I'm the IT support guy for a small town newspaper. The newspapers' in-house graphics designer and I have moved the papers web site to Drupal, and actually got some content from the print edition on-line which is a big improvement from what was there before. Our problem isn't technical as much as social. The powers that be don't really "get" the web and feel that the site should look like the placemat at the local diner --All ads in your face all the time. They have a modern site with content, and a good design that includes plenty of space for ad inventory. However they don't know what to do with it, including the basics of how to price or sell ads on the site. They are very good at selling for print, so this shouldn't be rocket science.
The site gets about 20k unique visitors and 160k total page views per month.
Any thoughts on what to do? Or pointers to resources that would help us figure out what we should be doing and how to train our sales people?
Comments
In the same boat
I'm in a very similar boat. I'm the IT guy for a small paper in Canada. And while I convinced everybody that drupal was the way to go and we are migrating to it. They insist on doing very similar things as you described. Where once we had a very clean layout with 4-5 well placed (and well paying ads). Now we have 12-18 smaller more annoying ads peppered around the page (with a lower cost).
We arrived at our ad rate by estimating the 'cost per thousand' (aka "CPM") value.
Here are some CPM calculators
http://www.htennant.com/hta1/askus/bannerads.cfm
http://www.clickz.com/cpm-calculator
Essentially you have to determine how much you want to charge for 1000 'impressions', and then work around that with what works for you.
CPM us we to determine a flat base rate, which we then adjusted depending on page, location, rotation, bulk discount (etc etc). This kept things very simpler for the sales people, as most of the variables they were familiar with.
Retaining the local marketing partner relationship
The dilemma you have identified is a very common one.
Traditionally, the local newspaper has acted as a marketing partner for local businesses. We'd suggest that as the world moves online that the paper should seek to retain the 'local marketing partner relationship' by providing the full suite of online advertising services to the client.
So rather that simply selling a 'banner' ad to an existing paper ad client, we'd suggest a good strategy is to also offer
- a local yellow pages
- a local classified listing search
- banner adverts that are dynamically featuring 'todays special offers' and coupons.
A bonus of this approach is that all of these services have their own space in the online paper and hence it is not necessary to turn the website into a 'diner placemat'
If all of these products are available, then they can be bundled into a 'high value' offering that complements the print offering and hence can be sold by the sales team.
If low cost banners are the product being sold, this often causes problems for the sales team as the value of the product isn't high enough to be worth the sales teams time.
As an example of a product suite for motor dealers, this newspaper http://www.irishtimes.com/cars/ sells packages that include print, banners, classifieds and directory listings