In the comments on my post on print newspapers the other day, there was a discussion about people who subscribe to the Sunday paper to get coupons. I don’t subscribe to a Sunday paper, but my house is still full of coupons. This is a couple of day’s worth that I fished out of the recycle bin. A few years ago, we got a fraction of the number of direct mail local coupons and circulars that we get today. This doesn’t get as much publicity as Craigslist or Groupon, but it’s a real phenomenon.
A couple of other comments mentioned that online advertising doesn’t pay. Well, that depends on overhead and the type of ads you run. There are some ad-supported local news sites that are doing well. One is West Seattle Blog, which was the topic of some discussion at The Stranger a couple of weeks ago.
“We have never had investors, we have never had grants, we have never had savings, we don’t have rich relatives, we don’t have side-jobs,” Record said. “Basically, we have lived entirely off our advertising revenue for going on five years now.”
She wouldn’t give out exact numbers, but said the site brings in six figures annually and is in the black.
If you look at the ads on that site, they’re similar to what you might see in a neighborhood newspaper. This doesn’t just happen in relatively well-off urban areas. In little Batavia, NY, The Batavian which is supported by local ads, has also been successful for years.
If you compare the ads at either of those sites to the ads in a typical online newspaper in a mid-sized metro area, the latter probably displays a bunch of ads that are unrelated to the local community. For example, until our local rag went behind a paywall, most of the ads it pushed out were just Google ads (similar to the ad at the top of this page). The local sites I mentioned above don’t do that. All their ads are for local businesses, and some of them include deals that you can only get by seeing the ad, so readers are more likely to actually look at them.
I guess my general point is that there’s still a lot of ad money floating around your town and mine. It’s just not getting spent at your local newspaper. There are a lot of different ways that sites that do journalism can grab that revenue. There’s not enough money to support one monolithic journalistic endeavor, but maybe there’s enough to support a few smaller ones.
James Gary
I guess my general point is that there’s still a lot of ad money floating around your town and mine. It’s just not getting spent at your local newspaper. There are a lot of different ways that sites that do journalism can grab that revenue.
Well put.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how much actual “journalism” the West Seattle Blog is doing. About 90% of the posts I scrolled through were the exactly the same lifestyle/human-interest filler you’d find in a local free newspaper. A larger question is how, in the future, the kind of reporting that is more labor-intensive is going to get funded.
mistermix
@James Gary: The comments from the West Seattle Blog owners are part of a story on PubliCola, a Seattle site that was trying to do in-depth reporting and failed. As far as I could tell from the story on PubliCola, they failed because they took outside investor money to start up, and used it to pay a couple of journalists, before they figured out the ad market that would support that publication.
Ed in NJ
FWIW every circular for every store is available at Sundaysaver.com
c u n d gulag
There are many local papers worth saving.
The Gannett-owned Poughkeepsie Journal ain’t one of them.
And, long ago, it was a fine, fine newspaper.
Now, you wouldn’t wrap a fish in it, because it would be an insult to the intelligence of the poor dead fish.
JGabriel
mistermix @ Top:
Jeepers, that place has more than 90 sidebar ads on the front page alone. They’re not terribly obtrusive or anything, but they must have someone (maybe two or three someones) working on local advertising sales full time.
(Not intended to be critical, just observational.)
.
Walker
Then why isn’t John making more ad money given the number of visits this blog receives?
**ducks**
mistermix
@Walker: Because he’s running generic ads that don’t pay a fraction of what West Seattle Blog or The Batavian’s advertisers pay.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
What you are showing are ad inserts. Some newspapers started to rely on them more as the old big moneymakers, classified and display ads started to disappear. The Sunday classifieds used to be a huge revenue source. The inserts, not nearly as much. And rather than depend on the declining newspaper subscription list, ompanies are using post office delivery to get better penetration.
There are sites that regularly cover the decline of newspapers, the loss of journalists jobs, the decline of editorial cartoons and the firing of cartoonists, and the struggles to build new advertising models. I’m posting mobile on the run, and always have trouble with links from this device, but it might help if you research this more instead of just insisting that it’s easy for an online newspaper to thrive as a smaller online entity. If it were that easy, the papers would not be dying. Yeah, some publishers stubbornly cling to old models, but they are not all stupid, and there is no new savvy generation cioming up to show how it should be done.
