Traffic reports from the newly-online-only Seattle Post-Intelligence placed its April readership at 4.3 million unique visitors, up from 4.2 million in the same month last year. That’s a modest gain, but considering the population of Seattle-Tacoma metro is 3.3 million, it starts to look like a magnificent achievement.
The catch is that despite this impressive performance, the monetization is not happening. Each time I’ve reviewed the site over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found a bare few national campaigns and a whole lot of ad network inventory. Sure, the latter can be ‘optimized’ (maybe) and sold for slightly-better-than-rock-bottom rates, but it’s still a long way away from charging premium rates to reach a highly targeted local audience.
Name-brand sites still want maximum reach, but this may be a situation that calls for a wildly different tack. With uniques handily exceeding population, there’s no way an ad team could claim its delivering a ‘uniquely Seattle’ audience to a local advertiser, much less one with certain desired attributes. On a local site with a local target audience, visitors from the rest of the web are not valuable. A restaurant in Seattle should not have to pay for an ad shown to a visitor from Schenectady. And this in turn drives content strategy: no longer should a newspaper site aspire to be the central hub of everything, but merely the central hub of its metro area. Leave the national news to the national sites.
Earlier today I picked up this year’s “Best Of” edition of Oakland’s East Bay Express. It’s chock-fat with useful content and ads from all over the East Bay, from sandwich shops to bakeries to beauty parlors. Long reliant on ads from big retailers, banks and real estate (among others)heyhe holy grail for SeattlePI and other MSM newspaper sites is to get these advertisers into their ecosystem and away from Google AdWords. And the way to` do that may be antithetical to everything they’ve ever wanted to achieve: get smaller.
In fact, under the radar (and probably not on purpose), the ‘getting small’ strategy is already well in use. According to the Inland Press Association (via Newsosaur), the newspapers with the smallest circulations have actually had the least impact on their bottom lines. That’s because they were never reliant on the big retail, bank and real estate ads that drove old newspaper profits. The weekly independent papers actually stand to recover well and retain these ads because of their long-standing relationships with local businesses.
So, yes, I see a future where the San Francisco Chronicle is no longer the dominant player in its metro area, but independents like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly stand tall. These smaller papers with distinctive editorial voices and tighter relationships with local advertisers may be the future of the newspaper.
The question for the reputable MSM big-city dailies is how they can get true local businesses – the restaurants, nightlife, storefront businesses and so forth – to advertise. In these narrow margin times, that means putting out a marketing solution they can afford. So long as CPM remains the measuring stick, newspapers will need to reduce readership to make it truly affordable and guarantee they can reach the audience they need. Starting point: the number of uniques is something less than the metropolitan population.
In an era of worries about media and business homogenization – the ‘Walmart effect’ and c. – going small may be the best defense for keeping local media, attitudes and businesses flourishing.