60 banner to be acceptable as well as two display ad units above the fold.

Bigpond - 4 total ads
Bigpond only have 4 external advertisers on their homepage - not bad. Let down unfortunately by their horrendous Bigpond Shopping page dominant ad.

Google - 0 total ads
And this is Australia's most popular page ... which says to me users enjoy less clutter.

I would like to see a publisher look to place LESS ads on their homepage, but extract more yield from these placements. Both advertisers and users would value less ad clutter and advertisers would be prepared to pay more.

Right now the amount of ads on homepages makes the industry look amateur and greedy in the eyes of most. And excessive ad placements effectively devalue these "premium" placements in the long term.

WAToday - more interesting numbers ...

I took a look at the numbers for WAToday for last week (11/8-17/8) to see how the new FD site was performing.

Interestingly, a duplication check uncovers some curious figures.

How come 60% of WAToday's readers also visited SMH.com.au last week? And how come 54% visited The Age.com.au. AND ... how come 35% visited Brisbane Times?

*** All data sourced from Nielsen Market Intelligence, Market: Australia - News & Weather - Domestic > By Brand, Period: Weekly, 11/08/08 - 17/08/08

And how come less than 10% visited thewest.com.au? And just over 12% visited Perth Now? These are WA based publications with local news - why would Eastern Seaboard mastheads be more appealing?

And why would these WA eyeballs be visiting FD's other mastheads in such large volumes if WAToday was catering for this "highly engaged audience" and delivering them a "new perspective on news." (Jack Matthew's words, not mine)

I think there's a need for Fairfax to come out with numbers showing WA Today's WA audience - and also explain to market why there are such large audience duplication across their audience.

The online Olympics? Or is it ...

Many of us (including me) thought that the Beijing Olympics would be a huge shot in the arm for online.


It makes sense ... daytime events, people are at work and wanting immediate information. Online is the channel they turn to?


Right?

Well ... I'm not so sure after looking at last weeks Nielsen Market Intelligence data across the News and Sport categories.





Above are the Nielsen figures for the Sport category, Domestic browsers, 11/8-17/8

Foxsports is at number 1 at 654,834. SMH Sport and afl.com.au are at 2 and 3 respectively.

The interesting things about the above for me are ...

- The entire category sits at 3.5m UBs, only up 8.7% on the week prior. Last week was when the Olympics really heated up ... but it hasn't really brought any incremental traffic to the category

- Fairfax Digital's SMH Sport is up week on week 216% to 578k weekly users. Their The Age Sport is also up significantly, up 151% to 310k weekly users.

- ninemsn's WWOS is down 40% week on week, to 207k users


Now take a look at the News category ...



As a category, News is sitting at 5.8m domestic users a week for 11/8-16/8 ... a decrease week on week of 3.14%


Most Masthead News sections or web news sources are either flat traffic wise, or down. I personally expected News traffic to spike during the Olympics.


Interestingly, UB frequency is relatively flat, so are page views per person. Both key engagement metrics.


What does this mean? I'm not so sure ...


I would suggest a high proportion of Olympic traffic is going through to Olympics.com.au and also the beijing2008 site - both of which Nielsen does not have access to.


Yahoo!7 is claiming they had 1.2m unique visitors through to their Olympics site in week 1. Problem is these are internal figures and don't specify whether they are AU eyeballs only. I find it odd that Yahoo!7 chose not to put their Olympics site on Nielsen when it's 100% localised.

Yahoo! is also spruiking incremental traffic to their front page as well. Again, no audited data on this.


So ... maybe the Olympics isn't pulling in any NEW eyeballs for these providers. Already loyal users of sites like The Age, ninemsn etc are moreso visiting their Olympic sections as they navigate through the site as per usual.


Or maybe everyone is just watching it on TV in the office and at home?


What are your thoughts?

Interesting usage data around Brisbane Times.com.au

According to neilsen Market Intelligence for June 2008, Brisbane Times.com.au had 624k users.

But when you do a duplication analysis some interesting data appears.

Of these 624k, 373k also read SMH.com.au ... and 316k also read The Age.com.au

I wonder how many of Brisbane Times readers are actually NEW users of Fairfax's News services ... or whether a load of the users are SMH and Age readers being funelled into the BrisbaneTimes site. Either that or they like reading multiple mastheads that report the same news.

There is minimal overlay between the BrisbaneTimes and Courier Mail audiences as well - only 132k users.

It would be an interesting stat to work out how many Brisbane Times readers live in Brisbane as well.

