ChasNote

From Thursday’s Personal Journal.

“The 32-year-old at-home mother’s irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web’s top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine. The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband Jon quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).”

From a Lee Gomes piece in the Wall Street Journal (I saw it at Boing Boing):

“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information…..

“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures [ones that “presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted”] were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.”

I’m no scientist, but this suggests to me that ads built around content (like JCPenney’s or Symantec’s) will do a better job engaging consumers than ads that simply offer up a discounted rate.

Adult content and the Wall Street Journal have been the two of the few places in online publishing that turn a profit from subscription sales. To see WSJ talk about going free and Playboy investing in content outside the paid garden suggests significant optimism about the growth of online display advertising. While paid subscriptions and ecommerce are still the #1 and #2 online revenue streams for Playboy, PaidContent reports digital ad sales are up 50% this year.

Waiting for the crew at Farley’s to brew up a cup of tea this afternoon, I flipped through the print edition of AdWeek for the first time in about a decade, and two stories caught my attention, both reminders that size still matters in publishing.

First, Starcom USA Unveils New Print Accountability Tool: The agency “has been doing bigger deal in print but with fewer magazines” in order to get a better read on the performance of campaigns, creative messages and publications. If other agencies are doing the same, it means the financial pain across the print-publishing landscape will be felt more acutely at niche magazines.

Second, Will a Free WSJ.com Pay Off for Murdoch?:

“‘Because of the their model,’ said Jeff Lanctot, svp, global media at Avenue A/Razorfish, ‘they are a smaller property.’ That by nature, can sell only so many ads. Consider that Yahoo Finance generated 470 million page views in October, versus 11 million for WSJ.com, per comScore. ‘They could instantly become a more attractive property’ if the site goes free, Lanctot added.”

Niche publications are great for advertisers in terms of targeting and audience composition, but without scale to go along with quality small publishers may not get a seat at the table.