We’ve been inundated with stories on how Twitter enabled the protests in Iran. Around the same time we were reading about China’s proposed requirement that all computers sold in China come with the “GreenDam-Youth Escort” Internet filtering software. On the one hand technology seemed to help the cause of freedom, while on the other it harmed it. Now China has backed down from the Green Dam requirement, saying it decided to postpone the mandate.

But this too was a victory for technology. If access to the Internet were not available in China (even though not totally open), and if technology companies didn’t see the huge potential in the growing (both in people and in wealth) Chinese market, opposition to the plan would’ve been muted. Instead, the Chinese people were against this rule and, as Dan Harris says on the China Law Blog, “…Beijing does NOT want to go against the people on something like this. Since there is absolutely no reason to believe the people will ever start liking something like this, there is absolutely no reason to believe the software will return.” (Despite Ministry statements to the contrary.) Dan also links to a Sky Canaves post in WSJ’s China Journal that discusses China’s “Politics of Consent.”

So again, another victory for technology. With the possible exception of North Korea (and even that can’t last much longer, can it?), technology has begun to bring freedom to closed and oppressed states around the world. In China’s case, we remember the country as scary therefore it remains scary, but the walls of oppression are crumbling and they can’t be rebuilt. For those worried about the effect of outsourcing to China on the US economy, there is only one answer - outsource as much as is profitable as soon as possible so we can turn them from hungry capitalists to satisfied capitalists. That’s when it becomes a consumer economy. And as Dan Harris says, “…I know movement has been slow, and I know it has been in fits and starts, but if we were to draw a straight line through the rises and falls, freedom is on a fairly inexorable march in China.”

Google News now allows users to search by author. With the exception of columnists, I think this is a relatively new desire. Not too long ago, readers cared about the newspaper - the brand - not the reporter. If the reporter was good enough to publish in, for example, the New York Times, that was good enough for most people. And since journalism is unbiased, fact based reporting (you know, journalism as a science) one good reporter was as good as another good reporter. Well, that’s all changed now.

We all recognize that unbiased reporting is impossible, as long as it’s done by humans, and with journalists blogging, guesting on TV and radio programs, and running their own web sites, we now get to see who they really are. The better we know a reporter, the better we can appreciate his reporting and the more we want to read his stories because they’re his. This is the rise of the journalist as celebrity. It began with TV (The McLaughlin Group was one of the early ones), where reporters blabbed to each other about current events and those with personalities became stars. But you really had to know someone to get those TV gigs. Now you can build your own following just like any other blogger (think about celebrity reporters Michael Arrington and Nick Denton).

Many newspapers are worried about giving their reporters too much play, afraid that the competition will go after them if they get popular in their own right. In the US there are probably only two destination papers - the New York Times and the Washington Post (and maybe the LA Times), so every other paper could have this worry if they wanted it. But it’s self-defeating. Think of good reporters like Moneyball suggested Billy Bean thinks of closers - not as irreplaceable as the industry thinks, with new ones coming up all the time. Why not have a strategy of creating celebrities out of your reporters, accepting a certain increased level of turnover, and backfilling with new potential stars when they leave? You’d get a great reputation among journalists as a star builder, voluntary turnover would lower overall salaries, and some of those stars would certainly stay anyway, building your reputation among readers. Give your reporters blogs, let them inject their own voice into stories, and make people want to read them. Will you dilute the company’s brand? I don’t think so - how can a better product dilute the brand?

• “‘All content consumed will be digital…’”
• “…within 10 years all traditional content will be digital.”
• “‘There are problems with digital advertising.’”
• “The old approach of simply trying to replicate a print newspaper online is doomed to fail.”
• “For media businesses to successfully evolve they must provide the right combination of context and relevance to make a compelling online proposition for consumers.”

All those quotes come from a Guardian article about Steve Ballmer, who was named the Media Person of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. How many times have we heard this stuff? One thing is pretty clear - the tech guys don’t have any answers. Oh right, I guess Ballmer is a media guy. But he doesn’t have any answers either. If the news industry maybe spent some more time thinking about the business model instead of how not to “replicate a print newspaper online” it might be better off today. All the gurus talked about the conversation and citizen journalists, but traditional news companies still get huge traffic. Compelling content doesn’t seem to be the problem right now, it’s how to make money.