Hugh Martin touched on a similar topic here - http://hugh-martin.blogspot.com/2008/05/brissie-times-grows-market-i-dont-think.html

Ad Overload? 19 ads on a page!

Today the front page of The Age.com.au had 19 advertising messages on it.

And this doesn't include pushes to Fairfax's own network of sites outside of The Age.

I don't think I'm alone in saying this is a tad excessive.

And it concerns me as an advertiser who has used this placement in the past of really how effective my ad might be when it's competing for attention against 18 other ad messages as well as the content.

I've always found it interesting that every year these 'premium' (their words) placements increase in price, but each year more advertising noise is added to the pages.

The media love talking about the media

Yes, we all know the media industry loves to talk about itself (yes I am aware that this blog is a good example of this at times ...)

But check this Fairfax article in the SMH about their watoday.com.au launch.

http://business.smh.com.au/fairfaxs-new-front-draws-familiar-fire-20080611-2p49.html

Erm ... how is this piece of editorial of interest to anyone aside those who either work at News or Fairfax?

And why is the media - especially old media with digital plays - now thinking that Joe Public really cares about their own turf wars. Are FD and News journo's incentivised to talk up their employers efforts online?

Fairfax launch WAToday.com.au

http://www.watoday.com.au

And the Google SEM is already live. Smart.

Chest thumping internal ego stroke here - http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/fairfax-launches-was-first-online-only-newspaper-20080609-2nvg.html

Will be interesting to see how it goes with actual WA based eyeballs. Also will be interesting to see thewest.com.au and Perth Now step up their act.

Motivated reporting

Do a Google News search for Tony Faure and witness some of the worst local digital media coverage (about his resignation from ninemsn) you will see.

Especially interesting to see competitors, Fairfax and News, sink the boots in. B&T and AdNews haven't been much better.

According to Lara Sinclair - ninemsn is on the "brink of collapse"

Please.

Witness the hard hitting coverage here - http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23806518-7582,00.html

Sinclair is quoting a topline audience decline and some 'analyst' expectations that ninemsn will miss their revenue targets.

I can say with some assurity I think most of the big 5 publishers will miss their initial FY08 rev. targets. Why? Well, to be honest, they were probably unrealistic to begin with.

But ... If we're talking topline audience declines it's probably worth taking a look at some others publishers traffic levels (source: Netview, April 08).

April 07 to April 08 ninemsn lost 4.9% of their audience

April 07 to April 08 Fairfax Digital lost 5.8% of their audience

April 07 to April 08 Yahoo!7 lost 5.3% of their audience

April 07 to April 08 News Digital Media gained 5.1% of their audience

Local media have been shitcanning ninemsn (especially their competitors funnily enough) for the past year citing Nielsen and Frost and Sullivan data generally out of context and claiming that News, Fairfax and Yahoo are catching up. I haven't seen the above figures rolled out for anyone BUT ninemsn. Funny that!

Interestingly, none actually ask clients or agencies ... those who are dealing with these companies. Funny that ... you have to ask ... are they really catching up? It only appears numbers wise News is catching up - FD and Yahoo have had larger losses than ninemsn ... but, to be honest, numbers aren't everything ... the ability to sell your audience is the key.

However, the worst coverage goes to Smart House - the online news source so respected Media Watch dedicated a whole episode to showcasing the way they source their content (article - http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Content_And_Downloads/Industry/Q4P5F9F8)

This just in: Blogs on the up whilst the News category remains flat

If you need more evidence that the line between semi-pro (or pro-am or whatever you want to call it) and professional journalism content is blurring rapidly, lets have a look at usage data between topline News (ie journalists) figures and the unduplicated audience of the top 4 blog platforms.

According to Neilsen Netview, the topline News & Information figures (which is a unduplicated figure taking into account News Digital Media, The Age, SMH, BBC, Yahoo!7 News, National Nine News, NY Times, Bigpond NEws, Google News, Conde Nast, Daily Mail, CNN etc) only saw essentially a zero usage increase from April 07 to April 08 - from 7.785m in April 07 to 7.786m in April 08.

Now lets look at the unduplicated figures of the top 4 blogging platforms - blogger, wordpress, typepad and livejournal.

April 07 - 1.839m

April 08 - 2.484m

That is a YOY increase of 35%. What does this show? Well .. people are turning to blogs more and more to get their information. Why is this? Well ... I don't have the definitive answer ... but I believe that blogs offer more credibility and passion than their larger counterparts - especially in niche areas (which we all know become quite big when there are enough niche's combined). And this doesn't even cover sites like Perez Hilton, TMZ, Gizmodo, Defamer, Slashdot etc - which I would argue are blogs by format and design.

