It seems every local media convention these days invites at least one industry speaker who gives an apocalyptic vision of the future and incites executives to fire up their digital strategy - without saying exactly how. That role at the Association of Alternative Weeklies 2011 Web Conference last week fell to Leon Brody, who works for but apparently did not want to officially speak for, the sports and media conglomerate owned by Denver billionaire Phillip Anschutz. Besides the Lakers basketball team, Anschutz also owns the Examiner.com sites. (Oddly, Brody's employer was not identified in the brochure and he asked a roomful of editors not to Twitter his remarks, due to the "very private" nature of his company, but I digress). Brody argues "human behavior has been fundamentally transformed" by social media and outgrown institutions developed during the industrial revolution. Trying to fit our behavior into our lives is like trying on a twenty year old prom dress. He identified a broad swatch of affected (outdated?) institutions ranging from education (36% of high school students will drop out) to government,media, global politics, dating and marriage. The many-to-many communication platforms represented by Facebook and Twitter (he noted 3000 Tweets per second as the Lakers played in the NCAA championship) is not only replacing many-to-one media but also altering our very brain chemistry (he showed some neat heat maps of brains "on technology"). The resulting 'bad fit' between human behavior, and, essentially, everything else, is eroding three hundred years of societal fabric and is merely expressed by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt ("the very institutions came into question and crumbled from the inside out") as well as declining ad sales. You get the drift. more

I've been finding it helpful with clients and members to divide the kinds of revenue available - and their assets - into two buckets: Those driven by traffic and those driven by sales. That … more

I'm a sucker for good writing and Sterling is usually dry as a bone. Not bad writing, just... clinical. Detached. After all he's writing about technology, right? Until he got his new iPad. For … more

Filtering through case studies from around the country, some common threads emerge:

• More large media companies, like the Washington Post with its The Capitol Dish group deal (posted here this week), are tackling verticals in their own markets as a way to compete with directories and group deal providers. Look for categories that are strong in the market and have an appetite for the business model. It may be restaurants in D.C. and outdoor sports in Portland.

HealthDeals, a group deal vertical launching via a partnership of Revolution Health, Mayo Clinic and Drugstore.com is one example of a new national play that will start in New York City and enter the top ten market loop shortly. Its easy to envision how  a local vertical that is female-focused and includes the beauty category may work in a market like Los Angeles - the appetite is there and the group deal model has some of the highest ROI in this category. 

• Smaller markets and media companies may simply not have the critical mass to verticalize a group deal. But they have the advantage of lead time before national providers with crack sales teams (and SuperBowl ads) penetrate their ecosystem. more

Borrell & Associates released an local online advertising study today that shows an interesting trend. Television sites gained about 1.1% market share of local online advertising dollars away from newspaper sites last year, and 22 broadcast sites are larger than print sites in the same market. more

Native advertising - essentially ads designed to mimic editorial content - was a key theme at both the recent National Association of Newspaper's MediaXchange and Folio-produced Media Mash-Up. But though lucrative, this practice can undermine reader or viewer trust can have a long term incidious influence. Here are some examples of native advertising efforts good and bad, and some general rules to follow: more

"When someone like me tells you how to run your business you should tell them to go to hell. But let me finish." That was Rishad Tobaccowala, the the visionary Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer of Vivak, speaking at the opening session of MediaXchange, a Newspaper Association of America (NAA) conference. In general, Tobaccowala predicts the print part of print will continue to decline by 4 to 6% per year, but that newspaper companies are big and strong enough to preserve their role as chief community connector. more

A funny thing happened on the way to the iPad app store: Newspaper executives began thinking about ad design in a more serious way. In short, pretty became profitable. Briefly put, local media on the iPad is … more

Several of you responded to last week's blog (below) on the effect iPads may have on local media's, well, low self-image, if you will. The importance is not just psychological, it's financial. And it's just starting. The iPad yields a $45 CPM - reflecting a combination of the demand, scarcity, novelty and high-end demographics involved. We are gaga over the iPad because these CPM's are not only much higher than mobile CPM's (hovering in the $15 range) but also reconstruct a viable business model out of the ashes. Banner ads on local media computer-based sites still hover in the $6 range for a large site (if you combine remnant inventory with premium positions.) Even in their hehday, alternative weeklies (my personal background as a publisher is in this category) only commanded $36 CPM's and that was back in the 1980's. Smaller circulation meant these maverick weeklies could still trump dailies by offering the low whole dollar pricing that small businesses cared about most. Community weeklies also played this game, using low whole dollar prices to mask huge CPM's. But that was a long ago time ago; a solid $22 cpm (yield/circulation/thousands) is viable for a print weekly in 2011 more

Just returning from the 2010 Geodomain Expo, where a number of new ventures surfaced, including Groupon offering to partner with local media and a couple of small city.com sites that are doing very good things. But one interesting attempt to breathe some life into the market of passive domainers is "City in a Box," created by Fred Mercaldo to appeal to the, well, lazy money in the industry. Just five years ago, Fred Mercaldo was in the golf and travel business, with a little real estate thrown in, and as such was one of the biggest advertisers on Scottsdale.com. So it seemed logical to him to buy the domain (he already owned a small, valuable portfolio) and develop it himself. Today the site, designed as a city guide, has a solid $800,000 in revenues, mostly from travel, golf and real estate, plus directory upgrades. Mercaldo decided to market the platform he developed to other domainers, and sold the platform for $12,500 each to eight small domainers who also own city names and work them as small businesses. The sites are designed as city guides; some local news is piped in via RSS feeds from partnering media sites. He decided to call the software "City in a Box" and market to some domainers who are inactive publishers by offering to sell the advertising, too. It works like this: Mercaldo takes a 75% revenue share until the $12,500 is paid for, then the cut shifts to 50/50. His first partner, Nate Cohen, of State Ventures, LLC owns 40 city sites. Mercaldo also plans to earn a revenue share on the eventual sale of the sites in which his company sells the ads, based on their increase in value. He says he and Cohen agreed that Ranchomirage.com a city site in Arizona was worth $30,000 before being monetized and has a target sales price of $150,000 after deploying City in a Box, which he'll split if the domain is sold. By targeting passive domainers, he figures he can roll-out 40 cities a quarter, 80 by the end of the year and 150 with in 18 months. That's a tall order, but it shows there's still cake left at the table. more