Mega Conference Recap 2011
Las Vegas Sun Patient For Web Profit ?
Can great online editorial survive without a strong sales effort? How patient can Greenspun Media be, as they pump financial support into the LasVegasSun.com? This is quite possibly the only session we can think of, where Rob Curley was asked about the financial sustainability of his efforts.
Mr. Curley; head of interactive for Greenspun Digital, is arguably one of the best content developers on the planet.
So what happens when a sales effort struggles to turn that superior editorial into cash?
Some questions we asked Rob, in front of a room full of newspaper executives:
- How long can ownership take that loss?
- Can a Rob Curley strategy survive in a newspaper company with limited funds?
- Why does Rob go on so many sales calls? Is the sales team not strong enough?
- Is new business development and local sales skill a strong suit of the Las Vegas Sun?
- Is there a common thread to be found from his recent time at the Washington Post and Naple News?
Here’s the slide deck from the session called ‘Digital Cage Match’; Mel Taylor vs. Rob Curley from the Las Vegas Sun.
Revenue: Online Community Journalism
TCU in Fort Worth recently played host to an excellent journalism workshop focused on helping community newspapers turn a profit with their websites.
I was invited to speak to this gathering of highly engaged newspaper execs. SEE PRESENTATION BELOW. The 30 participants in this 3 day workshop represented a variety of local newspapers throughout Texas. They were all committed to building sustainable business models for their digital news efforts.
Tommy Thomason; program director of TCU’s Texas Center for Community Journalism, is doing an amazing job with this series of workshops. With funding from the Texas Newspaper Foundation, attendees get intensive, non-stop training and development that really stands out amongst state news organizations.
WOW. No tuition, room or food charges during these workshops on the TCU campus in beautiful Fort Worth. In the past, workshop topics have included photojournalism, writing and editing, advertising sales, management, page design, developing an effective Web edition, sportswriting, and circulation.
Tommy Thomason was the founding director of the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism. He left that position to become the founding director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism. Thomason began his career in journalism in the early 1970s with the Associated Press, working as a sportswriter in Arkadelphia and Little Rock.
Dr. Thomason has taught journalism at five universities and has been at TCU since 84. In 1987, he was one of the winners of a national teaching award in Journalism Ethics from the Poynter Institute of Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Help Teens Avoid Facebook Mistakes
Here’s my latest keynote session and workshop devoted to helping parents, teachers and employers better understand the Internet usage of young adults.
Hyper Local Purists Steamrolled by Patch?
Last week, Chicago’s Loyola University hosted Block by Block 2010; an invitation-only gathering of indie website owners, bloggers and online news hounds. They came to talk hyper-local, how to save community news and possibly make a buck doing it. Following along via video stream and tweets, I had to double check the date on my calendar.
Unless I’m imagining things, the topics and concerns being discussed seemed to be essentially the same as they were in 2007. Geez. Anybody wonder why the hyper-local revenue needle has barely moved over the past 3 years? This uncomfortable issue is the 800 lb gorilla in the room and is why every local, online news site is vulnerable to getting steamrolled.
The summit was hosted by a bevy of smart editorial & academic folk. Yet, if cracking the business model code is challenge #1, we wondered why a new biz-dev exec with local sales chops wasn’t on the steering committee. Maybe a sales pro to moderate the sales-focused panel? A critical error of many online news conferences is assuming this problem can be solved from the newsroom. It can’t. This begs the question: is the phrase entrepreneurial journalism an oxymoron?
Early during the panel session devoted to sales, attendees enjoyed a pop quiz. “Who are your customers?” Many squirmed hearing the correct answer of ‘advertisers, not readers’. Funny how some of those audience members forget how Newspapers are actually run, and how their journalism has always been subsidized by advertising and other non-news monetization.
Pegasus News pioneer Mike Orren was a wise choice as a sales session panelist, and has the scars to prove it. The Dallas based hyper-local platform & strategy he developed then sold, is always one to watch.
Unfortunately we had to witness business savvy publishers like Sacramento Press‘ Ben Ilfeld, and Howard Owens of TheBatavian being relegated to audience status during the ‘sales’ session. That little oversight did make me throw up in my mouth a little. Those two could have shared reams of real world examples & and sales case-studies all day long.
Special shout-out to those who graciously shared: “advertising is evil” and my personal favorite: “I’d rather chew on broken glass than sell an ad”. What nice, encouraging words to say in front of financially strapped bloggers. Not like they need more, but this kind of public airing of blogosphere dirty laundry only provides additional confidence to the new local competitors of Patch, Reach Local, DataSphere and Groupon.
