Print. You know what you’re paying for.
One of the most disappointing things about being a webmaster is when you learn that the web stats you get on your site are not very reliable. Referrer spam makes it look like lots of folks were following non-existent links to your site. Page loads make it look like a visitor is really fascinated by your content, but really he just hit the reload button because he has a nervous tick.
It’s the same with advertising. Click fraud is common, easily automated, and even done manually in low-labor countries. Traffic and popularity analysis of sites is also still unreliable as the technology and usage change faster than people can learn how to measure it.
With print, however, things are different. You have a physical object to track. People understand how to measure the responses. The data may not have the detail the web seems to provide, but the data is real, it’s accurate, and it’s well understood.
On the web you pay for the presence, and you wonder what happened.
In print you know what happened.
