Bluffton Today
Morris Publishing launched Bluffton Today as both a home-delivered free daily newspaper in the fast-growing golf community of Bluffton, South Carolina, and as a companion citizen journalism site. The print edition now has regular readership levels higher than 60 percent in the affluent coast town, where half the population is new in the last few years, and penetration is as high as 90 percent when occasional readers are measured.
Within this community of 16,000 households, the web site has steadily increased the number of registered users, counting 7,300 as of January 2007. There is a professional editorial staff of 18 but this site defies a lot of citizen-journalism math, which holds that a few devoted posters trigger many casual contributors. More than 20% of its users have posted something to the site.
All income is derived from ads, including sponsorship, tower and banner ads, and business ads with “presumptive upsell,” Yelvington said. “Making income on the web site is not as important as the overall health of the enterprise. Papers have set up web sites almost in competition with the papers, so they want them to pay their own way.
“The relationship between this site and the newspaper is the opposite. The web site delivers tremendous benefits back to the paper and doesn’t rely on print reporting. If it never made a profit it would be fine. Our real goal is to do well in the market as a business unit.”
Wicked Local
This portal site draws on professionally produced content from GateHouse Media’s dailies and weeklies in Massachusetts and blends it with citizen content and a comprehensive local search engine. Although the full citizen journalism model has not yet been extended to all of GateHouse’s Massachusetts web sites, “Wicked Local Search” is available from all 100-plus sites.
The search site has traditional elements, including banner advertising, but has taken traditional classifieds – real estate, auto and jobs – and reframed them as searches, not classifieds. The searches aggregate results based on keywords by combining news, classifieds, newspaper ad content and other content into one search results page. Said Anne Eisenmenger, vice president of audience development for GateHouse Media New England: “By aggregating not only our own content but also content from many other sources relevant to each community, we’re aiming to produce sites that can serve as a one-stop online resource for living in any one of our communities.”
For Wicked Local, the challenge is to convince local advertisers that consumers want local search, and that the model will lead users to advertisers’ products.
New West
This regional news operation, launched for less than $1 million from angel investors, has a web site at its center, but it’s also pursuing related businesses. New West has launched a conference series, a custom publishing business, an indoor advertising business, and has plans to expand into book publishing. It sponsors wireless computer connections in coffee shops to help market its operations. “We conceived this all along as about building a media brand, about growth and change, leading with online,” said founder and CEO Jonathan Weber.
The New West staff has learned that the basic rules of the news business apply to their venture. Good stories and frequent postings drive the readership traffic that advertisers want. “What you really want, and what’s really going to sustain you, are the people who are going to bookmark you and come to you every morning, every afternoon, every night before they go to bed,” said managing editor Courtney Lowery. “Those are the people that you have to win over.”
Village Soup
Richard Anderson, the owner of this site that covers two towns in Maine, said, “Research shows that 50 percent of the market contains non-readers, non-newspaper readers, and 75 percent of the market contains non-newspaper advertisers. So there’s a huge opportunity out there to solve the problems or the needs of those people who are not looking to the newspapers.” Anderson has invested more than $5 million in developing the site, which had about 9,300 unique daily visitors in June 2006 and 1.2 million page views. He said recently, “We’re not cash-flow positive yet, but we’re gaining dramatically, and the printed paper has done a tremendous amount to help us get there.”
Among the steps Village Soup has taken to build online revenue are:
- On-demand advertising. Online posts feature last-minute sales or promotions that would be outdated in the weekly print edition.
- Enhanced directory listings. Advertisers can pay for featured listings in the business directories posted at VillageSoup.com.
- Online auctions. Local businesses can sell products through the web site’s continuous online auction, with proceeds going to the news site as an advertising credit.
The site has had its greatest success so far with a local database of real estate listings, which includes a link to town maps. Realtors are charged a fee to list in the local database. Anderson said, “The real long-range need is for businesses such as restaurateurs to decide it is worth the extra 15 minutes a day to put their daily special online, and to get more businesses to participate in the sharing of inventories in community databases.” The ultimate goal is to build a platform, which Anderson calls Village Soup Common, which can be adapted to communities of about 30,000 internationally.
Backfence
Backfence is a venture capital-backed commercial network of hyperlocal sites with all content written by the community itself and with a target audience of suburban “soccer Moms and soccer Dads,” according to co-founder Mark Potts. It launched in 2005 with two local portals in Virginia since grown to six, plus one in Maryland, three in San Francisco and three in the Chicago suburbs by fall of 2006.
The site allows readers to promote events, rate and review local businesses and post free classified ads, which can be upsold. The sites sell display ads, enhanced local yellow-page listings and self-serve business classifieds for $25 a month.
Backfence aims to capture local advertisers who can’t afford to buy into print. Businesses pay $120 per year for a one-page web site that can include photos, their hours and contact information. Increasingly, though, Backfence finds itself in competition with independent local start-ups.
Baristanet
Baristanet delivers an edgy blend of local comings and goings, community musings and all things related to food and real estate in three affluent New Jersey communities, Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield. It also has delivered readers, recording 140,000 page views in September 2006, up from 70,000 a year earlier. Advertisers have taken notice. Along with the site’s new interactive teardown map, which chronicles the address of every home in the community being replaced with something newer or bigger (a feature that originated on WestportNow), Baristanet features a standing billboard advertisement, rotating side pages and paid classifieds ($20 a month for 30 words; $40 to include a photo).
The site sells for $1,000 a month a rotating ad at the top of its main page, and for $300 a month side ads that also rotate. The revenue helps pay $500 a month for technical support and $1,000 a month for a regular contributor, a citizen journalist trained by the site’s two professional editors.
Voice of San Diego
This is among the most ambitious of the nonprofit sites, with heavy backing from local foundations and a paid staff of journalists. Readers are responding; page views grew from about 250,000 a month in the summer of 2005 to 700,000 a month in January 2007.Revenues include large charitable gifts from founders, and corporate donors who are recognized onsite as sponsors of the weather, traffic and surf reports. The site runs membership drives and now counts 595 individual members who have donated from $35 to $5,000.