Also, one of the articles about the New Orleans paper noted that even with the tremendous decline in population, the physical newspaper was passed around more, in barbershops and other places. You don’t get this kind of portability from a newspaper delivered to a desktop or laptop, not even in a household, where it is easier to pass the newspaper or sections around.
Also, too, you can take the coupons or the ad inserts to the store with you. You cannot do the same as easily with the online version, unless you have a smartphone, and then you are taliking about people having to shell out more money for more devices. Or printing the ads; but then you could just as easily buy a damn newspaper in the first place.
Joey Maloney
@mistermix: And with a blog like this one that has a national/international readership with only the most vague constellation of interests in common, how do you do a non-“generic” ad?
cathyx
@Brachiator: I agree with the coupon thing. Printing them from the computer is a hassle. Taking the flyer in is much easier, or even better, seeing the coupon online and then getting the coupon at the store is even better.
gbear
St. Paul is lucky to have a great community newspaper called the Highland Villager that covers local issues a lot better than the major Twin Cities newspapers. They also do lots of fluff pieces on neighborhood businesses to attract advertisers and their editorial page tends to be too conservative/reactionary for my tastes, but the local news reporting is very good and they attract enough advertisers so that the paper is free and available everywhere around town. It’s not online.
The fliers I get in the mail usually go straight to recycling. I’ll have to start paying some attention to them. Seems like most of them are filled with home service/repair stuff that I can’t afford or don’t need.
gbear
I have no idea why my comment went into moderation. FYWP
Schlemizel
The local paper has finally, just today, pissed off the little woman ;) enough that she announced we are dropping it. I have been campaigning for that for a couple of years at least. The have been going farther and farther in sucking up to the wingtards. There has not been an actual liberal pundit printed for a long time, the editorial pages are filled with some of the worst including one hired by the paper from the local Heritage Foundation welfare office and one radio talk show wingtard.
The news coverage is pathetic in ways we all see every day with “he said/she said” false equivalencies and IOKIYAR. I love newspapers but they have no reason to exist if their only reason to be is to dumb down society even more.
cathyx
@Schlemizel: When my local paper did that too several years ago, I stopped buying it. And I live in a liberal town.
rikyrah
The only paper I get is the Sunday newspaper, and yes, it’s because the guy who sells it gives us double inserts – double coupons..LOL
Ripley
A friend and I are actually working on a regional news site – not hyper-local, but not as broad as the larger metro outfits in the area – and we’re looking at real, purposeful ads for revenue. Most of the local news sites have pretty awful advertising and there’s doesn’t seem to be much thought involved in creating and placing ads.
It’s a tough trail to ride, and a tough sell sometimes. A lot of the smaller towns’ businesses aren’t really hip to online advertising because everyone already knows about almost every business in the area, and many of them are still in newspaper/radio mode. Trying to find the balance between a good value and a decent “paycheck” is a constant exercise in second-guessing ourselves, too.
I think at some point, most people will be off the paper medium, but the future is definitely not now – at least not here and not yet.
Scott Alloway
I noticed with CVS email ads that I can transfer their coupon online to my CVS non-credit card and then use it when I go to the store and scan it in. The “coupons” tendered show up on the receipt. No paper, no clipping. Just have to remember what I have.
mistermix
@Brachiator:
Yes, they are direct mail ad inserts. I’m showing them because someone mentioned the Sunday coupons as a reason people bought the newspaper. Did you read the post? And in the end it’s circulation that drives ad rates, and the underlying point is that Sunday inserts aren’t going to drive circulation because people get the same thing in the mail.
You mean like Romenesko? Which I read regularly? Or Jay Rosen’s different online presences, which I follow and read? Or even Howard Owens’ blog (the owner of The Batavian)? Just because you don’t like what I write doesn’t mean I’m uniformed. I’m well aware that journalists are being fired. They are being fired because their monolithic dinosaur employers fucked up their balance sheets in the 90’s and early aughts, and then whistled while their paper empires burned. I see that as a done deal, for better or worse, and I’m looking to see what will replace them.
