Should content publishers compete with search?

Maybe not. When David Churbuck, Vice President, Global Web Marketing, at Lenovo spoke at the Folio show earlier this week he showed the audience this slide showing how this major PC maker spends its ad dollars. As with many marketers these days, "search" is the largest spend.  

All magazine publishers have felt the impact of marketers’ moving their dollars online and most magazines have online products to sell. But the 800 pound gorilla online is search.

After the speech I asked Churbuck how the content publishers in the audience should pursue his online ad dollars in light of the big spend on search.

His advice was for content publishers not try to compete with search but to develop their offerings in a different direction. He uses content based media, both online and print, to brand his company while using search to drive sales. He is more interested in doing business with content publishers who offer him media to help his branding efforts than just lead generating.

Comments

[Hermes Kelly Bag]

Nice post. Thank you for taking the time to publish this information very useful! I’m still waiting for more interesting and useful thoughts from your side in your next post thanks!

[Engago Team]

Content publishers are getting a hard time as there is much content available from blogs.
These blogs operate daily, where as print magazines monthly or bi-monthly. Thus the audience has probably read the news or the new concept already.

As there is an abundance of content, filtering solutions like Yahoo Pipes allows to limit the amount of content to be processed by your mind everyday.