Pew Study Finds Ads on News Web Sites Are Missing Users Web sites for newspapers, magazines and television stations might be hungry to make money with digital advertising, but you wouldn't know it by the way some of them do business online. The Economist's home page is not unusual in displaying ads for the company's products. A new study released Monday by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at 22 news Web sites and more than 5,300 digital ads. It found that many of the sites had not attracted the same advertisers online as they did on other platforms. In part, these sites were failing to attract online ads because they were not using technology that would customize ads based on their users" online behavior. For example, a user searching for tickets to a Broadway show might see ads for that show. The study, which looked at Web sites for 11 newspapers, four magazines and six television outlets, as well as two online-only sites, focused on premium digital ad placements on home pages or at the top of article pages, which have generally cost more to buy. "One of the great challenges that faces the financial future of journalism is, how can you begin to charge more for digital advertising?" said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the center. The gold dust of the Internet will be consumer information. Ads that are aimed at a user based on interests or Web browsing behavior are more valuable to advertisers because users are more likely to pay attention to them. "If targeting is a central feature of financial success online, a broad look at major news Web sites suggests that industry is not there," Mr. Rosenstiel said. Neal Mohan, vice president for display advertising at Google, said publishers had "varied degrees of adoption of offering that type of technology to their advertisers." One reason publishers might have trouble in moving advertisers from the printed page or the television screen to the Web is that singling out consumers is relatively complex. "That is effort not just on behalf of the creative agency and media buying agency, but also your ad operations and media sales team," Mr. Mohan said. The Pew study found that 21 percent of the ads seen on news sites were for the company's own products, like subscriptions. The second-largest category of ads were for financial services companies, which Mr. Mohan said had more of a "performance-oriented goal" than would makers of consumer packaged goods, which might be looking for brand awareness. "The vision has to be," he said, "how do you bring P.& G. or Clorox to the digital world?" Of the news sites surveyed, those that used the most user-focused technology were Yahoo, The New York Times and CNN. The rest of the sites, which included Fox News, The Washington Post, The Economist, Time, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News and The Atlantic, used very low levels of the technology. Emily Smith, the senior vice president for digital at The Los Angeles Times, said the company offered its advertisers digital packages that included the ability to single out users based on geographic location, the content read on the site or behavior online. "We believe the best type of advertising is advertising that is welcome," Ms. Smith said, saying that, for example, readers who visit the travel section of the Web site would see travel-related ads. "I think we are now at the place where digital is not just sexy anymore" for advertisers, Ms. Smith said. It's what everyone wants and expects and it's got terrific return on investment.