Speaking at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg, Wolfgang Blau, editor-in-chief of Zeit Online, said online advertising has been "discredited", but its potential and effectiveness has not been properly investigated by news organisations.
Advertising rates for text-based ads will continue to fall, but there will be a market for high-end display advertising online that is creative, he said.
"It is important for us, because journalistic websites in most European markets never have the audience size of other sites that are much bigger, that don't produce journalistic content and have lowering operating costs, it is a moot point for journalistic websites to just compete in absolute numbers of audience," he said.
"We should focus on qualified audience and say we have a certain kind of readers with a certain kind of profile and that should justify higher ad rates. That's the part that we can do, for instance not doing celebrity, not doing sex and crime [stories], even though of course we could have oodles of clicks from that.
"But what we can do in our relatively small markets in Europe is invest heavily into the research of the effectiveness of display advertising. We know so much about how certain print ads work and how efficient they are; we know very little about how display advertising works. There is still this myth that you can only advertise products that the user already knows about, that he or she is searching for, but that the net is not a good medium to introduce new brands and branding campaigns. I think this is utterly wrong, but we still need to prove it."
Zeit Online looks to other markets as part of its research into online display advertising, particularly the UK, he said, where a recent Internet Advertising Bureau report suggested a 6.4 per cent year-on-year growth in online display advertising in the first half of 2010. Campaigns such as Mercedes Benz's development of 3D ads on the homepages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post with interest, have been followed with interest.
Blau said he hoped Google, "with its foray into display advertising", would share its technological power and invest some resources into teaching the market "that there is also room for high-end advertising rates and display advertising" outside of its own CPC model.
"That could really help journalism more than all its squabbles about copyright, snippet fair-share agreements and so forth," he said.
Related reading on Journalism.co.uk: more from Wolfgang Blau on the need for a more "human" Google
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