At last week’s No News is Bad News forum there was a whole lot of passion, plenty of ideas, and questions about new models for funding journalism. As Patrick from West Seattle Blog was talking about their relationship with sponsors I took a look at his site and compared it to SeattleTimes.com:
 the complete ad content of two local news websites. |
Soccer players celebrate MLS cup by building playground
famous soccer players I thinks it good celebration…
Marination: Best Food Truck in the USA
Toftie You MUST try it. I follow it around Seattle and eat lunch there at least once a week if not more. But even...
Who’s your new mayor? It’s way, way too soon to tell
SoundJohn Hey! Thanx for this beautiful place of the Inet!!
Celebrate the MLS Cup with food, fun
josh I am very interested in that pretzel.
Dining out and saving cash
Lisa Great advice Patricia! And another great discount-dining site I’m excited to share with you is Emerald...
It’s hard to argue against the notion that newspapers (ours, at least) are lacking a sophisticated online advertising strategy. They’re flat out leaving money on the table.
Artful, as usual, Josh. Some will see this as commentary on WSB and other neighborhood blogs (um, like mine) looking a little like NASCAR racers with ads on every square inch. But there’s more to it. I’d wager that higher % of selection from WSB are also more relevant to WSB audience even with only 3 ads showing on the Times page. And it’s not because of MBA optimization or algorithms. These sites are opening up online advertising to businesses that have never had an opportunity to connect with the right community. I’ve talked to a lot of small businesses that have been burned by advertising so badly in the past that they never advertise. One of them is now a sponsor on my site.
Seattle Times could solve part of their problem by simply opening up more inventory that smaller businesses can afford (oh, and figure out a way to scale down to that sales process — self-serve, anybody?). But they’ll still have the relevant message/relevant community issue to solve.
to be clear: I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying beyond that the two sites are using really different models and I hadn’t really even noticed until now.
(I should also mention that I have no control over any of the ads on Metblogs — all of that is handled by the mother ship and their ’strategy’ looks a lot more national than hyperlocal.)
I should chime in here and say that, from Metblogs perspective, our ’strategy’ has been to tell our advertising partners they need to focus more on local ads to which they reply basically ‘we don’t know how to sell those, here’s some national ones so stop complaining.’ This is something that we’re really not pleased with, and we hope to correct in 2009 one way or another. One thing we’re seriously looking into is local, commission based, ad reps to sell specific sites (or regions) directly rather than relying on partners who are looking at the whole network instead. If there’s any North West sales folks reading this who are interested, please get in touch.
Sean, you guys should mix in some self-serve and see if you can bypass the sales process. That’s what we use on http://neighborlogs.com sites