Let’s take this idea of not replicating a print newspaper. True, that’s a bad thing, but didn’t Google just get all kinds of plaudits for trying to do just that with Flipper? Flipper, you know, like flipping through pages. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s not like print, it’s a visual representation.

The fact is, no one has any idea how media companies can make money online, although some people have ideas and experimentation has begun.  But the sooner we stop giving press to tech executives and pundits who simply burp out these bromides, the sooner we can all move on.

In a recent Folio article, Dan Blank makes a list of concepts he’s gleaned from attending three recent “Future of…” panels. The list looks like this:

• Broadcast media is dead.
• Print revenue is supporting online strategies.
• Media companies need to rethink their roles and make hard choices.
• There is a huge opportunity for journalists.
• The advertising model is not dead, but it is fragmented.

Some of these continue to beat a dead horse, but I’d like to think for a moment about the “opportunity for journalists.” Blank goes on to say, “The opportunity might not have as much financial value as it once did—but in terms of pure reporting—of serving the public and reaching niche audiences—the tools and reach are now available to all.”

On the heels of this article comes a post today on D/All Things Digital by Peter Kafka suggesting that the “online-only newspaper of tomorrow, for a decent-sized city, will have a staff of 20 people. That’s 20 people, period. Perhaps six of them will be ‘news gatherers.’” (This estimate comes from Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in.) Ignoring the issues raised by the pro-forma P&L in the post, let’s focus on the idea posited there that much of what the news organization will do is aggregate “a river of extra content created by local bloggers, Twitterers and lots of people who don’t even think of themselves as content creators, like people who post real estate listings.”

The third part of this little trilogy is an article in The Guardian today by Charles Arthur stating that “The long tail of blogging is dying.” Arthur sees fewer and fewer blog posts linking back to Guardian articles because, he believes, “blogging isn’t easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it’s to easier things that people are turning.”

Now, if I put all of these things together, I discover that there is a great, low paying opportunity for journalists in the news organization of the future which in large part consists of aggregating local blogs that are quickly dying out. Gee, I’ll bet media companies are salivating over that prospect. Seriously, who’s going to write all of this citizen journalism for free? How long will professional journalists stay with jobs that are low paying?

I’m not arguing that no one can report the news but “journalists,” or that media companies will ever be able to support big newsrooms again. I’m saying that we haven’t found the answer yet. Producing valuable writing every day is hard work and something that few amateurs (meaning they’re not getting paid for it) have the time or determination to do for long. Sure, people will always produce news bursts dealing with specific events, but that is far different than investing a great deal of time investigating a city council or a police department. It’s not whether someone is “qualified” to do it, it’s whether they have the time. And if they consistently have the time, don’t you find yourself wondering why? People will only do so much for free, and then they have to move on and get a job.

Yesterday, Microsoft program manager Dare Obasanjo posted this image to Twitter. The image is pretty self-explanatory, but it really sums up what’s been happening to nearly all newspaper and content sites as they’ve worshipped the high priests of the “new journalism.” The old, longer article is replaced with a top-ten list because we’re told to write something shorter, punchier, and in bullet points, all of which make the story work for today’s distracted audience. We ask the reader to send or recommend the article all over creation because we’re told content is social. The comments (and how true is the description!) are critical, we’re told, because it’s a conversation. And finally, information wants to be free, we’re told, so it must want to be surrounded by ads, hence the ad ghetto on the right side of the page. The only thing we’re missing is that the story should be written by a “citizen journalist” who isn’t paid for the work but will no doubt continue writing interesting, accurate stuff for free.

What makes the “Today” image so sad, is that each element has some validity to it, but taken as a whole it paints a picture of desperation. While the audience complains about boring, biased, or irrelevant content, sites throw spaghetti at the wall praying that something will stick. Maybe it’s time to worry less about the latest pronouncement from the altar and more about writing stories that people want to read.  And showing the audience how to find them.

Thinking about the Iranian election coverage, and the MSM’s difficulty with it, brings to mind an obvious rule: if an event makes you want to interview an eyewitness, forget it, you’re toast. Now eyewitnesses are also known as “the first reporters on the scene.” Your hope is to go in search of their reports and bring them to your audience, hopefully in a way that provides some context and coherence. That last point - providing context and coherence - remains an opportunity for legacy media. People usually don’t have the time, the inclination, or the ability to sort through thousands of reports coming through many distribution channels to understand what is true and false and exactly what is happening. If this context isn’t provided by someone, I’m afraid most people will just tune out.

