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Will Ad Coop Help Monetize News?

Is better tracking technology the answer to newspapers’ woes? That seems to be Alan Mutter’s premise with his recently announced ViewPass. Mutter, who writes Reflections of a Newsosaur, is not proposing a simple widget here, but what appears to be a sophisticated business coop.

The idea is to create a single, branded logon for multiple news products. After registering, readers would go about their normal surfing to favorite free news sites. Readers also can buy individual articles, subscriptions or bundles of content from sources that do charge.

The key to ViewPass seems to be a central database for tracking reader behavior to better target ads. That in turn would lead to bigger profits from advertisers happy with better results. By the way, targeted ads is nothing new; Mutter is just proposing a methodology for unifying the thousands of solutions already out there.

Under Mutter’s vision, ViewPass would be owned by multiple news organizations – broadcast, online and print – in a coop form. If ViewPass gets large enough, the news industry would finally have serious negotiating clout with advertisers, search engines and other service providers.

If you’re eyes are glazing over, I understand; this is biz side stuff instead of writing, reporting and broadcasting. But it’s important to remember: the problem with journalism is not on the editorial side, but the financial side.

Additional:

Alan Mutter’s Plan for Newspapers Is an Industry-Owned Ad Venture View Pass: Aiming not Only to Help Charge Online but to Increase Ad Revenue

Rediscovering the Worth of Journalists

Do journalists really deserve low pay as suggested by media economics professor Robert G. Picard in his Christian Science Monitor article? Only if journalists find a new way to create value for readers, he writes.

The problem, Picard points out, is that technology makes it so easy to publish and so easy to find free, duplicated content that it’s difficult to assign any real value to journalistic endeavors:

Put Your Blog on Kindle!

Here’s an interesting idea: you can monetize your blog through the Kindle and compete with the big boys. Sure, you only get to keep about 30 percent of the revenue, but it is more than zero!

Because you cannot use your existing Amazon accounts, you must create a new one. The entire process took me 10-15 minutes.