PerfectMarket

Newspapers are worried.

And yet, they have some of the most enviable resources in the online space: professional journalists and opinion leaders with fact-checking chops capable of producing nuanced, in-depth and often tide-turning prose.

Yahoo, AOL and DemandMedia could be seen as potential competitors, but only if newspapers chose to relax their standards of journalistic excellence.

If the likes of DemandMedia pose a threat to mainstream publishers it is because of their highly efficient, targeted and cost effective content creation and delivery systems.

If DemandMedia succeeds in filling the hole in intent-driven content, journalism may be crowded out and lost in the immense sea of Demand’s two million articles on terrariums.

Should publishers fail adapt to this “new frontier” in content monetization, they could face extinction by their own failure to keep up.

Newspapers must capitalize on certain innate strengths — strengths that AOL, Yahoo and DemandMedia will long struggle to fully replicate = a major newspaper’s brand power and authority.

New data from comScore Media Metrix showed that “57 percent of Internet users in the US looked at a newspaper site in May at home or at work.”

What is more, ComScore reports that a newspaper’s average CPM (cost per thousand) for their online content was $7. The average CPM for other (non-newspaper) sites was $2.52.

Trusted, branded, premium content has high value for advertisers. And this $7 figure, while three times larger than other sites, still has room for improvement.

Google News creator Krishna Bharat spoke at the IJ-7 “Innovation Journalism” conference at Stanford this week (see below).

Bharat predicted that in five years, online news will include “ads that understand the audience better and market the right type of products to the reader.”

Right now, there’s a window of opportunity open for publishers. It is time to act, before “content farms” overwhelm the space.

— Lee Glandorf

On Twitter: @LeeGlandorf