From The New York Observer, 2/13/06:
http://www.observer.com/20060213/20060213_rebecca_dana_pageone_nytv.asp
By Rebecca Dana
Quietly, on the Internet, the terms of the cable-news ratings battle
have been reversed:
Web audiences flock to CNN.com and MSNBC.com, while FoxNews.com trails
badly.
Even more quietly, that Web traffic is rescuing the finances of the
trailing networks--supplying tens of millions of dollars a month.
For all its struggles in the TV ratings, CNN is still reporting
revenue growth.
That’s due to money from online advertising, according to CNN.com
senior vice president and general manager David Payne.
"You gotta show growth," Mr. Payne said.
"And right now, all that growth is coming out of interactive."
At MSNBC, the MSNBC.com Web site sometimes earns more in monthly ad
revenue than the cable channel does, said Kyoo Kim, the site’s vice
president of sales.
On Feb. 3, BusinessWeek reported that MSNBC and CNN have been beating
Fox on the Web in Nielsen online ratings.
On Feb. 6, CNN supplied The Observer with its own internal
traffic-tracking numbers:
According to the site’s data, CNN.com had 1,313,592,095 page views in
January 2006.
Nielsen’s Net Tracker records about half that--a discrepancy commonly
lamented by Web executives, who are able to monitor exactly how many
hits their sites receive.
MSNBC, by Nielsen figures, has similar page views to CNN.
Meanwhile, Nielsen credits FoxNews.com with about 200 million page
views a month; FoxNews.com head Bert Solivan estimated that the actual
figure is more than double that.
That would put the Web leaders ahead of Fox by not quite a billion
page views apiece.
Those numbers translate into money.
Though the networks won’t discuss figures for online advertising
revenue, it’s possible to make some estimates--based on how much they
charge for ads and how many times the ads are seen.
________________________________________________________
One can take only so much of FUX News' fascist *****.
Harry
CNN.com charges between $9 and $30 for 1,000 page views of a display
ad. (For comparison’s sake, a 30-second spot during Anderson Cooper
360 costs around $10,000, according to one television buyer. That
means an advertiser would pay around $16 to reach 1,000 viewers.)
Assuming the cheapest rate, $9, and assuming a single ad per page, the
site would make $12 million per month, at the very minimum.
In truth, CNN.com often has at least two display ads per page, and
sometimes the whole thing is sponsored by a single company. On Feb. 6,
for example, AT&T owned every ad on the home page.
Other intangibles muddy the algorithm: discounts given advertisers,
graduated rates for targeting specific audiences (sports fans, for
example) and click-through ads, which pay only when a viewer chooses
to click on them.
Nevertheless, given the ad density and the prices, it’s safe to guess
that display ads alone make tens of millions of dollars for CNN.com
and MSNBC.com each month.
And that doesn’t include the priciest part of Web advertising: video
ads. Last month, users watched 26,862,029 clips on CNN.com, according
to the network. At prices between $35 and $45 per thousand views, the
10-second ad spots attached to each clip would have brought in an
additional million dollars, at least, for the network.
All of this makes up a growing share of the networks’ total yearly
revenue. In 2005, CNN grossed $794 million in revenue. Fox made $574
million; MSNBC made $258 million.
“The data is pretty clear,” said Mr. Payne. “The broadcast-news
ratings chart just drops and drops and drops. For cable, it’s probably
less dramatic, but it’s still true. There’s just no doubt in my mind
that online usage is going to dominate in the future. Whether that’s
20 years from now or five years from now, I don’t know. But it’s going
to win in the end.”
CONTINUED
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You may reach Rebecca Dana via email at: .
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