Ads key as publishers move online

Magazine publishers are still trying to figure out how to monetise their digital content. The solutions are still fairly traditional, however. Five years from now, cost-per-thousand impressions will still be the norm, according to 39 per cent of top-level media executives who responded to a survey by Accenture in the first quarter of 2007.

Cost-per-action, or cost-per-transaction, was the second choice, favored by 21 per cent. Cost-per-click, a model that has come under much more scrutiny in 2007 in light of advertisers’ concerns about click fraud on the major search engines, was still anticipated as a viable business model by 12 per cent of respondents.

Exposure time, also known as stickiness, was proposed by nine per cent of the media executives, indicating that they took online content seriously enough to make it the basis of their business model.

When it comes to advertising online, these respondents overwhelmingly chose the mainstream media portals (86 per cent) as one of the top three areas on which they will spend the majority of their digital ad budgets.

The next two choices, user-generated content and social networking sites (41 per cent and 38 per cent, respectively) indicate these executives grasp what it means to be on the internet and that interaction with content is key for visitors.

Emerging platforms such as mobile and video gaming received stronger votes of confidence in this survey than in ones taken in other industries.