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>
>>Bob's right, of course! As usual, however, the newspaper titans are
>>late to the game -- and have a lot of catching up to do. Netscape is
>>selling three-month ad spots on its Web site for $40,000 a pop;
>>Prodigy is selling ads on its home page for $4,000 a week. The
>>fact that you've got a monopoly on local news in your geographic
>>market won't mean anything to national advertisers shopping for media
>>buys in cyberspace. Newspaper execs will need to do more than band
>>together before big-money sponsors come knocking!
>
>The secret, Rosalind, is that they've just created what amounts to an 
>online news cartel. Play their game or go find your own news to use 
>as a lure to get readers, whom advertisers will follow. And the new
>online consortium has sufficient clout to control AP pricing. If AP
>suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive to non-cartel members -- i.e., 
>to "non-contributing" members like Prodigy -- where will the commercial 
>online networks look for breaking-news content? UPI? These folks even
>own a big chunk of Netscape. OPEC could only dream of being so well
>established. 

I'd agree with Eric except for the fact that these players are newspaper groups 
forming yet another alliance.  The history of such undertakings does not inspire 
confidence - remember 'one order, one bill' that was supposed to make it easy for 
advertisers to make national newspaper buys?  It took years to get something that 
nobody wanted.  A board with one person from each group is a recipe for 
disfunction.

--------------------------------------------------------
John Van Zwieten        "Yesterday I was still a fool, 
WorldNews On Line        but today I've grown wiser"
04/20/95  07:38:15       F.D.- Elder Zosima explaining
E-mail: jvz@clark.net    why he did not fire in a duel.
--------------------------------------------------------

  
 




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