At the final panel at DeSilva+Phillips’ Future of Celebrity Media, NYT media columnist David Carr (pictured, right) posed the big question: at a time when there is unlimited online inventory and users are moving away from brands, can anyone — even celeb sites — make money right now?
— Think small, think targeted: Henry Copeland, Business/Technology Chief, PerezHilton.com and Founder/President, Blogads: “I imaging driving down a highway and the number of advertisers were growing. At the time, any idiot could make money. Only now, we’re waking up to the fact that there is an infinite supply of inventory. I think there’s going to be a lot of corpses next year.” Fred Mwangaguhunga, Founder & Editor of MediaTakeOut.com, “You have companies that need $10, $20 CPMs to run their business. where my business can run profitably at $1 CPMs. Maybe in better times, advertisers are more willing to pay higher for established brands. Our ad revenues, CPMs are up this year, mainly because we’re charging much less.” Bonnie Fuller, founder, Bonnie Fuller Media and Huffington Post blogger: “If you’re serving a need, serving an audience you know will connect with, the opportunity of the web is made for women. Traditional media is a one-way conversation. But if you can structure a five-way conversation, advertisers will pay for that engagement, especially if you can do it in a targeted way.”
More after the jump
— The personal and profitable: The panel began with a discussion of the value of media brands and whether the rise of blogs has eroded that. Copeland, who’s in the business of getting ad dollars to individual brands, told Carr that in the future, the NYT columnist will have his own brand and not have to rely on being part of a large organization like the NYT. Carr, half-jokingly pointed to his smaller Twitter following relative to that of Martha Stewart’s, responded, “The trends aren’t that good.” Fuller, “A lot of the old brands need to figure out how to personalize the way people receive information.” Sibyl Goldman, VP/GM, Entertainment, Yahoo’s OMG: “We picked up from Bonnie’s idea at Us, which was that ‘Stars are like us.’ The idea of us disrupting the old media flow of celebrity information is happening now. If you want to know about an event before watching it on TV, we’re better able to provide that. We’re not held down by the old strictures of reporting. And audience and advertisers do respond to it.”
Photo Credit: NY Times
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