Short-term good, long-term bad? Or, the other way
around? A growing consortium of newspapers is backing Wanderful Media, a
company that creates digital versions of newspaper circular inserts. It is a
way of looking to the future, to have a digital version of the grocery store
and hardware store flyers online, yes. OTOH, in at least a certain percentage
of digital readers, are they already going to Target.com or whatever anyway?
And, as newspapers' complains over Valassis' deal with the USPS show, print
circulars are still an important part of newspaper revenues, so ... if this
leads retailers to abandon print circulars sooner rather than later, it could
be a big issue.
I doubt this will come to non-daily papers any time
soon, so no hurt there. And, bigger seven-days will still attract plenty of
print-version circulars. Smaller dailies, though? At some point, retailers participating
with Wanderful may make a take-it-or-leave-it digital-only offer to some of
these papers, perhaps playing them against Valassis/Red Plum on mail-out
versions of print circulars.
Especially if smartphone/tablet apps are next, this is
another gift horse that may not pony up well for the longer term.
And, of course, there are other issues involved. One I can think of is, will these digital circulars get past ad-block extensions or not?
