RE: NYTimes: Reed Elsevier's Online Ads

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

I wish the potential advertising market for socioeconomics and 
public policy was large enough for us to take the same step. But 
judging by the difficulty we have in winning advertising for our 
magazine, the OECD Observer, this route won't be viable for us or 
other social science publishers. One only has to think back to 
Elsevier's Trends journals to realise that advertising markets 
have always existed in some information segments, but since the 
range of Trends journals never extended much beyond the 
biosciences one can quickly see where the limits with online 
advertising are likely to be.

Good to see Elsevier take this step, though, and in view of the 
huge marketing budgets in pharma-land I'm sure they'll succeed.

Toby Green
Head of Publishing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Sent: 12 September, 2007 12:23 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: NYTimes: Reed Elsevier's Online Ads

Looks like Elsevier has been bitten by the Google bug, i.e., the 
big bucks are in online advertising.

It looks like they are betting that the losses in subscription 
revenue will be exceeded by the gains in online advertising 
revenue: Elsevier "is taking a risk that its readers will drop 
their paid subscriptions and switch allegiance to the new Web 
site".

Reminds me a little bit of the NY Times Select free offers to 
folks with ".edu" e-mail addresses.

I wonder if there will be lots of copycats if this Elsevier 
endeavor is successful??

If it eventually turns out that publishers can do well with 
online advertising revenues and don't need to rely on 
subscriptions, what does that mean for libraries? There's a good 
side ("extra" money because of dropping library subscription 
costs). There's also a bad side (people thinking they need 
libraries even less because they can get even more for free 
online).

Bernie Sloan