Hey Google, stop bringing me traffic damn it!

The newspaper industry has another great idea... read the Yahoo story here

Dear Newspaper Publishers;

I am not an "old media" basher, however suffering fools is not my strong suit. Please try hard to be not the fools yet again...

You ignored us when we said the pay for performance model was where the market was going and instead insisted on cramming the old CPM model into the new medium. $32.50 per thousand worked for a while, but the continuing advertiser churn caused by near-zero ROI quickly drove you to thirty-two and then to twenty-five. You added flashing, blinking moving things to annoy and interrupt more effectively but the rates continued to slide… twelve, ten, eight and soon, I suspect, to "Will deliver CPM for food" cardboard signs.

In the early days you managed to fool many of your print advertisers into buying CPM-based "bundled-buys" so they could breath easier having checked that annoying "new media thing" off their must-do media list. You watched your annual revenues grow year over last based on a wool-over-the-eyes ploy that allowed lazy media buyers to report to their even lazier directors that they had “it” covered as far as online goes.

Today accountability and ROI demand are on the rise. Most of those Banner-Ad-Betties have been fired or retired. You need to figure out how to hunt with rifles and loose the cannon’s. This is an interactive and highly transparent medium. Geo and buy-cycle targeted eyes are what we want to buy, not hundreds of thousands of scattered impressions served in page positions we have all been trained to ignore for at least 5 years now. Adapt or watch those print-to-web, migratory dollars again fly from your bottom lines because what you are selling is not working now, just as it did not work then.

What you sell as "local online" eyeballs is another problem for you.

Tracking and reporting technologies have caught up to you in a way no one (there anyway) ever saw coming. Just because YOU are local and YOUR company is local and you throw your paper on local porches DOES NOT MEAN your readers are local. In fact if your publishers were smart enough to ask to see your web logs and incoming visitor reports that are easily produced by the very companies you pay to track your online sites (Omniture, WebTrends, Urchin, others...) she would be horrified to discover that the geographic regions producing most of your traffic billed as “local” may not be local at all. Sorry, but a world wide web site with a local name is still available world wide. If your content is of interest to anyone beyond your foot-print, they too will come.

The shameful part is this; you know you have the ability to tell most local users from non-local users, yet you insist upon rolling all unique users and page view reports into one number and allow your shareholders and advertisers to ASSUME the best.

Imagine the local advertiser and stockholder outrage that would ensue if a daily newspaper were to see that based on the I.P. address tracking less than 35% of a local shopping section’s traffic were actually local? Print-gods forbid that any sort of online reporting bureau start to track these things the way they do print circulation. Imagine those top-line revenue figures after having to issue a 70% refund as the result of a class action lawsuit drawing attention to the fraud you allowed to happen while feigning technical ignorance. That would be a real problem indeed.

Until you are willing to employ a local-user targeting system (perhaps I.P. based? Oh yeah, you already have that….) or a street-address-verified registered user base to serve session based ads to, you are selling something that is almost certainly misleading, and a potentially a catastrophic relationship destroyer with your advertisers.

Which brings me to the point at hand - cutting off a HUGE supply of those online eyes that may actually be local because they used a geo-qualifier in their search string to even find you content on a search engine.

Again, turn to your analytics. Where are the users coming from? What percentage of traffic comes not only from the root search engine domains (Google, Yahoo, MSN) but from their search network partners too? Remove that at what is left? National sites like the Drudge Report and others that direct huge numbers from all across the planet.

While the entire world is figuring out a web 2.0 model for content syndication - push, feeds, XML and RSS, and various on-demand delivery models, you work to build the garden wall higher and strive to make the tiny-bit of non-commodity product you produce even harder to find buy extracting your content from the world’s info sorting machines.

Don’t be so constipated by your own internal politics that you allow that occasional nugget to be hidden from the online world. (That whole iron-curtain thing is so yesterday.)

Folks, the entire world has moved on and there you sit waiting for this "online trend" to pass and for all to return to the good old days of high margin publishing and vertical market domination. It is not going to happen.

Being the last dinosaur standing does not stop the ice age from occurring, it only guarantees ringside seats to your own demise.

Wake up. Please.

I for one still appreciate the early morning, aromatic effects of newsprint and coffee. (I’m not much of a fiber guy and I appreciate the chemistry…) At 42, I will still dig through pages of Associated Press blah-blah covering stories I was introduced to 5 times the previous day online, on radio and on my cell phone, to find the one or two truly local nuggets that make you still qualify as a member of my local media mix. I will still use your online vertical content for local stories and research.

But only barley, and like it or not your index page is no longer your front door – Google, Yahoo and MSN are. That is how we discover you have something of value to say to us.

Remove yourself from my daily search results for traffic, weather, local news and classified and you take one more step towards what is shaping up to be a slow-motion, Edsel-like place in media’s continuing march towards a terrifying concept for your publishers and editors – consumer choice. (Wow…all of that was in here at the end of a long week…I really do have issues. – Jim Bonfield – EyeballFarm.com)