Professionalizing ad sales yields revenue gains for news startups

I wrote a study of best practices for advertising sales at news startups for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY. Here is a post I wrote summarizing key findings, originally published by Knight Digital Media Center at USC Annenberg.

A new report I wrote for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY underscores the value of professionalizing ad sales operations at news startups. The report details a number of practices that news startups have either developed or adopted from traditional media. In this post, I highlight three:

1. Professional sales staff

Hiring a sales rep or bringing on a partner to focus on revenue may prove critical to many operations. It is challenging – good sales people are in high demand and compensating them adequately is a stretch for small sites. But the inability to recruit and retain a good sales person may doom a site.

Ask David Boraks, who closed his two local news sites in North Carolina earlier this year.

“Finding a full-time sales person earlier would have made a difference,” Boraks said. “We tried. We couldn’t find the right person who could work for us for what we could pay They were six-figure persons. The other (sales) jobs around here are that. We can’t afford that.”

By contrast, multiple sites in the study, including Riverhead Local on Long Island, N.Y., and Noozhawk in Santa Barbara, Calif., reported revenue increases when they took steps to improve their sales operations.

2. Realistic rate structure

A rate structure has to reflect revenue requirements of the site and it should be consistent

Kim Clark, vice president for revenue development and partner at Noozhawk said a structure (outlined in a rate card) gives the sales rep has something to share with potential advertisers and set the value of the site. Without a rate structure, “everything is up for negotiation,” Clark said, which is time consuming and makes it harder to track and hit revenue targets.

Clark said the rates have to reflect revenue needs of the site. “You have to stick with an average rate that’s going to get you into the black. Sure, it’s great if you’re making a lot of sales. But at end of the day what does your profit margin look like?”

3. Avoid CPM pricing

Successful sites have developed a following that enables them to charge premium rates. Most favor multi-month contracts. That time frame means the ads have time to work in raising advertiser visibility in the community and it means sites are not constantly reselling inventory. 

Long-term contracts assure that “you’re not always reinventing the wheel” in reselling ad inventory, Clark said. “They are advertising long enough to see if it’s effective.”

Noozhawk, charges $1,450 a month for prominent display in high-traffic sections of the site and $165 to $600 a week for run of site advertising, depending on prominence and size. Third Door Media, with its audience of 1.4 million unique monthly visitors, charges $4,000 per week for daily advertising across its network, which includes multiple sites and newsletters. Search Engine Land also offers CPM pricing at rates ranging from $25 to $60 depending on size and placement.

By contrast, sites that rely mostly on CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) or network rates, struggle.

Budget Savvy Bride, for example, averages $3 per CPM against an audience of 82,000 unique visitors. She Finds, a fashion site, has seen its rate through the Glam network fall as low as $2 against 1.5 million uniques..

News startup survey: Revenue growth, capacity challenges

I continue to update my database of promising local news startups, Michele’s List, with support from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY. The center posted results of my 2015 survey of publishers and I wrote this post, originally published by Knight Digital Media Center at USC Annenberg.

In the chaotic world of online news startups, I think it makes sense to take a long view. Whenever someone asks whether a big breakthrough is coming, I scratch my head. That’s because progress at this time is so incremental – a game of inches, feet, maybe yards but rarely miles – a marathon with no finish line in sight.

I think it is productive to figure out what is working at specific sites, examine why it is working and try to figure out whether it can be replicated in other markets.

That’s part of the philosophy behind Michele’s List, my database of “born on the web” local news sites and behind the publisher surveys I conduct periodically. Today, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, my collaborator in this effort, publishes the results of our 2015 survey, the fifth I have conducted since I launched the database as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow in 2010.

Summary of results here.

Progress: More than two-thirds of the publishers report that they increased their revenue in 2014 over 2013. Nearly half said they turned a profit last year. That’s encouraging evidence that a greater focus on revenue across the field is paying off.

Challenges: Most of the sites are quite small, with revenues of $50,000 or less, and they are highly dependent on a single source of revenue – traditional display advertising.  Each is a vulnerabilty. Together they create questions about whether a site has the capacity to develop enough of a business to get past $50,000 so a single founder isn’t trying to do everything.

To be sure, some of the sites in this cohort, are relatively new. Just as newspaper layoffs spurred dozens of launches by refugee journalists in 2009-2010, the disintegration of Patch prompted many if its refugees to start sites in their base communities in 2014. The survey also showed younger sites tended to have less revenue.

Others, however, may be stuck in neutral and some will likely shut down when their owners are forced to get a day job or develop other priorities.

That said, there is a cohort of sites that are growing revenue above $100,000 annually and well beyond. Looking at their trajectories and the market factors that have fueled their growth is worthy of additional study.

Previous surveys..