Long mistrusted and branded as unpredictable, the online publishing arena has always struggled to gain the same credibility as print publications in the minds of media planners.
A new umbrella body, the Online Publishers Association (OPA), seeks to change all this, and aims to present the internet medium as a trusted, profitable, and accessible medium to media planners.
I caught up with Russel Yeo, chairperson of the association, and General Manager of M-Web Studios, stuck in Cape Town traffic of the more corporeal kind.
Yeo, who hails from an advertising background, notes that it was imperative to create an organisation to manage the relationship between media planners and online publishing. He said it had long been believed that the online arena didn’t adequately cater to the needs of advertisers, and especially media planners.
The OPA will now create a standard audience measurement tool that will be implemented across all major South African websites, sometime towards the end of the year. The idea is to provide media planners with concrete and standard statistics to better enable them to sell advertising space online.
The implication for the industry is a major one — advertising revenue is its first source of income.
This becomes even more imperative when industry surveys put the South African dial-up market at more than a million users by the end of the year, and the total online population at approximately 5-million by 2004.
These numbers translate into massive revenue as long as advertisers trust the medium enough to invest in advertising.
The organisation also seeks to build standards to make the internet an effective and trusted media, as well as educate the market on these standards.
Despite these noble goals, there are detractors.
SA IT analyst Arthur Goldstuck adding a sobering thought: “The OPA has to be very aware of the danger of replacing one debating forum with another debating forum. Otherwise it will be argued that, in its efforts to kill off the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), OPA merely reinvented it.
Goldstuck says the OPA’s founding statements “leave as many unanswered questions as the ABC did in its most inconclusive days. It also needs to understand that an industry standard must be acceptable to the industry, not only to the biggest players in that industry.”
“At the end of the day, of course, it may just be a matter of public relations. If ABC and ABIS (Audit Bureau for Internet Statistics) before it had done their PR [public relations] better, they may have remained the central players in this debate. OPA is already building up a terrible track record in this regard.”
Yeo’s response to this was to refer to the industry’s history of petty infighting, with the agenda for business being led by small marginal players.
“What is pleasing about the OPA is that the majority of the large players have got together and reached unanimous agreement on a wide ranges of issues”.
He agrees with Goldstuck on the issue of agreement, and adds that the OPA is representative of 99% of the industry’s players.
Yeo clarifies that the association is not dealing with editorial issues at all, but is purely geared towards aligning statistical measurement across sites, and that they have been in consultation with international organisations.
He added that the OPA plans to learn from other countries, and was pleased to note that it was assembled and functional in less than the 18 months it took for the Australians to form an equivalent organisation.
On the issue of paying for online content, Yeo said: “the OPA mandate extends to all forms of revenue, but it won’t represent pure e-commerce sites but rather people who are putting content online with the intention of earning revenue”.
He added that the lessons learnt from international organisations were that tackling too many issues guaranteed failure, and it was important to remain focussed on only those issues relating directly to the survival of members.
“Spreading online access is a massive social issue involving education. This is a key issue way outside of our arena”.
The Mail & Guardian Online is a member of the Online Publishers’ Association