Revenue 2.0 Seeks Online Ad Solutions

An ad-hoc group of more than two dozen newspaper journalists are meeting in Washington, D.C. to re-invent online advertising. Though they come from the ranks of the nation's top newspapers, they are embarking on this quest independently -- their efforts are self-subsidized and they are not representing their employers in this endeavour. They've dubbed their mission RevenueTwoPointZero.

Newspapers are in crisis. The old revenue model is no longer viable. If media companies want to produce journalism, they’ll need to find new ways to fund it — even if those ways are not explicitly tied to editorial content.

We have the means and the mission to deliver solutions, rather than merely talking about the challenge of preserving journalism. Our solutions will be based on a proven funding strategy — advertising revenue — rather than failed or unproven strategies like micropayments and philanthropy.

We will begin with these tasks:

• Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone.
  
• Create a better CraigsList.
  
• Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.
  
• Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.

Unlike recent confabs of executives, editors and academics, we are hands-on professionals charged with delivering media solutions every day. And because we’re hands-on, we know how build to prototypes to demonstrate our ideas to the newspaper industry.

Despite the fact that most of us come from editorial, we pledge to focus 100 percent of our energy to developing advertising models. We will offer solutions on March 21 based on current technology, so they can be deployed immediately.

That was yesterday. We are avidly following their progress and eagerly awaiting their results!