The post-election protests in Iran are big news worldwide, but the US media seems strangely slow to take up the story. The information flow, however, highlights both the risks and opportunities for traditional media.

Most information on the protests is coming from social media sites. Twitter, as usual, is gushing with information and rumors (#iranelection). Flickr and Facebook are brimming with photos. YouTube is a center for videos, but has also been the target of some scorn for removing videos of police beating protesters. People are wondering if the site has been complying with Iranian government requests to remove material. This action, though, simply forced people to go to alternate sites. Some of the best reporting is found on local blogs such as Revolutionary Road. That blog also has some amazing photos.

Rumors abound as well as facts. At one point Mousavi (or someone managing his account) Tweeted that he’d been placed under house arrest, an assertion his wife later denied. Other sites and Tweets repeated reports of tanks in the streets and takeovers of military bases, suggesting the protesters could be arming themselves. With the governement ordering the foreign media to cease reporting, the only news will come from citizens. Internet and cell phone connections have also been disrupted by the government leading to Tweets of functioning Iran proxies.

With so much information, one has the feeling of being on the scene, looking out a window at what is unfolding on the street. You’re subject to the same images and the same rumors as those people actually in the country. And that provides the opportunity for the media.

It’s silly in circumstances such as these to not report on the existence of rumors, waiting to find out if they’re true. Everyone interested in the situation has heard them, so ignoring them doesn’t mean they go away. The opportunity is to distinguish the wheat from the chaff for the audience. Mention the rumors and say you’re tracking them down. Show the photos and videos. Tell your readers how to follow the story (Mashable has done a nice job of that).

Huffington Post is doing a good job of sorting things out for its audience. Reporting the Hezbollah rumors, true or false, tell us about the state of mind of Iranians and what they’re worried about. Sitting here in the US I wouldn’t have been wondering if the police are actually Lebanese Hezbollah, but after reading the rumor in comments and reports, it gives me a better understanding of what Iranians might be thinking. The New York Times is doing something vaguely similar, but in a much more sedate fashion.

Now is the time to be a curator for your audience. Tons of information is coming in from the scene, but none of it is yours. So what? Sort it and report it. How’s that for utility?

Mice in the front door and elephants out the back.  This is the picture painted by media executives when discussing the advertising revenue problems they face. An ever increasing inventory of display advertising has driven down CPMs making the possibility that online ad revenue could ever come close to matching offline revenue seem remote. While content companies earn pennies from online ads, they lose dollars as offline advertising shrinks.

While this growing online ad inventory reflects the endless supply of new online content sites, it also results from improved advertising tools and processes that now allow any site to easily sell targeted display advertising.  Ad networks aggregate sites, large and small, and sell demographically and behaviorally targeted audiences, making the quality of content found on those sites, they argue, irrelevant except for how well it attracts the target audience.  An advertiser that wants to reach a specific demographic no longer feels the need to pay a premium on a branded content site when it can buy an ad network and reach the same demographic on hundreds of small sites of sometimes uneven quality that happen to reach that demographic. (A recent Business Week article noted the trend.) We’ve gone from a world in which content is king to one in which content is irrelevant.

Or have we? If we look at extremes, it’s obvious that we’re not there. The Wall Street Journal still commands premium CPMs and mainstream advertisers still don’t advertise on pornography sites, despite the fact that porn consumers buy goods and services just like everyone else. So we’re talking about degrees here, but that still isn’t particularly comforting for branded content producers.  There must be more, and there is. The January Online Publishers Association study, Improving Ad Performance Online, showed that ad effectiveness is consistently higher on branded content sites than on other sites, including portals and ad networks. (Ad networks fared especially poorly in the study.) An April 2009 BrightRoll Video Advertising Report surveyed advertising executives and found that the most important factor in online video CPM pricing is “quality surrounding content,” suggesting that these executives also believe that video ads fair better on branded content sites.

Of course, when we talk about the performance of online display advertising, the bar has been set far too low.  The audience has trained itself (or publishers have trained them) to largely ignore banner ads which are often positioned in “ad ghettos.” Another way branded content sites need to distinguish themselves is by offering advertisers new ways to get their message across. A recent article in AdWeek discusses the efforts of sites such as The Daily Beast, Digg, and Meebo to move beyond the banner.

