What has this business model reaped?

Plummeting print circulation. Over 6% loss on average over the last year, and accelerating. Add to this plummeting share prices, and mutinous shareholders, and in some cases the break-up of national chains.

Haven’t the readers who once had home delivery moved over to the online edition?

Yes. However the online edition does not enjoy the wide range of revenue streams that print does.

Print has newsstand sales, paid subscriptions, the ability to sell the subscription list to outside marketers without the subs’ consent, full-page ads, small space ads, pre-printed inserts, Sunday magazines with ads, and the ability to expand and shrink in size as ad demand fluctuates. They can have an ads-to-edit ratio of 3:1 or more (try that online). Yes, print can be very profitable.

Online, newspapers have very few advertising options. There is no chance of adding a pre-printed advertising insert from Target or Sears. No local car dealers buying up pages in the classified section. Full-page ads? Yes, but the IAB says you MUST have a skip-the-ad button on these interstitial units.

Pop-ups? Well, Internet Explorer now blocks ALL pop-ups by default.

What’s left? In-page IAB units, like leaderboards, towers, and the like, and crawl-over or take-over pages.

But there’s an added wrinkle. In the print version, a newspaper can publish hundreds of ads per day, in all variety of sizes, and get paid for each one based on the number of copies printed, even if readers skip over many or most of the pages.

Online, the paper is at the mercy of the reader. What if there is an average of 5 page views per user session? It becomes impossible, therefore, to sell the same quantity of advertisers at the same impression levels as the print version. The difference in ad revenue between print and online is staggering. For the Tribune Company (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday), Internet revenue is forecast to account for just 6% of their total income for 2006.

But what if they were more than just a nuisance? Imagine driving the family down the 405 Freeway, on the way to a weekend at the beach.

You’re doing a nice seventy-five miles per hour, when all of a sudden a flyer appears—smack dab in the middle of the driver’s side windshield. Completely unnerving!

Advertisers would never think of doing that (assuming the laws of physics allowed it). Yet online, they’re doing something similar every day. For example: you’re browsing along, into paragraph three of that article on the Middle East, when you’re forced to stop, grab your mouse, and find the “close” button—because an animated ad has just sprung up onto your desktop, blocking the very words you arrived to read in the first place.

Why do we, as advertisers, think the public deserves this? What we’d never accept from advertisers in the physical world, we’re happy to lay on the public in the online counterpart. Does this really provide the user with an experience he’ll want to remember? Or is it just another annoyance in a sea of already diminished user experiences?

Occasionally, an advertiser will sponsor an entire TV show, and provide it without commercial interruption to the viewer, getting their sponsorship in before and after the event. The viewer’s quality of experience in these cases is always heightened, and the advertiser is often richly rewarded for taking this chance.

The ability to do something quite similar exists on the web. So why are we not taking greater advantage of the opportunity? Some sites “get it,” from a user perspective. Both Salon and the Economist let you visit their sites for the day with the simple option of viewing a commercial prior to your entry. No fees, no pop-ups, nothing to diminish the user experience after the user has watched the forty-five second interactive commercial at the beginning of their experience.

Premium content that would otherwise cost the user a membership fee becomes available after an explicit relationship is established between the reader and the sponsor. Think of it as the bridge between fee and free.

The result? The advertiser gets guaranteed visibility, with immediate feedback and actionable results. Click-throughs in these cases tend to register much higher than the average. And the site is rewarded by a revenue model that works.

But most importantly, the viewer isn’t disillusioned or dismayed by the experience — in fact, quite the opposite may be true. Instead, the viewer watches the ad in a quid pro quo manner: his time has become currency, which is extremely valuable to the sponsor, and he trades it in exchange for content he would normally have to pay for. In the end, he gets to the very content he wants to see, and knows that the content will be viewed in a trouble-free, distraction-free environment.

The Internet is the only medium in which a truly accountable exchange of attention for content can be utilized — a key differentiator that print and broadcast will never achieve. Yet the majority of us remain in the windshield-flyer stage.

The viewer can be our friend — in fact, the viewer can be thrilled with us, our ads, our site partners, the whole process. The key is offering him a simple and honest choice: engage with the sponsor in exchange for valuable content, or purchase the content outright. Viewers can then choose to learn about the sponsor’s product, and not see it as an intrusion, but rather, as a welcome addition to their online experience.

Quite frankly, I’d take a welcome addition over an intrusion any day — especially at seventy-five miles per hour.