Newspaper is a wonderful invention that enables credible information sharing to the mass. Although it seems to be trivial, this bundle of papers has shaped the world we know today. It has displaced and replaced politicians. It has elevated the development of printing technology and typography. Forest disappears to print news. The amount of old newspapers generated everyday itself supported recycling businesses and created jobs. Most importantly, without the classified section in the newspaper, we probably still go door-to-door in our job hunt.
Okay, enough nostalgia. The world has changed. The amount of information has multiplied, but our time we have everyday stays the same. So who has the time to read newspaper these days? I know I don’t. In today’s digital standard, I expect only the most relevant and interesting news should be made known to me, in the most convenient ways to me. If I need take the trouble of buying and reading a paper, it is not a news not big enough to waste my time on. If we follow demand and supply theory, with the large amount of information that we have today, news should be free. Therefore, in the last decade I have only been reading free news from the internet and free newspapers.
Of course free newspaper tends to have more advertisements in it, but I don’t mind, because advertising makes the world go round. The advertisers pay the journalists’ salaries and the printing of the papers, so that I can read junk news while I’m sipping my coffee in the morning. Sounds like a good deal.
Until recently it occurred to me: This is a legal version of printing money. You see, the advertisement rates in media are determined by the audience type and size, quantified in ‘circulation’ (how many copies are distributed in the market), and ‘readership’ (how many people are reading the papers from the circulation). Mathematically speaking, the larger the circulation, automatically the larger the readership too. Now, if you are giving your newspaper for free to the suckers who like free stuff (yes, like me), basically you are setting your circulation and readership numbers according to the number that you pressed on the printing machine.
Here’s what you need to do if you run a free newspaper business: Employ a bunch of cheap journalists and an army of low-cost delivery staff. Throw in a handful of sales people to harass the potential advertisers, whom you get your money from. Then print the money, I mean the paper. Boom. Somebody found a loophole in the matrix.
The free newspaper guy was not the first who discover this. Directory provider like Yellow Pages was there first. Remember that thick, non-mathematical number book? I don’t see their directories running anymore, and I’m waiting for Yellow Pages to shut down. It cannot fight against Google or other extended or specialized online directories (e.g. Foursquare, TripAdvisor, HungryGoWhere). So it stopped printing directories, because it does not have enough advertising money to fund the printing.
So why do we still have free newspapers? And another important question: Why do we cut more trees just to print the same, boring news? It is not because “free stuff sells”, it is because we still have conservative, lousy marketers! Traditional media like newspaper can only give you indication such as circulation, and you cannot measure its effectiveness without giving coupons (read: discount). Moreover, in the case of free newspaper, the measurement of circulation is rigged. If you cannot measure its effectiveness, you are as good as wasting half of your advertising money. Go digital, track and get the ROI that you deserve, kill the free newspapers, save the trees.
Okay, enough nostalgia. The world has changed. The amount of information has multiplied, but our time we have everyday stays the same. So who has the time to read newspaper these days? I know I don’t. In today’s digital standard, I expect only the most relevant and interesting news should be made known to me, in the most convenient ways to me. If I need take the trouble of buying and reading a paper, it is not a news not big enough to waste my time on. If we follow demand and supply theory, with the large amount of information that we have today, news should be free. Therefore, in the last decade I have only been reading free news from the internet and free newspapers.
Of course free newspaper tends to have more advertisements in it, but I don’t mind, because advertising makes the world go round. The advertisers pay the journalists’ salaries and the printing of the papers, so that I can read junk news while I’m sipping my coffee in the morning. Sounds like a good deal.
Until recently it occurred to me: This is a legal version of printing money. You see, the advertisement rates in media are determined by the audience type and size, quantified in ‘circulation’ (how many copies are distributed in the market), and ‘readership’ (how many people are reading the papers from the circulation). Mathematically speaking, the larger the circulation, automatically the larger the readership too. Now, if you are giving your newspaper for free to the suckers who like free stuff (yes, like me), basically you are setting your circulation and readership numbers according to the number that you pressed on the printing machine.
Here’s what you need to do if you run a free newspaper business: Employ a bunch of cheap journalists and an army of low-cost delivery staff. Throw in a handful of sales people to harass the potential advertisers, whom you get your money from. Then print the money, I mean the paper. Boom. Somebody found a loophole in the matrix.
The free newspaper guy was not the first who discover this. Directory provider like Yellow Pages was there first. Remember that thick, non-mathematical number book? I don’t see their directories running anymore, and I’m waiting for Yellow Pages to shut down. It cannot fight against Google or other extended or specialized online directories (e.g. Foursquare, TripAdvisor, HungryGoWhere). So it stopped printing directories, because it does not have enough advertising money to fund the printing.
So why do we still have free newspapers? And another important question: Why do we cut more trees just to print the same, boring news? It is not because “free stuff sells”, it is because we still have conservative, lousy marketers! Traditional media like newspaper can only give you indication such as circulation, and you cannot measure its effectiveness without giving coupons (read: discount). Moreover, in the case of free newspaper, the measurement of circulation is rigged. If you cannot measure its effectiveness, you are as good as wasting half of your advertising money. Go digital, track and get the ROI that you deserve, kill the free newspapers, save the trees.
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