This is a good time of year to be thinking about 2012 - and about 2015 and 2020.
The variety of new business models to keep larger local media companies profitable and competetitive is still forming - and reforming. This week's case study on NewOrleans.com explores one business model that most local media do not think about: Travel products.
Other emerging strategies include marketing tools and services that go beyond traditional advertising.
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10/27/11
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David Castello, COO of Castello Cities Internet, Inc., spoke at the nascent GeoDomain Publishers conference about the future of city.com sites. This interview fleshes out his own plans to build out Nashville.com and his thoughts on partnerships with local media.
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10/10/11
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Quick, create a list of all the accounts who are spending $5000 a month in your market.
If this doesn't phase you, now try figuring out the last time they had a real needs analysis with a sales representative.
No problem?
Ok, lets move on... was that sales representative equipped to create a competitive multi-media plan?
How are we doing?
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9/22/11
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Advertorial: Webshoz has created a way for video content to be syndicated in a small form factor that provides roll-over engagement - called the Videobar. It also displays multiple videos simultaneously.
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9/21/11
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This week's two case studies are from tiny Pottstown, a 23,000 population borough in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, on the Schuylkill River that survived both an earthquake and a flood this week.
The case studies are solid, if small revenue, simple ideas. But what's happening at Pottsmerc.com is important for a different reason.
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9/1/11
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It was already 9 p.m. inside a industrial warehouse in Las Vegas, when the first people in Nevada tried to print the page of a newspaper on a Macintosh computer.
I was 20-something, and let …
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9/1/11
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The following interview is with Kurt Lozier, SVP of Dow Jones Local Media Group, which is currently testing paywalls in eight small markets. The complete case study is this week's lead item.
LMI: Looking over the data, do you find it remarkable that 50% of print subscribers have chosen to pay more to read news online, simply because you asked them to?
Lozier: The take rate was higher than we thought. Every time I read about (publishers) launching a site who say current subscribers get into for free, I want to grab the phone and call them. If you just give it to current subscribers, you don't know if it has value. Our new core product is print plus online.
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The following interview is edited from this week's interview with Kurt Lozier, SVP of Dow Jones Local Media Group, which is currently testing paywalls in eight small markets.
Looking …
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8/25/11
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This week we've released a set of reports on a creative way to sell against the football category: Football contests.
In the renewed excitement over building e-mail lists that drive deals, the value of sponsorship revenue is often overlooked. We've found that a number of companies have divided contests into two categories, ie "marketing" which primarily drives e-mail capture, and "sales," based on the ability to sell the contest, reporting to two different departments.
Football - with a younger and more desirable demographic than baseball - is one of the eminently salable kinds of contests, and one that also drives significant registrations. Beer, auto and fast food chains love this category.
Because Second Street Media has such a long history with football contests, we looked at as many of their contests as we could and found ten solid concepts. Best practices can also translate to other kinds of sports contests, so use these monetization tips.
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8/14/11
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A new trade association for city.com sites, GeoPublishers, is rising from the effective ashes of the Associated Cities. Affiliated with Borrell & Associates, the new group looks like it has a bright future.
Some context here: Domain collectors in the early days of the web occasionally wound up as owners of city.com sites. The power of the city.com URL to lift content to the top of search results fueled a variety of new business models, though most fell short of what would be considered “media."
Exceptions include Richmond.com, ultimately acquired by its daily newspaper competitor, along with a few others.
Today, these entrepreneurs are laughing all the way to the bank. City.com sites in good markets can rack up exceptional revenues with very small staffs using a "city guide" model based on transactional revenues from travel products like hotel rooms and golf courses.
The scrappy entrepreneurs building new companies first banded together as Associated Cities in the early days of the industry.
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7/25/11
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