The trouble with localisation on the world wide web

Google makes money with advertising. So why doesn’t your news site?

The engineer who co-founded the communications protocols for the Internet said Monday that he doesn’t know.

“Young people don’t pay for Gmail or Google Docs,” Vint Cerf said. He is responsible for enabling new technologies on the Internet for Google.

“They basically get all that for free. … And people pay us to present their ads. The model seems to work for us. So why isn’t it working for journalists?”

Speaking in front of 200 participants at The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism, Cerf (on right) talked about journalism’s failure to make money with advertising on the platform he helped enable during the 1970s.

His keynote, which followed IJ-6 host David Nordfors’ welcoming remarks at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, also touched on the immediacy the Internet fosters.

In a brief “engineer’s history of mass media”, Cerf linked the proliferation of powerful one-way mediums like radio and television with the (still) rising importance of local audience.

“That was an important property because advertisers can take advantage of locality. Advertisers want to reach an audience they care about,” he said.

Terrestrial radio advertisers in particular must target their ads at to the geographic location of their audience. Indeed, in times of economic stability, print and broadcast journalism has been able to make money with demographically specific advertising.

But when a news product has a potentially global audience, as it does on the Internet, it’s hard to know whom the advertisements would be for, Cerf said. This problem must be solved.

“The journalism of the future has to lay in an advertising model,” he said.

Perhaps advertisers and content creators have not yet fully adapted to the personal, targeted nature of the Internet.

This individualised experience of a medium that transcends time and space presents a great deal of immediacy for advertisers and journalists.

Consumers of journalistic output are in a position to act instantly, in real time.

Transactions (financial and otherwise) can happen within the medium of the Internet, unlike mediums like magazines. Book lovers, for example, can purchase or download titles online.

That said, perhaps the role of journalists could (should?) be to increase transactions online.

“The immediacy and opportunity to do something with the information you’re getting places opportunity on shoulders of the journalist,” Cerf said.

Posted on May 19, 2009 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under events.