In an interview with PaidContent.org, CEO/Publisher Caroline Little of WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive talked blogs, ads, and online viewership.
The nice people at The Jordan, Edmiston Group dropped a present in the Murdok inbox this morning. PaidContent.org’s editor and publisher Rafat Ali interviewed Ms. Little and touched on a few topics of interest to the general online community.
Ms. Little noted how WashingtonPost.com has been incorporating blogs into their content, citing blogs on widely disparate interests like sports, Finland, and last year’s devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia. “We’ve gone broader than politics,” she said.
The site has incorporated advertising in several places, placing “before-the-stream” ads in video content and having videos play in an on-page media player rather than launching a separate application. Ms. Little observed that contextual advertising “has been a very nice revenue driver for us.”
And the Washington Post has been involved in some classified acquisitions though the Classified Ventures joint venture project, according to Ms. Little. “I think they broaden our portfolio with cars and real estatewe’ll have more product to offer our advertisers.”
That effort will be interesting to see develop, especially for well-known sites like Craigslist and new startups like Oodle, which incorporates Google Maps into the results of classified queries on its search engine.
There has been plenty of contention that users have moved away from traditional media, like the print edition of the Post, to online sources for news. Ms. Little acknowledges the challenges to the newspaper business:
“(G)iven that the newspaper’s circulation is declining, how can the online organization help keep and grow readership? And, how do you get the folks that don’t even read newspapers to come to a branded newspaper site with its own particular flavor?”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
