I've written before about the challenges of the non-search, on-line advertising market and don't want to re-live those posts. But, with that, I have to say, I am always fascinated by this subject.
What caught my eye today was this PaidContent post about Fox Interactive's online earnings:
FIM had $125 million in revenue during the last quarter, attributed primarily to MySpace.com.....FIM had its first profitable month in December.Remeber we're talking Fox interactive - owner of MySpace.com. MySpace has more monthly page-views than anyone else - 38 billion and change. Fox Interactive is part of Fox which owns newspapers, tv stations - even TV networks - and employs lots of salesfolks who work closely with the big spending advertisers every day.
Given all of this, from those 38 billion plus MySpace page views, they're pulling in $41 million/ month? $1 CPM? By way of comparison, Tribune's total (offline and online) revenue is $1.3 billion a quarter. That's an order of magnitude higher. I point this out to show (again) that if the future of media is online, the revenue needed to become, in today's terms, a respectable size media company has a long way to go.
So I ask again - is this the future of the publishing model?