Boom. Bust. Boom.
I displayed the little totem pictured to the left in my office for the past 7-8 years as a constant reminder to myself and anyone who came to visit of how things aren’t always what they seem. Flush times could simply be masking bad ideas and stupid money. Tough times can present opportunities to think different(ly).
The only constant is that, in the words of Don Ameche’s character in the David Mamet movie, “things change.”
Right now, we’re all living through a big change. In a downturn, money dries up. People spend less. Businesses advertise less. News organizations struggle to cover their markets on less revenue.
But even in the current tough scenario, online looks to grow in the coming years. We’ll see if the predictions hold, but recent prognostications by some key analysts, while ratcheting their projections downward, still hold out hope for mild improvement in digital ad revenues.
The problem is, of course, that these are just projections. You have to look only as far as last December to see how far ad projections can be off when conditions on the ground change.
But if we don’t invest our efforts and our dollars where the growth is, we might as well pack up and go home.
This “news” on NBC site is nothing but a cheap trick
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I saw this on nbc.com:
…and I can’t help thinking that the ad on the right – made up to look like a news update, right down to the “updated 8 min. ago,” is horribly wrong. Is NBC so hard up for money that it’ll allow its site to carry deceptive ads dressed up as fake news?
(Edit to add: ten minutes later and I can’t get the ad to show up again, so maybe it just slipped through the cracks and someone at NBC killed it. That position seems to be filled with a lot of remnant advertising.)