BTW, my point isn’t that it’s easy for a newspaper to exist as a smaller online entity. I don’t think that’s true at all. The successful online-only entities that are succeeding in local markets are tiny mom-and-pops who have figured out how to grab some of the ad money floating around in their markets. They do it on a shoestring budget. I think more of them will start up. It’s not a cure-all, but despite all the noise made by the “hyperlocal” movement in the last few years, the couple of examples I cited are a few of the only profitable hyperlocal sites.
James Gary
The successful online-only entities that are succeeding in local markets are tiny mom-and-pops who have figured out how to grab some of the ad money floating around in their markets.
The content on those tiny mom-and-pops is–as I said above–the same lifestyle/human-interest filler you’d find in a local free newspaper. They are “successful” only in the sense that they turn a profit, not that they provide actual in-depth journalism.
As Brachiator and myself, and many others, have been saying in your comment sections on this topic for months now: the question is not “is it possible to make money online?” but “how will traditional investigative reporting–which requires trained workers and costs actual money to produce– be funded in the future, if at all?”
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
The problem here is that this sort of portability may actually exist, but it can’t be quantified to the satisfaction of the bean counters. Who want solid numbers (like circulation or, in the case of tv/radio, ratings) to base their presentation to advertisers.
The fact that ten or twenty people may look at one physical copy of a newspaper isn’t “factual” enough for the guys trying to sell it. It’s one of those intuitive things that can’t easily be put on a spreadsheet. You have to know the business to get this, and no one has time to know the business. They’re too busy trying to sell, sell, sell.
mzrad
Because I almost never click on web advertising myself, I decided that we would take a different approach for advertising on http://CentralCoastFoodie.com. Because our site promotes local Central Coast foodie businesses, it only makes sense to have advertising from Central Coast businesses (and a few of my friends, too). We’re building our ad base business by business including sharing Google Analytics info for our paying sponsors–we’re using a WP slideshow widget for the ad space. All the info we provide is free to users including indexes of Central Coast great food & drink products as well as our blog. We’re 98% finished with the development and design phase of the site build and are almost ready to get the word out more widely to help develop audience. This approach seems to be working for us.
I wanted to avoid the situation where an ad for an Ann Coulter book appears on a liberal site, which is what seems to happen on several sites I frequent.
mzrad
Because I almost never click on web advertising myself, I decided that we would take a different approach for advertising on http://CentralCoastFoodie.com. Because our site promotes local Central Coast foodie businesses, it only makes sense to have advertising from Central Coast businesses (and a few of my friends, too). We’re building our ad base business by business including sharing Google Analytics info for our paying sponsors–we’re using a WP slideshow widget for the ad space. All the info we provide is free to users including indexes of Central Coast great food & drink products as well as our blog. We’re 98% finished with the development and design phase of the site build and are almost ready to get the word out more widely to help develop audience. This approach seems to be working for us.
I wanted to avoid the situation where an ad for an Ann Coulter book appears on a liberal site, which is what seems to happen on several sites I frequent.
tom
The Ann Arbor Chronicle, an online newspaper run by the husband and wife team of Dave Askins and Mary Morgan, has been in business for three (?) years now and they are making a go of it. The have a well-defined focus: civic affairs, and cover that extremely.
Their competition, such as it is, is AnnArbor.com, an abomination started by Gannett after they closed the 100+year-old Ann Arbor News.
Given that, I expect that the Chronicle will be in business for a long time.
Citizen_X
@c u n d gulag:
Fixed for more general truth.
mistermix
@James Gary:
It won’t for the short-term while the market adjusts to the new reality of the kinds of profit margins that are possible.
I’m hoping that beat reporting, which is also dying out with newsroom cuts as reporters are expected to cover everything, could be resurrected in mid-size markets with one or two-person blogs covering some beat (e.g., a police blog). But I don’t have an example of that kind of success to show.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
I read the post. Did you read what I wrote? The Sunday paper, even more than the weekday edition, used to be driven by the big three of display ads, classified ads and coupons, usually for big supermarkets and other big stores. The ad inserts, which are not quite the same as coupons, are contract jobs and do not net nearly the same revenues as the other sources, which have dried up.
