What does that even mean?
The New York Times has a gem of a brain-twister this morning in a report on media spending by consumers. Here’s the paragraph:
An interesting shift occurred in 2008, the report said. For the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines.
I find this a) hard to believe, and b) a false comparison.
Starting with a), there is the question: for the first time? Would one like to travel back to the 1700s with me and take a look at the amount of time spent with books vs. newspapers and magazines?
Then there’s b. While cable television is partially subscriber-supported, there are also large swaths of the cable landscape that are all about advertising (just pop onto a cable channel between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. and try to find actual entertainment or news content). Is this report claiming that cable television channels are not primarily ad-supported? Only in the premium channels (HBO, Showtime, etc.) The basic cable channels are primarily ad-supported with some help from the subscription fees.
There’s also this paragraph, which seems to argue against the decline in advertising spending:
In the report, Veronis Suhler breaks down the expected performance of the elements of each area of marketing and communications. Some of the fastest-growing ones are creative strategies that have lately gained favor among marketers. They include paid product placement, with a compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2013 of 17.6 percent; e-mail marketing and in-game advertisements (both 18.5 percent); mobile advertising outside of texting (33 percent); paid interactive television gaming (38.7 percent); mobile advertising and content tied to broadcast television (35.5 percent); mobile gaming and advertising (46.2 percent); and Internet and mobile home video downloads (34.4 percent).
I may be missing something semantically here, but most of those categories are about advertising, with the exception of video downloads.
Either way, the report shouldn’t be a welcomed one for news media looking to move to a pay-model on the Internet.
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