iPad Gold Rush: Advertisers are ready to pay premium fees

Take away: As so often Apple surprises the industry: In a magic gold rush advertisers are ready to pay premium fees for advertising on the iPad-editions of magazines and newspapers, Wall Street Journal reports.

Time magazine has signed up Unilever, Toyota Motor, Fidelity Investments and at least three others for marketing agreements priced at about $200,000 apiece for a single ad spot in each of the first eight issues of the magazine's iPad edition, according to people familiar with the matter. And what about newspapers? Six advertisers, including Coca-Cola and FedEx, have agreed to advertise with the Wall Street Journal, and a four-month ad package costs $400,000, according to these people, who are involved. Coke and FedEx declined to comment on terms.

iPad and sustainability of the gold rush There is the car maker Ford for example, who will advertize a game on the New York Times iPad-App. Ok, it seems as if the media industry sees a lot of advertising chances on the iPad. Strange, why didn't this advertising gold rush happen on the mobile devices, on the mobile and iphone editions of New York Times, Time, and WSJ? As I argued before, the media industry has this idea, just similar to the publishers soncept, that the iPad brings back the good old times. But these times, in which we were able to advertise directly to a community, are gone. Gone, forever. Nowadays advertising is much more complicated with all the fragmentation going on.
Be there with your message on Twitter, on Facebook on iPhone, on iPad, on Android, on Google, on Bing, on... Would be nice, if the iPad could get us all some relieve on that. It is simply not the case.

Soon advertisers, like Ford, will realize, that it makes much more sense to publish their own iPad-Apps, than to ad videos to the iPad-version of NYT.
This is sad news for the advertisers but good news follow the way. Because in a third step newspapers, magazines and advertisers will merge their ambitions. NYT will advertize its app on the Ford-App, and Ford will advertise on the NYT-App. And together they will form strong communication bundles. The brand will always have a value, traffic will be a chance to reach audiences. But the big questions for newspapers and magazines remain: How do we make money, as ad revenues (iPad-gold rush) will not stay forever. The answer is: Re-add value to the content. Multi-media-enrichment is one approach, journalism another.
The WSJ plans to charge subscribers $17.99 a month for iPad subscriptions, according to a person familiar with the matter. (Ha!Chinese Walls! This is what the WSJ reports ;-)) I personally like this Wall Street approach. The iPad-version is now nearly double the price of the online edition. The more techy it gets, the higher the price. Yesss, we can!