Sunday, January 30, 2011

Sioux Falls | What happened to the 'cleaner' look?

Here's a screenshot I just took of South Dakota's Argus Leader homepage, as the Sioux Falls paper promotes its new website as "cleaner, faster, better." That yellow-and-red South Dakota Furniture Mart wallpaper advertising challenges the cleaner claim, however. (Click on the image for a bigger view.)


4 comments:

  1. Hey Jim - did you click on the banner?

    No? I didn't think so. That's the flaw in counting on the internet as a major source of advertising revenue - people don't click on the ads! Think about it, 99.9% of the time you NEVER click on an internet ad and you think the ads are pain in the ass.

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  2. National average is around 0.05% (so un-clicked ads average slightly higher than 99.9%).

    Interesting: When site skins were still new, Gannett specifically mentioned them as a forbidden ad type in their online advertising policy. They also refused to allow resizing ads (like the sponsorship position that would supersize on mouse over). Likewise, it was verboten to put anything but a sponsor's logo in a sponsorship position - well, unless you were the Gannett national ad team - who frequently broke their own rules, but would shut down local websites who followed their lead.

    Not sure the status of Argus, but many local gannett markets have already completely forfeit their control of local ad placement on their websites. Honestly, I doubt this is a cost cutting move as most of the ad serving was done as very small part of an employee's job. Could be the mantra "hyper-local" was a smoke screen to cover their making everything a local USA Today portal sites.

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  3. What would happen if Gannett unleashed publishers to innovate and to go for the money they thought they could get with their own mobile/web/app/print strategies with their own risk-taking. Are publishers allowed to be publishers?

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  4. 8:11PM, no not anymore.

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Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."

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