4 replies to this topic

[robertclough]

http://www.internetn...cle.php/2240941

Snippet:
The one-year deal calls for Overture to provide algorithmic and paid search, as well as contextual text-link advertising.

[markymark]

I think this confirms that Overture's combined algo/paid package includes Fast for the algo search - which is exactly the package they're delivering to Freeserve too. Wonder what they/Yahoo are going do with AltaVista then.

[Matt B]

Overture believes the market for such advertising could be worth $2 billion in five years.

Pshaw! A measley 2 bills? Is that all?

Interesting deal, as Knight Ridder has a pretty slice of the newspaper market. I wonder what the online readership rates are?

[Scottie]

Our local paper is Knight-Ridder and they use a subscription model for news older than 7 days. From what I know, it's not a profit-generator for them.

I actually worked with the local paper about 2 years ago on an online payment system (for real and online subscriptions). The individual papers were set up with a lot of autonomy as to how they wanted to handle their online presence. Basically, corporate didn't think much of the web and let them do whatever they liked. Bottom line: I don't think you can get good results from "Knight-Ridder" as a company because there are going to be some geographic areas that are strong and some that are weak.

There was a movement by several Knight-Ridder papers to band together and standardize software and layouts but it was voluntary. I would think they might have gotten their act together by now.

I tried to convince the local guys to open up the archives to search engines but they were not interested. They felt there was money to be made in charging for archives as well as charging for advertising... IMO, they should have focused on advertising or mini-websites/business portal or some other revenue model and made the information available.

Print media wants to do the same thing online as they do in the real world. They have trouble getting their mind around the concept of alternate ways to monetize their content.

In any case, current news is freely available (here) and I'm sure it gets a fair amount of traffic. I see this as an excellent opportunity for people using Overture to target geographic-specific keywords and get real results.

Good move Overture!

[Matt B]

And as long as newspapers try to monitize by the user, it'll be a catastrophe. I worked in the Newspaper software business for a while, so I kept up with what was happening in the web side of things.

There were many products in development that would translate content from print to the web via XML a couple years ago, the main problem seem to be "paper thinking" in a web world. Because print revenues are down, they are looking for ways to monitize, so the web is the whipping boy to make money, which unfortunately, IMO, leads to many mistakes.

The NY Times was one of the first to figure it out, as they really turned around the web side, but that was because they started thinking like the web, rather than managing the web like a paper.