New York Times Digital Chief: About.com Has "Unbelievable Margins" from Google AdSense

About.com, the online network of special interest communities, enjoys "unbelievable margins" from Google AdSense, said Martin Nisenholtz, who heads digital operations at The New York Times Company, which owns About.com. Nisenholtz was a panelist Monday at the OMMA conference where I taped his comments.  (His reference to AdSense comes up at 2:45 in the clip.) He says that companies who create low cost, highly verticalized and contextualized content will get "very rich" from AdSense.  He adds that AdSense does not perform well for New York Times news coverage. Andy Plesser, Executive Producer Production note:  Sorry for the poor audio quality; I was unable to connect to the event sound system from my location.Video TranscriptMartin Nisenholtz:  Well that is really a great swirling conversation. It’s a convergence of, you know, reading, hearing, and talking. It's not just reading. And so sites like the Huffington Post, so long as, and I'm not speaking specifically about the Huffington Post per se, but sites like them. (interjection: So long as they're in New York City...) So long as...well there are a lot of aggregators in the world and the Huffington Post isn't the only one and so, you know, there are laws around fair use and obviously to the extent that our content, the efficacy and the copyrights that we own are respected and then the linking of one article to another or one website to another is endemic in the web itself. So if we were to pull ourselves off from that, we could do that; a lot of people now are talking about doing that because they're frustrated with respect to their business models, but I think the only result that happens when you do that, in fact, as I tried to say in my talk, this isn't as much about social or not social, it's about closed and open. I think we've been on a path toward ever increasing openness over the last decade and that is really about opening oneself up to the web. So, now obviously, if you get into the situation...

Channel: Beet.TV Video Length: 0s Date Found: Sun, Sep 27 2009 4:15 PM Category: News Date Produced: Sun, Sep 27 2009 3:16 PM View Count: 0