Pure-plays like Patch love to see paralysis and the regular pissing and moaning from local news orgs. Intellectual theorizing and to-do list creation from the incumbents only provides Patch more time to marshal small armies of sellers to get in front of every mom and pop business in sight. Since small business owners are the financial life-blood of local news orgs, close relationships with them should be viewed as the ultimate end game for all for-profit news efforts.
It did occur to me, that if Patch execs were watching, they could be thinking: ‘sweet, these poor souls have no idea we could steamroll them if we wanted’. Surprisingly, Patch was rarely brought up and when it was, summarily dismissed. Instead of trying to understanding the Patch business strategy and how to compete, they were immediately described as a drive-thru experience with little chance of being a dominant news org.
Dismissing Patch is death defying puffery from those who can’t imagine losing control of local info & advertiser streams. Imagine a professional business not wanting to understand a fast moving, well funded competitor? Indeed, it speaks volumes to the ‘smarter than thou’ and academic ‘class project’ vibe of some hyper-local efforts.
Love em or hate em, Patch is one of the more potent threats to local media to date. Will they succeed? Who knows? But the one thing they will certainly do is inflict pain on the local media incumbents, forcing some to eventually throw in the towel. Patch could easily play a waiting game similar to when a Wal-Mart sells items at a loss in order to vaporize the small shop owner.
AOL /Patch’s; Tim Armstrong, recently made a TV appearance on CNBC. Tim touched on his general strategy with Patch. On the Business Insider site, reader comments slammed Tim. “Armstrong has no clue” on Aug 17, 1:24 PM said: “do you really think local media outlets are going to let you come to their town where they employ professional journalists and let your rag tag bloggers take-over?”
We think that answer is yes if revenue doesn’t become job #1 with local website operators. As the ancient warrior; Sun Szu, explains in the ‘Art of War’: know thy enemy…
…and as I say: Your cool site sucks cuz it can’t make money, and it scales like shit. Now take control of that steamroller before you get flattened.
Local Media Eco-Systems
Local news & info sites need more than just a banner sales strategy. While display ads are still a major part of online advertising, they’ll certainly not be the cash cow you hoped for. Instead, consider a variety of other revenue streams, like Local News Incubators, to quickly move to sustainability. Counter-intuitively, some of the best revenue producers are offline.
Here’s a graphical look at the business plan we developed, and are deploying in a mid-size market. This road map uses proven tactics that are already working independently, in many markets. We’re rolling this out in measured increments, not all at once. This allows for ability to build a solid foundation, prior to adding more complex elements.
hyper local online news and eco-system model
DataSphere Smart. Local Media; Not So Much
Gotta hand it to the fast growing DataSphere. The online solutions vendor recently closed deals with LocalTV LLC, Raycom and others. Could their offerings threaten WorldNow, Triton, and Emmis Interactive? Better yet, could their business model even hurt the local media partners they’re teaming up with?
Recently funded by Fisher Communications, DataSphere clearly saw local media still struggling with turning a web profit. (even after all these years)
Combine that with viewers and advertisers losing interest in typical local news sites, and ever lower cpm’s….. general managers everywhere are scrambling to keep corporate off their a** and to quickly accomplish the following:
- Have a half-decent website at the lowest possible cost
- Populate it with news, content & info, at the lowest possible cost
- Hit their new, mandatory web budget at the lowest possible cost
- Get it all done while not screwing up the primary business
DataSphere to the rescue. Here’s the deal: We’ll turn on a whole bunch of ez-to-operate neighborhood blogs for ya, then have our call centers auto-dial the local businesses in your town, close lot’s of deals, rinse, repeat. How’s that sound? Oh, we almost forgot. We’ll take a ridiculously high percentage of the deal and we’ll have a primary contact with the client too. But hey, just sit there and promote it. No need to lift a finger. Cool?
DataSphere Technologies, Inc. (http://www.DataSphere.com) is a Software as a Service (SaaS) Web technology and hyper-local ad sales company focused on generating online profits for media companies. DataSphere offers a range of turnkey solutions to rapidly improve site monetization and experience with minimal investment of time and money
I like that last line; “minimal investment of time and money”
As a local media manager, you’ll love how this easily puts web revenue on the books. But in reality, you did a deal with the devil. You just handed over the most valuable part of your business (realtionship with local advertiser) to an outside technology company/middle man.
Just for kicks, ask the Newspaper publisher in town how that deal with Yahoo has been working out for them.
7 Habits of Profitable, Hyper Local News
CUNY New Business Models for News
Still no sustainable business model for online news? That’s crazy talk.