Also, the newspapers used to promise not only circulation, but “good demographics,” readers with money who were going to buy what you advertised. Mere circulation alone does not drive ad rates.
And yes, if you think that the primary reason that newspapers are dying is because the publishers fucked up the balance sheets, then yes, you are uninformed. It is not that I don’t like what you write. There is a deeper picture that you are missing. I was there when the LA Times started to die. I know many of the people who killed the Herald Examiner, and many of those who tried to save it. I know the journalists who tried to set up alternative sites after leaving the Times. And I see that it is not working.
The Seattle blog that you linked to is the nice equivalent of a local throwaway. It is not much of a news site. How are they staffed? How many reporters do they have? How much are they paid? How big are their business or legal departments? What is the readership of the blog? It would be useful to know how effective their ads are.
I agree with you that there is a lot of ad money out there. One problem with the LA Times (and other papers) is that they still charge premium ad rates for a non premium product, and drive advertisers away. Those advertisers are looking for a place to go. And that’s the problem; there is no consistently good physical or online alternative.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
I think this reflects the notion that the LA Times is considered to be one of the premier national papers, along with the NY Times and the WaPo. The problem of course is that all three are suffering in a marketplace that wants to be, for the most part, not informed, or challenged, but entertained. Yet they still charge those premium rates in reflection of their past glories. Also, there’s the problem of their advertisers themselves being subsumed by other entities, for example, department stores being bought out and brought under one corporate roof, which eliminates the need to advertise to beat the competition, because now those consolidated department stores don’t compete.
Remember when TV news was a loss leader? When William S. Paley wanted the “Tiffany Network” to shine, and massive growth in profit was not nearly as important as image? When the Networks competed with each other to produce documentary programs that examined issues facing society in depth? Doesn’t happen anymore, because those news documentaries are competing with pure fluff that more viewers turn in to. The “Serious” people of the Village are utter slaves to corporate demands for higher ratings, so they go the infotainment route and seek not to inform, but to entertain, and not to challenge, but to confirm.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
No. The portability issue is a problem for online sites. Consider a household and the old LA Times. Display ads for department stores were in the main news section. Same for stereo equipment. Guns, computers and sporting goods were in the sports section. Specialty clothing was in the women’s or style section. Other ads were mixed around. Much stereotyping, but there was also the idea that people in the household might look through the entire paper, but then carry away the section that had stories and ads that appealed to them.
This doesn’t work as well with desktops or laptops. And even here, even with computers getting cheaper, how many households are there in which everyone has his or her own computer? Newspapers flourished in the late 19th century because they became affordable by the masses. The equivalent penetration for computers and smartphones means, for the near term, that you are pitching mainly to the more monied middle and upper classes.
You have it wrong here. The marketing department of the LA Times, for example, used to have a very good idea of how long home delivery and street sales copies would last, good figures of how many different people would likely see a particular issue, and use this to sell to advertisers.
The thing is that none of this expertise helps them with trying to develop an equivalent online product. They just don’t know how to match ads and eyeballs. One quick thing: even click throughs are a problem. Click throughs kinda assume that you want to buy something immediately. Not necessarily the case, and if you do select a click, you might not go back to the site to continue reading or read other stories (or look at other ads). With a physical paper, you might hold onto it because you will drive by the store later, or the ad is for a Memorial Day sale that is not happening until Monday.
So how you respond to or react to online ads is different. News sites haven’t figured out how to deal with this.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
mistermix
@Brachiator:
I really don’t understand what these nitpicking distinctions mean in the context of my main point, which is that coupons people used to get from the Sunday paper are now coming in the mail. You keep making them as if they’re meaningful, and that’s what I find annoying about your comments on this topic.
The reason I think the publisher fuckups is worth mentioning is because it accelerated the death of an already dying industry. It’s not the primary reason. The primary reason is a long-term decline in circulation. Since World War II, circulation growth has not kept pace with population growth. Before the Internet, there was TV cutting into the newspaper reading population. If you have some other “deeper” picture, give it.
