Posted on August 22, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

Newspaper survival relies on free online content

The New York Times announced an agreement yesterday to employ the services of Rapt.com across the NYTimes.com website. The deal will help The New York Times achieve and sustain profit by monitoring and managing their business performance through Rapt’s proprietary advertising yield management platform.

This marks yet another move by a big media company to secure an agreement with Rapt and they now join the ranks of the Dow Jones and Fox Interactive Media in the plight to digital revenue.

What these three super-powers all have in common is the realisation that online advertising revenue is of critical importance to their survival in a previously dominated paper-based environment. The only way to achieve this revenue is to scrap the subscription based models and offer free content across their platforms and the agreement with Rapt ensures the tools are in place to effectively serve advertisers within the marketplace.

I found Rapt’s Vice President of Marketing, Ben Crain’s comment on the agreement very reflective of the shift we’re seeing in Global Media today. Crain is quoted on Wired.com’s Epicenter as saying

“These folks are industry leaders for a reason – they have great content. But the nature of digital media is unique, given the infrastructure required. All of those things combined present a problemset that can’t be solved with Excel and good intentions. The relationship between newspapers and their market is changing from the doorstep to the browser – and with the recent news of the end of the subscription model, the industry is exploring. If giving away content for free is the best way to use that asset, so be it.”

There is little doubt that there has been a slow uptake to online advertising in South Africa, quite simply because publishers have struggled to demonstrate the value to advertisers, however big media players need to gear themselves for the reality that is looming just around the corner. It’s not quite the evolve or die mentality just yet however, ignore at your peril.