Ultimately, as Josh Chasin says in Metrics Insider, the question comes down to, “If I reach the same person with the same ad in two different vehicles, does the ad perform differently depending on the vehicle?” We have evidence to suggest it does, but with the popularity of ad networks in the current recession, it would appear that advertisers aren’t interested in that message. If branded content sites want to maintain and regain their premium pricing, they must do a better job of explaining why an advertiser should pay a premium above ad networks.

Writing on MAD, Tom Morton looks at the Big Idea. After the Big Idea went to ridiculous heights in the 1990s (ice cream companies with their own foreign policy), successful brands became known for connecting with consumers, not communicating an agenda. Yet Morton still believes we need big ideas.

Most importantly, brand owners need big ideas.  Not just to hold their campaigns together, but to hold their businesses together.

The biggest big idea in businesses is the strategy: how the business organizes its efforts to create value, where it over-delivers, what it sacrifices. As businesses become more sprawling, running them becomes more about steering through complexity.  Here the big idea plays a profound role:  it’s the strategy articulated in a catchy form. 

But when it comes to media, Morton says that “Media itself doesn’t suit Big Ideas.” To prove this point he says that “It’s instructive that Channel 4 and Google don’t have strap lines, and amusing that the most famous attempt at Big Idea marketing in television, ‘Fox News: Fair And Balanced’, is balls.”

Well, I don’t know about Channel 4, but isn’t Google’s well known big idea and guiding light “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” If this isn’t a big idea, what is? As for Fox, I would argue that its big idea has created its success. It’s “Fair and Balanced” mantra gives the organization a mission and defines the network so well that it has legions of both haters and lovers and is the most watched news network. Its genius is taking an idea that should apply to all media organizations and, by implying that its competition is biased, makes it its own.

Another example of a successful media company is CNN, which grew with the help of a galvanizing mission: “to connect audiences with the world wherever and whenever they want it.” When it launched, this was a big idea and it gave the brand a clear identity and gave the company a clear mission.

Newspapers though, are a different story. When journalism became a science, roughly marked by the American Society of Newspaper Editors Canons of Journalism in 1923, big idea branding ended in the industry. Now every newspaper had the same mission - reporting news “free from opinion or bias of any kind.” Even today, the industry tends to think of brand only in the sense of the brand of newspapers as a whole, not as individual products. There is much talk of brand equity, but it is assumed to be essentially the same for a newspaper in Pennsylvania as for one in California. William Randolph Hearst would have had no trouble with big ideas for his newspapers, but today’s journalists have been taught to denigrate that era of muckraking and Yellow Journalism. Yet the Founding Fathers’ view of the press was as partisan organizations, organizations with big ideas. Network news, which has been living through intense competition longer than newspapers, is now moving back to that model - conservative Fox, liberal MSNBC, and moderately liberal CNN. Only the broadcast networks, which are rapidly losing audience, cling to this idea of being without a mission.  In other words, they have no point of differentiation among themselves, other than trivialities such as the first woman anchor or splashier (i.e. more distracting) graphics.

There is, however, one newspaper brand that does have a mission, a mission to “become the world’s leading liberal voice.” This brand is the Guardian. Clearly the Guardian works to fulfill that mission, yet it is generally not perceived to be “biased” in the sense of distorting facts. It’s readers feel confident that the facts are correct and feel equally confident that they understand the viewpoint of the writer conveying those facts. It’s the confidence that comes with transparency.

But back to Tom Morton. Since he does believe in big ideas, although perhaps not for media companies, he lists five guidelines for adapting them for the “new media landscape.”

1. It’s More Important To Have A Point Of View Than A Line. “…the most useful Big Idea is a point of view than can inspire activities.”

2. A Big Idea Cannot Depend On A Line. “Translation, whether into different channels or different languages, is the priority.”
3. One Big Idea Doesn’t Mean One Big Execution. “The best way to manifest a Big Idea today is through a whole bunch of activity.”
4. Align Your Big Idea To Your Business. “A truly robust Big Idea should be rooted in how the business generates value, where the business is going, or in the culture of the brand.”
5. Match Your Brand Behaviour With Audience Behaviour. “Now brand strategists need to understand their audiences as consumers of media.”

