Blogging: Thinking big by thinking small

Consider, please, these paragraphs from the Wall Street Journal:

But time may be running out. Now, for the first time, pure-play Web companies have the biggest share of the local online-ad market. In 2007, Internet companies had a 43.7% share of the $8.5 billion local online-ad market, while newspaper companies had a 33.4% share, according to the media research firm Borrell Associates. Just three years ago, newspapers had 44.1% of the local online-ad market. (Directories such as the Yellow Pages have 10.1%, and local television outlets 9.3%.)

Local media companies, because they are based in the communities they serve, would seem to have an edge over Internet sellers when it comes to persuading the diner or corner hardware store to take out an ad. But they have largely failed to convert that advantage into sales. Instead of tailoring their sales to local businesses, many newspaper companies initially focused on selling ads to bigger advertisers who were already buying space in their print products.

And this is Jeff Jarvis’ reaction:

Newspapers are losing their own core market because they didn’t understand the scale of the internet. They still thought mass when they should have realized that small is the new big. That is, online, newspapers still threw their lot in with the big advertisers who had been the only ones who could afford their mass products. They didn’t see the mass of potential spending in a new population of small, local advertisers who never could afford to advertise in newspapers but who now could afford to buy targeted, efficient, inexpensive ads online. There’s growth — yes, growth — there. But newspapers ignored that — apart from some half-hearted attempts to come up with crappy online Yellow Pages — and handed what should be their local market over to Google and other online companies that set up efficient means to sell a lot of little ads, which equals big revenue.

I look at PJStar.com, and I see a ton of local ads. I also see Google Adsense. I wonder what’s generating the most revenue for them? Does a Web ad on PJStar costs more or less than a comparably sized ad on the dead-tree version?

These posts only tend confirm my own current dissatisfaction with network ad sales. Local ads seem to be the way to build a site into something that generates real revenue. Networked ads — like Google Adsense, Project Wonderful and BlogAds — seem to be a way to generate beer and gas money at best.