If you followed the link, you’d see that it’s run by a husband and wife team. They don’t have any of that overhead. They have about 8,000 readers a day. And they gross six figures doing it.
http://www.quantcast.com/westseattleblog.com
That’s the future. Perhaps you’d feel better if I posted a shot of the tears on my pillow about it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
OK, I misunderstood your portability argument. I just question how “real” those numbers are to advertisers.
As for the issue of online vs. dead tree, yup, they haven’t figured it out. I don’t think anyone has. The bottom line is money is more important than anything else, and the fact that you’re not losing money, and eeking out a profit, isn’t enough nowadays for the Ferengi overlords. They’ll pull their support in a heartbeat for something that they think will yield more latinum.
Mark
@Brachiator: “how many households are there in which everyone has his or her own computer?”
In my two-person household we have six. Wireless subscription penetration in the United States is 105%.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
It wasn’t publisher fuckups. It was the rapid deline in display advertising, which publishers saw and didn’t adjust to quickly enough, and the disapearance of classified ads, especially to the Internet, which they didn’t see coming at all.
The decline in circulation growth is more complicated since newspapers saw a growth in revenues and profits and readership after the war. And you have the direct impact of tv, which first killed afternoon papers and later morning dailies. It is not just about circulation not keeping pace with population growth. It is about specific events and changes in habits which killed newspaper reading and subscriptions. And it is about a second revolution that killed the advertising model Mainstream magazines have largely disappeared, and it’s got nothing to do with any particular balance sheet fuckups accelerating anything.
I followed the link, and it didn’t tell me much about staffing or how they gathered the news or how they run their site, or its costs. You could easily have summarized some of this. And they gross six figures. What’s the net and is even this sustainable?
So, 8,000 readers a day. I think we would agree that this is not sustainable for any major daily newspaper. So, newspapers will die and neither of us have an idea of what the future might bring, except maybe profitable small online rags that are as shallow as were the first editions of the LA Times and other papers. Back to a perhaps inevitable future.
No need for a shot of tears on your pillow.
Uncle Cosmo
FWIW, beyond a couple of DM ad packets each week, one of the “local throwaways” here in Baltimore is in fact an offshoot of the local rag (that I used to read online but waved buh-bye to after The Baltimore XXX changed its true motto from “Light For All” to “A Glimmer If You Pay Us”). The “XXX-Plus” is delivered by hand, no less, on Thursdays in a (very thin) plastic wrapper, 4 fullsize newsprint pages filled with remodeling ads, recipes & restaurant gossip wrapped around area-specific supermarket & drugstore ad sections & a packet or two of coupons–basically the same stuff that shows up in the “XXX”‘s Wednesday deadtree edition.
Just curious as to whether that’s typical in other Juicers’ localities.
My brother lives halfway to DC & subscribes to WaPo & I noticed recently that the Sunday ad inserts now come prewrapped & sealed in plastic. The rest of the rag can take its chances on the weather but those ads have to get through untouched, I guess…
Steve the Lurker
I work for a large newspaper and we have cut our staff, corporate and news, by about 75% in the last few years. We are trying hard to monetize our web presence but haven’t yet figured it out. The main things keeping us in business right now are (1) old people; (2) couponers; and (3) our still profitable tv and radio stations. Tv and radio will have a huge year in swing states thanks to Citizens United.
Oh, and the coupons you get in the mail are not as good as the ones in the newspaper inserts.
Chris T.
Aside: here’s how to tell if someone is rich. Ask them what “clipping coupons for a living” means. If they think it refers to those inserts and getting discounts at stores, they’re not rich. The rich ones think it means “living off bond interest from your trust fund.”
(Bonds, in the old days, were printed on heavy Bond Paper—hence the name “bond paper”—with interest-paying coupons that you actually physically removed and sent in to get your money. Back during Forbes’ run for president he kept referring to people who would “clip coupons for a living” and it took me forever to figure out what he was talking about.)
Schlemizel
@cathyx:
As liberal as Minneapolis, MN.? Where the paper is named in part of the communist workers Star?