So big ideas still have relevance, but need to be thought about differently in today’s media environment. I think there’s value in a big idea for media organizations, but ultimately it’s about staying true to that idea in everything you do across all of your channels. And galvanizing Big Ideas are in short supply right now.

In the winter edition of Nieman Reports Vivan Vahlberg of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University discusses her experiences with a focus group of 17 to 22 year-olds. Some good news emerges as this group “Trusted news about the election more from well-known news organizations than from other sources” and “Valued the expertise and reporting of journalists more than opinions or comments, even from other young people.” More interesting, though, was

what young people say about what makes them tune out on news sites: too much information, too many details, too many choices coming at them all at once without enough guidance as to which are more important; too much unrelieved text; stories that go on and on; endless coverage of trivial stories, and features that aren’t immediately and intuitively understandable.

In short - too much. Part of this problem has to do with the kind of content that is created, and part has to do with design.

• Too many things competing for attention, without signals about which was most important. They wanted someone (or something) to make choices. They wanted design to clearly signal priority.

• Too many details and words. They wanted things distilled so they could understand them better without spending lots of time, but they also wanted additional resources available if they’re interested.

• Too much text or too high a percentage of text to graphics. They valued information shortcuts.

• A site feature that’s not immediately understood. If a feature has to be explained, they don’t look at it.

• Pages or stories going on and on. Interest waned with scrolling.

Now think of just about every news site you visit. Aren’t they all an exercise in how much information can be crammed onto one page? There are competing priorities for any designer - expose the breadth of what is offered, while keeping the design simple. One solution may come through content structure, building simple pages that provide clear, obvious, and consistent paths to content. While users may be happiest when they get to their intended destination in the fewest clicks possible, they are also happy when they are confident that each click is getting them closer to that destination.

So it turns out that despite all of the complaining we hear, people, or at least young people, really do want editors. Not editors that hide certain content, but editors that expose certain content. Editors in the positive sense of suggesting the best of what the Web has, not the negative sense of only showing you what they think you ought to know. People want help, but they don’t want restrictions, and that principle has to carry through to design as well.

The paid content drumbeat continues with a recent article in Time by Walter Isaacson. After setting the stage by noting the strength of the newspaper content audience, more and more of whom get that content for free, he goes on to say,

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who “got it” by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was “the future.” But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.

He goes on to discuss Henry Luce’s belief that free publications are “morally abhorrent.”

That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication’s primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue.

Isaacson makes the usual arguments that aggregators and ISPs are siphoning away revenue on the backs of content providers, and then states his belief that in addition to subscriptions, publishers need a way to enable micropayments.

While it still seems unlikely that paid content could work for a newspaper web site, the time has come for it to be discussed in polite company. Free content has become a religion and those who think outside of the dogma are shouted down. In the early days of AIDS, a lot of governement money was spent convincing all of us that you could become infected by being near the wrong person when he sneezed. Those who suggested that certain groups were more at risk than others were shouted down.  It wasn’t until we were allowed to admit that there were high-risk groups that money and research began to be focused on where it could do the most good. Is free content journalism’s AIDS?

One problem, of course, is that even if paid content is ultimately a workable business model, those who try it first are likely to go down in flames. As long as the competition offers free content, it will be difficult to make paid content work. 

The notion that advertising supported content will give rise to a loss of “serious” journalism in favor of pop reporting is also problematic (and not obviously true).  With so many choices for information and entertainment provided by the Internet and cable TV, readers who prefer entertainment over news will simply not pay attention to the “serious” journalism paid publications can produce. These individuals cannot be force-fed their vegetables. Unfortunately, the same machine that seems to produce boring city hall story after boring county commissioners story, also uncovers the infrequent major scandal that everyone, even the entertainment lovers, want to know about. Not to mention that it is the knowledge that there is a news organization covering all of their monotonous activities that helps to keep public officials on the straight and narrow.

The question now seems to be, Can media companies put the horse back in the barn and close the door? As Isaacson says,

…we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.

The problem, of course, is that there is nothing quite so unique as your own text message. News in a free content world? Not so much.

The digerati politicati was giddy about all things changing after President Obama’s inauguration, with a Whitehouse blog providing key evidence that this would be a new governing era.  (For example, see here, here, and here.) So feeling like a boy heading to a new candy shop, I took a look at the Whitehouse blog, interested to learn a little bit about the inner workings and thoughts of the administration.