It's not all bad for the News & Information category - page views per user per month are up YOY from 65 to 74. Still, if I had the choice between a marginal increase in consumption or a major increase in users I know which one I'd take.

Maybe we will start seeing large news site bloggers become more than just light entertainment 'columnists' and actual evolve to being actual experts on what they're covering.

Fairfax Digital: The Vine traffic at 400% of expected after 1 month ...

So according to Fairfax Digital's Pippa Leary, www.thevine.com.au is swimming along with 155,000 users in month 1 - way over the 40,000 they forecast.

Problem is - there's no audited data on this.

A search for The Vine on Neilsen Netview generates zero result - meaning the amount of users on the Netview panel accessing the site was too low for it to be an adequate sample size.

And on Market Intelligence - which Fairfax uses for The Age, RSVP SMH, Lifestyle, ASX and it's Business properties, thevine.com.au is nowhere to be seen ... I have checked under Lifestyle and Entertainment and it is not one of the sites Neilsen is tracking

Begs the question - why isn't FD monitoring this through Neilsen given it's the only standard for agencies and clients in Australia? It's hard to swallow publisher supplied glee when they haven't used Neilsen to monitor traffic ... it's especially hard given the FD salesforce go to market daily trumpeting their primo sites traffic and sourcing Neilsen when doing so.

AdNews piece is here -- http://www.adnews.com.au/News.cfm?NewsId=4722

Fairfax Digital launch search agency?

Seems weird to me, but it's happening. FD and MelbourneIT have partnered to create a search marketing agency aimed at SME's.

From AdNews: "The joint venture, Advantate, will target SMEs in Australia and New Zealand, including the 700,000 SMEs Fairfax and Melbourne IT already have a relationship with through the provision of classifieds, domain name and hosting services."

Jack Matthews modestly claimed: " the range of products and services we will offer will be far broader than existing search engine agencies can provide."

Melbourne IT CEO Theo Hnarakis also chimed in about the 'broader' services they will provide: "We will be able to bundle in search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, domain hosting and, down the track, display advertising"

With all due respect, SEM, SEO, domain name rego and display advertising bundled isn't exactly a new concept. It does, however, signal that the traditional display/classifieds operators in AU are looking to search to grow revenue. It also would worry the people over at Sensis - who I think would be bracing for their Yellow Pages business to cop an absolute pounding from paid search and its evolution into mapping, mobile and video over the next 3-5 years.

Ad News article (sub. req.) - http://www.adnews.com.au/News.cfm?NewsId=4689

Yahoo!7 alliance deals change

I've noticed that Yahoo! is back on board with Carsales and Seek for their Auto and Jobs alliance deals. Previously they were with Fairfax's My Career and Drive.

It appears they have retained their alliance with FD's Domain.

It also appears that they have abandoned their own branding (ie Yahoo! Jobs, Yahoo! Cars etc) in favour of just linking out to the partners external site.

Introducing the 'Printerstitial'

Want yet another digital ad format? No ... well, stop reading. If the answer is yes, you're in luck!

Introducing the 'Printerstitial', a new technology and ad placement developed by US firm Format Dynamics.

"Format Dynamics has perhaps invented a whole new ad category by developing a service that inserts ads into printouts of Web pages, combining the "advantages of online ads with the power of traditional print ads."

From MediaPost: "Format Dynamics estimates that U.S. consumers print 61 billion Web pages annually"

61 billion! That's a helluva lot of pages.

Mediapost again: "When consumers make printouts from Web pages enabled with Format Dynamics' "CleanPrint," the technology dynamically reformats the pages to be more appealing to both consumers and advertisers--including text, photos, charts and ads--while completely eliminating such Web-centric features as navigation bars. The PrinterStitials can either be print-friendly versions of ads already on the Web page or completely separate "print ads."

So what this essentially means is the technology cleans up printed html pages to be easier for users to read and ideally file, and easier for advertisers to include stronger ad executions.

It makes sense. If you print out a recipe (like I do often) from Taste like this - http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/6438/chocolate+mousse+cake - no ad appears on the printed page. Surely this has a value that the publisher could take to market to monetise? Same deal for Recipe Finder. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume both of these properties have thousands of pages printed a day of their content.

Sometimes ads do appear on the printed page. Lets say I print an article out from ninemsn Health about Nutrition - http://health.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=105204 - it will print out the frame on the leaderboard that was active when the print job processed. Not the best use of the space.