We love reading about online editorial success and greater activity in the hyper-local space. Yet most of these reports feature vague remarks about revenue plans still being explored and the perplexing challenge of finding a way to pay the newsroom bills.
CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis, NYU’s Jay Rosen & other veteran journos have been trying to crack the business model code for quite some time now. These entrepreneurial endeavors are well intentioned as they seek to support the emerging legion of news sites that may one day replace traditional newspapers. Seasoned educators like Jeff and Jay used their editorial credentials to wake up many online newsrooms. But that’s not going to move the needle enough. Now it’s time for seasoned sellers and revenue focused execs to step up and take the lead here. Maybe we need those with actual sales and revenue experience….. to tackle this sales and revenue issue?
Since 1998, we’ve been tracking and field-testing the leading revenue and sales models used by leading online operations. This research identified a robust collection of revenue models that are currently thriving in the local marketplace.
So why are most hyper-local sites still swimming in red ink, or looking for financial bailouts? With plenty of proven and active revenue models available for adoption…..are these models being intentionally ignored, or just mistakenly dismissed?
Here’s a summary of findings, recently submitted to CUNY’s New Business Models for News project. This is top line insight into proven business models, currently in operation at a variety of leading websites. Most of these best practices will not only sustain the NEW, news organization, but many will allow it to thrive with high margins, attractive profitability and better editorial coverage of the community.
7 habits of Profitable, Local News Sites
1) Lead by revenue-first executive (just like traditional media business)
- Profitability first, then operations, followed by editorial/content
- Run site as a start-up business
- Think like an entrepreneur…NOT just a manager or journalist
- Borrow tactics from online revenue leaders
2) Running extra-lean & efficient w/content & platforms
- Open source platforms, software & applications
- Outsource content via feeds, blogs, indie-journalism
- Aggregation & curation. Do what you do best, point to the rest
- Aggressively strip out & reduce hard costs/expenses
- 24/7 news cycle; Twitter = first responder journalism
- Hard news & data as commodity loss-leader
- Monetizable soft news & activity, subsidizes hard news
- Data as content
3) Advertiser & sponsor friendly
- Enabling local commerce is priority #1
- Advertising as content
- High impact ad units & sponsorships
- Removal of GAN’s; garbage ad networks
- Feet on the street-sales efforts
- Local business education via Web 101 workshops
- Self-serve & outbound tele-sales
- Ability to show quantifiable ROI
- Local & regional advertising networks
4) Non-traditional revenue streams
- Rev-share, transaction fees & e-commerce
- Free-miums & up-sells
- Offline initiatives & live events
- Marketing services for local business
5) Training, management & compensation
- Regular training of all staff (especially top management)
- Performance based compensation
- Mandatory budgets with bonus & penalty
- Managers lead by example, not from behind desk
6) Seed, syndicate, socialize & mobilize
- More than just a destination site strategy
- Leverage & monetize content anywhere & everywhere
- Enable formation and leveraging of affinity groups
7) Database mining & video adoption
- Sales and editorial appreciation of well-defined databases
- Sales-based uses of video; online infomercials & ad-vertorial
NAA: Newspaper Website Strategy
Speaking with Enrico Burden of NH.com
In cooperation with Blog Talk Radio, I spoke with some heavy hitters in the Newspaper industry at a recent NAA Conference
We discussed their current web efforts.
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Dan Shorter; President of Minneapolis Star Tribune, Interactive. Formerly the GM of the Palm Beach post, Dan recently got lured to Minneapolis. He’s one of the most respected Newspaper people in the online space, and Mr. Shorter shares his thoughts on the fast changing Newspaper environment, and how he’s gonna fit another award on his mantle! CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
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Howard Owens; Former Director of Digital Publishing, Gatehouse Media. (current publisher of TheBatavian.com.) Howard recollects the NAA session featuring Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News who said things like: ”our readers don’t want the same newspaper we’ve been putting out over the past 30 years.’ Howard also discusses the 12 things journalists can do to save journalism. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
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Allison Sholly; Former VP/GM, Chicago Tribune Interactive. Allison describes sales structure and compensation, as well as the Trib’s success in the online video space. And because we had so much fun doing this Radio-like webcast, Allison and I discuss whether we should do a DJ morning show together. Here is the podcast recording of my conversation with Allison Sholly.
Also spoke with folks like:
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Chris Tolles; CEO of TOPIX
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Bob Kellagher; COO Calkins Interactive
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Walker Fenton; NewsGator
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Jay Small; Scripps GM of Interactive
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Shannon Dunnigan; Director Online Revenue, Gatehouse Media
Click here to hear all interviews I did, using BlogTalkRadio.com
