Ann Moore, Chairman and CEO of Time Inc., Perez Hilton, Two Different Online Marketing Strategies

Insights into Two Important Online Marketing Strategies

While some of the online bloggers and showbiz Web sites may have gotten a headstart on the tradional media magazines, Chairman and CEO of Time Inc., Ann Moore isn't too concerned about the gossip Web sites out there.

She through down the gauntlet saying, “Smaller gossip sites think they are big and powerful… but get out of the way. The People editors are coming.”

The specific sites she's thinking of those like Perez Hilton and TMZ.com. TMZ at this time attracts the most unique monthly visitors in the space.

Moore makes a good point when she talks from a business viewpoint, saying that People is much more valuable than these other sites. Concerning the more negative and snarky writing from these Web sites, Moore adds, “We still fact check, we are not mean spirited and we are accurate,” she said. “You can’t make as much money in the mean-spirited arena. I’ll leave that to someone else."

She makes a good point from the monetization aspect of business Web sites. Most companies don't want their products next to these types of content sites. There will always be the "safety" factor in online advertising.

In a smart move for the company, she waited until companies started to shift larger portions of their advertising budgets online before she took People magazine to the Internet, which happened in 2006.

There are two different strategies being conveyed here, with neither necessarily being wrong. The first online marketing strategies is the way TMZ and Perez Hilton are doing it. They are the "shouters" that draw a certain type of person to their sites.

Hilton and others like him are building themselves up as celebrities, they will look to monetize and cash-in in a different way than a People online magazine would. This is a legitimate strategy, but not too many people will reach this type of celebrity mold.

For People, their strategy is to keep their pulse on the entertainment market, but to do it in a way that will appeal to their advertisers, which is their method of making money.

They still cover interesting enough subjects to draw huge traffic to their site, as the page views for stories about Angenlina Jolie and Brad Pitt show, with traffic reaching 17.5 million when they talked about their expected baby, and 25 million when Baby Shiloh was born. Advertisers like this type of content; being safe but bringing huge scale for their products.