What will happen with the Newspaper Industry?  Is the Huffington Post contributing to the death of print?  Betsy Morgan, CEO of the Huffington Post, thanked Henry Blodgett, CEO of Business Insider, for the softball question he posed as moderator for the panel.  Betsy shared, “We have a hybrid model with tremendous amount of original blog content – 10K in bloggers posting.  Readers come for the original thinking and individual view points.  This is something you don’t always get in a traditional newspaper where content is more controlled to reflect the brand of the paper.  It was noted that the Huffington Post is closing-in on the Washington Post in terms of views or unique consumers of information.

Brian Quinn, VP/GM Digital Ad Sales of the WSJ is also looking for ways to manage growth in this new era of The Huffington Post.  He is particularly expanding paid subscriptions through partnerships with such ad players as Google.  Paid subscriptions are up for WSJ- however it is by personal subs not business expensed subs.  Brian stressed that both paid and non-paid (free) are treated with equal respect because clicks are still clicks.  Paid is just another great revenue stream.

Henry Blodgett then hit on advertising asking if advertising without click-throughs can be valuable. Isn’t brand view critical?  Are we putting too much interest in click action rather than intellectual consideration of a display ad’s brand set that includes the iconography, the message, and the perception?

David Cohen, EVP of Universal McCann believes display advertising is holding its own.  Some trends are larger displays and clients wanting more ROI.  David likes Apples high investment, limited burst, and high CPM strategy for display.

Brian Quinn believes that 1/10 of a campaign – click-throughs – cannot be the true value of a campaign’s success.  Impression’s matter.  Display ads matter.

Henry then struck a chord with the panelists by bringing up ad networks that want to find - a reader - on a high value site, stick a cookie on the browser and continue to extract value through-out the reader’s travels over  the WWW.

Michael Barrett of AdMeld believes the publisher owns the reader, not the ad network.  The publisher can turn off the cookies and  can re-sell that information to the ad networks.  However, David Cohen challenges the notion of the publisher owning the reader – rather, he see no particular owner – the reader comes to the site and all the partners/entities share in the ownership.  It is cooperative ownership.

Readers consumer content, so how will the cooperative owners deal with changes in digital delivery? How is journalism being redefined in today’s digital world?  Betsy Morgan mentioned that the Kindle is helping to redefine journalism in how and when users want their in-depth stories. 

The small mobile handset may not have the most practical screen size for great reads – can you imagine reading the news stories behind ‘All the President’s Men’ on a candy bar phone?

Wall Street Journal believes that content is king.  If the ad buyer values the premium content, the world class experience, then the paper’s ad value is great whether there is a click-through or not.  Display ad success depends upon the relationship the ads have to the content.  It is a critical relationship.

So how does this play out on mobile? Sean O’Neal of Datran Media stresses advertising models will probably not reflect EMEA and APAC, rather there will be a mobile ad model organically created in the US that is tremendously successful. We just don’t have it now.

 David Cohen addressed why mobile ad models are not successful today – he stressed form factor inhibits advertising – tiny ads on tiny screens, plus the wireless infrastructure is slow to load the content, and wireless carriers are holding back user data on consumer demographics. 

The last is easy from my perspective – toss $$ for the data.  It’s a business.  Pay for it.  So, I asked David after the session if payment is on the table and he says it is worth a discussion – a business model needs to be created for the exchange... it needs to happen.