It's hard out there for magazines. Print advertising revenue has dropped 25 percent since 2008 as advertisers move over to digital, giving observers a lot of reason to believe that the print world is in deep trouble.
Hold that thought. Mary Berner, CEO and president of MPA - The Association of Magazine Media, isn't convinced that the naysayers know the full picture. Since joining the MPA in late 2012, she has pushed for magazine companies to decouple their identities from the printed page: Magazines should be selling "magazine media," not just print products themselves.
"We're in the business of disseminating content through our brands. That can be anything from a print magazine to a video, to a digital experience," she said.

Ads at the top of the page are most valuable. Attention spans on mobile devices are gnat-sized. Increasingly, what you thought you knew about the Web is turning out to be untrue when held up to the scrutiny of real data.
Premium sites are no better at getting people to pay attention to their ads.

On the heels of comScore's news last year that half of display ads aren't being seen, Chartbeat looked at the time people spend exposed to ads on premium publisher sites, on the basis that exposure time correlates with ad recall. It found that more than 50 percent of so-called viewable impressions are only seen for 1-5 seconds... 

There's a saying that's almost as old as advertising, and you've probably heard it dozens of times. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Some attribute the quote to John Wanamaker, while others say it was William Lever who coined the famous phrase. For our purposes it doesn't really matter who said it or exactly how it was worded because, as marketers today can tell you, the sentiment still holds water, even in a digital world where just about anything can be measured.

Sometimes, you see the train wreck coming.
Tony Ridder, the last CEO of Knight Ridder, saw the classifieds pileup ahead and would talk about it in our company meetings by the mid-'90s: the replacement of print classifieds with databased, searchable online listings. To their credit, he and his cohorts at Gannett, Tribune, Washington Post Co., Belo, McClatchy, Times Mirror, the New York Times Company [updated after omission], and Central Newspapers (bought by Gannett in 2000) invested in and built out several competitive "digital classifieds" companies.
Now, one of those companies - Cars.com, built out in 1998 - is up for sale. That sale tells us a lot about the experience of newspaper companies on the web. Just as importantly, it raises new questions about those companies' abilities to wring future revenues from auto dealers. As one industry insider puts it: "It will be a disaster at the operating level." In fact, one could make the case that the likely sale is both a prudent move and burning down part of the house to get firewood.

Schadenfreude broke out among some publishers today when Digital First Media killed an ambitious interactive publishing initiative and commenced layoffs to bolster the bottom lines of its newspapers in a reported plan to groom them for sale. 

But no one should be happy that Digital First hit the wall. All this episode proves is that digital publishing - which remains the only imaginable way forward for newspapers and other legacy media - is even harder than we think.
Digital matters, because modern consumers - even those over the age of 55 - prefer to ingest news on a panoply of platforms including computers, smartphones, tablets and smart televisions. Even the American Press Institute, an arm of the Newspaper Association of America, recently concurred that "the majority of Americans across generations now combine a mix of sources and technologies to get their news each week."

Email marketing has always been one of the most important weapons in the B2B marketer's arsenal. It is estimated that over 122 billion emails are sent every hour, and 68 percent of marketers say that email marketing is vital to their business. Email is ideal for engaging B2B customers and prospects individually, but email marketing in 2014 has evolved significantly since its inception.
It is important to understand how your B2B audiences use and respond to email in general in order to know the best ways to reach out to them. Follow these 10 best practices for B2B marketers looking to leverage email for customer engagement, acquisition, retention, CRM and more, and reap the rewards of increased response rates and higher overall engagement.

Media organizations are hiring again. Promising young reporters are leaving stalwart publications for new newsrooms. And venture capitalists are pouring millions into nimble publishing startups. It's a rare moment of optimism for an industry accustomed to doom and gloom.
"When we started, investors did not want to invest in anything that involved journalists or reporters or other professional people creating content," said Jonah Peretti, the chief executive of BuzzFeed, which launched in 2006. "Everyone just said, 'You can't get venture capital if you're hiring people who make content.'"

The method that someone uses to get to a news web site is a major indicator of their behavior once they arrive there, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The analysis of comScore data on desktop and laptop traffic to 26 top news sites finds that direct visitors-those who come to a site by typing in a URL or clicking a bookmark-behave quite differently from those who use search engines or social media to get to news. 

When top digital-advertising executives descended on Palm Desert, Calif., last month for the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Annual Leadership Meeting, one topic dominated conversation from start to finish: fraud. In the hallways and onstage, the industry's leaders made it clear that the problem was out of control and needed to be stopped.
The ad industry loves to talk a big game when it comes to fighting ad fraud. But when it comes to actually doing something about it-bounties or otherwise-the story is much different. Fighting fraud costs money, and just about every company in the ecosystem can benefit in some way from it. The rational decision for most is to look the other way.

Newspaper publishers charting their long term future need to leave themselves more entrepreneurial breathing room, even for models that disrupt their own business lines. 

When Swift Communications three years ago made the risky-looking decision to move all its core functions-advertising, circulation, content management and Web platforms-to the cloud, and to outsource or centralize much of its production, its balance sheet lost plenty of expenses. But the organization found something in the process, says President and CEO Robert Brown.
"It's been quite successful in the sense that we what we've really found is the ability to find pockets of excellence," Brown said. Standardizing advertising, content and circulation platforms has made processes measurably more efficient and transparent, and focused efforts on the best opportunities to serve advertisers and readers, he said.