Fairfax have it nailed at the moment. Their print friendly versions have static gifs which carry the info they need to carry. http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2008/05/09/1210131209141.html

It would be very interesting to get an idea of how many pages are printed by Australians from web content ... and will be also interesting to see how the major publishers approach this. It's an interesting space - digital moving into traditional print ... but with technology and insights that could (essentially) create ads relevant to the users age, location and online habits.

Full article - http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=82093

Future of Journalism online: A must see Media Watch

A must see Media Watch aired on Monday night.

"The newspaper format is a dead duck" pronounced Guardian media columnist Roy Greenslade, as Jonathan Holmes presented a special Media Watch that looked at the future of journalism in an online world.

They aired opinion from Greenslade, Crikey publisher Eric Beecher and Fairfax's Mike van Niekerk.

The show covered a few core points ...

- the online news model isn't as profitable as the traditional news model (Beecher talked about the SMH in glory 'rivers of gold' times pulling approx. 40k per page in revenues ... whereas the same ads in a digital format don't pull in the same bucks. Beecher:"So the 40-thousand dollars that advertisers pay for a classified page in a newspaper becomes something like 4-thousand dollars on the internet. "
- Given the above, who is going to pay for the foreign bureau's and the quality journalism. Especially considering digital mediums are so trackable, that editors have the luxury of seeing in real time what is generating page views, and in essence, revenue.
- Are Fairfax's core mastheads - The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald - heading in a more tabloid direction

It was great to see the conflicting views of Greenslade and Van Nikekerk.

Greenslade: "It's not a matter of saying 'hooray' newspapers are dying, it is simply a factual matter of revenue."

Van Niekerek: "People who say that newspapers are on their last legs and are about to die are completely wrong in my view. I think that newspapers have a very long future."

Greenslade's view was that the direction of journalism was shifting. "In future there will be advertising, it won't be enough to fund huge staffs as there are now, but we'll have a core of professional journalists. We can fund them and then, in company - in participation with citizen journalists, bloggers, user-generated content, however you want to describe that, amateur journalists - that in company with them - crowd-sourcing, mash-ups, however you want to do it - that you will form a different kind of approach to journalism. "

Personally I think this is already well underway - especially in the US.

Holmes spoke of renowned US and European mastheads, and their lack of trash/tabloid content. Check out http://www.nytimes.com and http://www.guardian.co.uk/ and you won't see articles on Amy Winehouse smoking crack or Britney Spears having a meltdown.

However on the Fairfax mastheads digital versions trash isn't taboo. Media Watch cited one day where Fairfax ran the following on the homepage

Dolphin killed in mid-air trick
Balls up: Ronaldo's prostitutes turn out to be transvestites.
I had you babe: Cher tells Oprah of Tom Cruise affair.
Janet's GLAAD about award— Sydney Morning Herald online, 29th April, 2008

Mike van Niekerk: "Absolutely you will see some stories that will resemble entertainment, stories about celebrities, I don't deny that. They are there. And that's part of what we do, is entertainment, but we also inform. And the quality journalism is there and those stories actually represent a very small fraction." Mike van Niekerk

So where is journalism heading as more eyeballs migrate online and the essence of newspapers changes? And how can brands like Fairfax that actively sell their premium AB audience maintain that position whilst heading more and more tabloid to generate reach and frequency in an ever competitive marketplace?

Will the real 'premium' eyeballs (ie the high net worth people) migrate off the Fairfax mastheads and look to overseas sites like The Guardian and the NY Times? Or even The Australian - which is probably News Digital Media's most underutilised resource - great articles, solid readership and broad content (with no tabloid)

Whatever happens, it's happy days for advertisers. The options keep on getting broader and the reliance on 1 or 2 publishers to hit the 'newspaper' readers has well and truly gone. There are hundreds of options now and it's a positive thing. I can buy ad space on virtually any newspaper in the world and can do it within 24 hours. This is the case with all content verticals - from music to movies, gaming to social networks, business, finance, technology and everything else ... I personally feel that sometimes local publishers neglect to recognise this and almost expect advertisers to spend with them despite superior options (context, audience) being available offshore.

I am also interested to see whether Media Watch evolves to cover more journalism - professional, amateur and blogs - on the show. Sometimes I scratch my head in confusion when they will cover a sourcing error at a North Queensland local paper for 10 minutes yet seem to ignore the blog world ...

Anyway - it is definitely worth a watch. Download link is below.

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/tv/mediawatch/download.php?file=mediawatch_2008_ep12.wmv

Fairfax Digital launch The Vine

http://www.thevine.com.au

Personally I don't see the point at all as there are plenty of other sites easily accessible doing this much better and with more sincerity ... but hey, I am not in their target demo anyway.

Time will tell if the kids embrace this.