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Recently I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Malaga --"The audiences are in charge: Are publishers listening?" The audience had students in their doctoral, master's and bachelor's programs, as well as a number of faculty. Below is a summary of the presentation. 1. The marriage of convenience between advertising and journalism is over. For proof, look no further than the graphic below, which shows that newspapers in Spain have lost more than 500 million euros in ad revenue since 2009, and that includes the revenue they get from digital. (The U.S. is very similar.) In the future, news media will need to develop a deep relationship with their users. The important thing will be not the quantity of eyeballs reached, as measured by page views and unique users, but the quality of the relationship with the users. Versi�n en espa�ol Read more �

As a professor, I often wonder what effect my class presentations are having on the minds of my students. Honestly, is it really possible for any human being to pay attention completely to a class for 45 minutes? Or does the mind wander? While I am explaining the theory of market externalities , every media company in the world is fighting for the attention of those students. These companies are desperate to attract eyeballs for their content and their advertisers' messages. They have developed ever more powerful tools to distract people from what they are doing and look at their smartphones. They use pings, vibrations, badges, flashing lights , lock-screen messages, and who knows what else. What human being could pay attention to me when they receive a notification on their smartphone that their ex has commented on their new profile photo? Or that there is breaking news about the latest silly statements by a president? It's no contest. Versi�n en espa�ol The Notification Exp...

Kinsey Wilson. Photo by Mary Kang/Knight Center AUSTIN, Texas -- One of the dirty little secrets in digital media is that the big numbers of page views and unique users touted by publishers are misleading at best . They overstate a publication's audience size and impact. Most visitors to a publisher's content are fly-bys : They stay for only a few seconds. And even if they stay longer than that, the vast majority come to a publisher's website only once or twice a month . These are not loyal users devoted to a brand. What is more interesting and meaningful, especially for publishers of serious news and information, is that the smaller number of loyal users -- who come frequently, linger, and read many pages -- is willing to pay for the content and other products. They identify strongly with the brand. Kinsey Wilson , editor of innovation and strategy at the New York Times , brought the point home last week at the International Symposium on Online Journalism when he mentio...

According to eMarketer , half the digital ad spending this year will be on mobile , a total of $29 billion. Advertisers want to know if their messages are reaching the right target groups of people at the right time so that ad dollars are not wasted . Some people are better targets than others for messages about, say, infant car seats, or trips to Mexico, or eye makeup, or Hummers. It is not a simple matter to measure Internet traffic, whether on the web or on mobile apps. But metrics matter to advertisers, who use them to determine the amount they are willing to pay for having their messages in a digital publication. (Versi�n de este post en espa�ol) Advertisers want to know not only the size of the audience, but its characteristics -- income, location, interests, spending habits, hobbies , and more. But for technical reasons, it is difficult to track a single user across all the devices they may use at home, at work or on the go -- smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop. Cookies,...

Editor's note: This post was updated 3 June with an eighth best practice. For the last seven years I have been interviewing and profiling successful entrepreneurial journalists in various countries of various socieconomic classes. I've talked to publishers and editors with staffs of as many as a hundred as well as some one-man/one-woman bands. The ones that survive and thrive after several years share some common practices: 1. They develop multiple sources of revenue. They embrace sponsorships rather than advertising, memberships rather than subscription paywalls. They recognize that they can't make money on standard cost-per-thousand or cost-per-click advertising rates. They seek sponsors who embrace their mission and core values. They monetize their audience by creating clubs or groups of members who support their journalism mission. They can actually charge much more than a subscriber would ever pay. Among other revenue sources: direct sale of products such as books, mu...

Eduardo Galan, "Emperor" of Revista Mongolia BURGOS, Spain -- Eduardo Galan is a bundle of contradictions. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, specifically the psychology of marketing. (Versi�n en espa�ol) He has a background in online business marketing. And he speaks very seriously about business models for marketing a media product. Yet he has the playful air of an adolescent who delights in mocking the pretensions and hypocrisies of Spain's political, business, and religious leaders, which he does in the satirical monthly Revista Mongolia . Onstage at the iRedes Iberoamerican Conference on Social Networks , he delighted the audience of several hundred with off-color jokes and humorous asides. In an interview with me afterwards, though, he sounded like any other media executive struggling to make a buck amid fierce competition. Read more �