Well, how predictable was this: it consists of press releases posted by minions. Yesterday’s post is the text of Obama’s weekly address. (I suppose as a sign of change it’s no longer called the weekly “radio” address - that’s just so old fashioned. But who actually hears these things, anyway?) Now, even some of the “formerly giddy” are disappointed.

There is a lesson here, when even the masters of change have trouble changing - It’s never as easy as it looks.

Over at Mobile Opportunity, Michael Mace writes about the mobile phone taking over the PC:

It’s long been an article of faith for many mobile enthusiasts that
mobile phones are going to become the dominant means by which the human
race deals with the internet.

After quoting some of the voices saying just that, he lists two mistakes he thinks they’ve made:

–They’ve assumed the internet is a thing, and
–They have forgotten about Moore’s law.

He argues that “People do an incredible range of tasks that take advantage of the internet, some of them well suited to a mobile phone and some of them not.” As for Moore’s law, he says let it “continue to chew on the UMPC [ultra-mobile PC], and I think a PC will soon be within the reach of a working-class family in much of the developing world.”

Perhaps my favorite part is his assertion that

The idea that people in the developing world won’t want or need the
benefits of a larger screen and keyboard is patronizing. It assumes
that they’ll be content to be second class citizens for many Internet
services permanently.

The idea that the mobile phone won’t eat the PC doesn’t mean we no longer have to meet the needs of mobile users, it just means we have to continue to meet the needs of PC (and very soon TV) users.

Mace envisions a future of “smartphones with flexible screens and fold-out keyboards that can fulfill all of the functions of a PC.” Before that, I see a future of smartphones that simply plug into a screen and keyboard at home and in the office, eliminating the need for a desktop or laptop.

Alan Jacobson at Brass Tacks Design has offered some advice to newspaper web sites (and by extension, content web sites) on how to make online ads work.  After listing everyone who hates online ads (the list includes, well, everyone), he offers two main suggestions:

• “Change the pricing model from CPM to CPC.”

• “Forget about the user. Focus on the advertiser.”

He believes that to achieve focus on the advertiser a site must:

1) “Make the advertising message the primary visual on each page.”

2) “Limit advertising messages to one per page.”
     2a) Less comprehensive homepages to increase page views
     2b) Stickier sites to increase page views

3) “Serve up ads on a contextually sensitive basis, rather than willy-nilly.”

Jacobson makes some pretty good points here.  I’ve long thought that one ad per page, integrated into the design, would be more effective for both advertiser and reader. The “ad ghetto” that many sites use now results in ineffective ads and readers trained to ignore those sections of the site.  And that includes actual content placed there.  Jacobson’s idea of breaking out of standard ad sizes to create  more emphasis on the ad is good, but runs into trouble when the site is forced to ask advertisers to redesign their ads away from standard IAB sizes. Standards are created for a reason, and it is the very existence of standards that make non-standard ads more effective.

We’d all agree with Contextual ads and increased page views (to help make up for just one ad per page), even if they’re often easier said than done.

Jacobson’s suggestion to move from CPM to CPC pricing is a bit more problematic.  He states that “CPC works for Google. It works for Google’s advertisers. It will work for newspaper Web sites.”  I don’t think that’s an obvious conclusion.  Google adwords get such high click through rates because they appear when a user is actually searching for information or a purchase related to the ad.  Not so on content sites. Yes, a greater emphasis on ads should increase CTRs, but enough? If CPC works for search and it should work for content, does that mean that the only advertising we’ll see online, the soon-to-be dominant medium, is direct response?  That branding ads will die? Just because display ads, as currently designed and implemented have problems, doesn’t mean direct response only is the answer.

I and others have pointed out before that advertisers like CPC ads because they shift complete responsibility for the performance of an ad to the web site.  If an ad doesn’t work because the creative stinks, well, it’s not the advertisers fault, it’s the site that doesn’t work.  Measuring direct response on an ad for a product normally purchased after much research and finding a low CTR? Yup, the site doesn’t work.

I just don’t think the pricing question is as simple as move from CPM to CPC.  There may certainly be a place for CPC ads on content sites, but I’m not sure that place is everywhere.