Who Advertises on News Sites and How Much Those Ads are Targeted

Pew Research reporting:
Between 2011 and 2015, revenue from digital advertising in the United States is expected to grow by 40% and to overtake all other platforms by 2016.[1]
Yet how much of that growth will go to underwrite news remains in doubt and throws into question the financial future of journalism as audience continue to migrate online. What will happen pivots in part on whether the news industry can move into the more lucrative areas of digital advertising, particularly using consumer data to target ads, persuading major legacy advertisers to also advertise online and moving into new revenue areas. 
A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.
Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting.  A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.
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Professor Turow notes that the absence of legacy advertisers from the Web domains may reflect a problem. "Figuring out what they are doing instead, and why, might be a first step in trying to get some of them back."
Among the findings:   

• In-House ads, ads selling or promoting a news organizations own products, fill more space across these news websites than any other advertising category. Nearly a quarter, 21%, of all the ads captured were for the news organization's own products. The practice occurs most among the media sectors with direct subscription sales-newspapers and magazines. At time.com, for example, ads promoting their own products accounted for 56% of the ads captured in the study. This practice was less common at sectors with no direct consumer subscription, such as those from network television and cable television[2].

• The finance industry is represented far more than any other on the news websites studied. Ads from the financial industry numbered nearly three-times that of the next biggest category, toiletries and cosmetics. What stood out even more was that the financial industry's strong presence on news Web domains is matched by a fairly limited presence in the legacy platforms...

• Discount or coupon advertising such as Groupon was fairly limited. Just as the long-term viability of discount companies has come into question, their prevalence on news websites in limited as well. The year 2011 saw the rise of discount/coupon companies like Groupon or Living Social, which many news organizations hoped might become a major new revenue source. The study found that such coupons were not a major presence among these 22 news sites...
• Most of the news sites did not feature ads targeted to consumers based on their online behavior... http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/digital_advertising_and_news