Classified Revenue

TweenTribune.com New Revenue Source

Janet DeGeorge — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:42:15 +0000

By James Rainey, Los Angeles Times

December 15, 2009 | 9:27 p.m.

The grand debate over how to save journalism has pondered many big solutions, such as making consumers pay for online news, strong-arming aggregators like Google into sharing ad revenue with newspapers and funding public-interest reporting with charitable donations, big and small.Legions of commentators and bloggers have raged. Innumerable conferences have been convened. And a select few have taken action — creating vehicles that promise to reach new audiences while making some money along the way.
One such upstart is Alan Jacobson, a veteran newspaper-design consultant who has created TweenTribune.com to bring news to pre-adolescents, provide teachers with a new classroom tool and help advertisers reach a market worth billions of dollars.

In the couple of months since he has been pitching the website in earnest, Jacobson has gained a foothold and seen his traffic grow several-fold. He’s using educators as his marketing and editing force and even has gotten a few publishers in the innovation-phobic newspaper industry to play along.

Jacobson and his Norfolk, Va.-based website will not save journalism. He won’t recapture the billions in ad revenue lost by newspapers over the last several years. But his ebullient innovation opens a door for an underserved audience and provides the kind of incremental revenue that, strand by strand, eventually just might rope journalism back to a financial mooring.

Jacobson, 54, has been helping newspapers redesign and plot ad strategies for more than three decades. He has watched with increasing alarm as the rush of readers and advertisers to the Internet threatened the underpinnings of the print industry.

After reaching a high of $49.4 billion in 2005, newspaper ad revenue will shrink this year to around $28 billion, San Francisco-based analyst Alan Mutter has projected.

When Jacobson convened a meeting last March in Washington, D.C., with representatives of most of the top newspaper companies, a certain urgency gripped those brainstorming new advertising forms. Ideas from the group, called RevenueTwoPointZero, led to several online prototypes. But the innovations that had the news people so excited nine months ago died of inattention or inertia. “Technology is not the barrier at newspapers,” Jacobson told me this week. “It’s just the culture that is not receptive. I have been beating the drum for years, and nobody has been listening.”

So Jacobson, advisor to news outlets, set out to build an outlet of his own. He knew as the parent of two girls that newspapers as a whole did not hold a lot of appeal for young people. But they did contain content that even pre-adolescents enjoyed.

Jacobson envisioned TweenTribune as that bridge — gathering the kind of content from Associated Press that would inspire lunch table or computer lab chatter. Young people would be encouraged not only to read the news but also to talk back.

Among the top stories on the site Tuesday: the lawsuit by a Brazilian university student expelled for wearing a short skirt and a feature on “making your holiday eating ho-ho-healthy.”

Stories drawing the most comments include a piece on a Salt Lake City woman who has been happier since losing her record-length fingernails and a story about President Obama’s hope to increase school hours for students. (One outraged TweenTribune reader, nicknamed Chicken Nugget, responded: “I would have not told everyone to vote for him if I knew he was going to do this.”)

Said Jacobson: “You are not going to hook a 9-year-old on reading a newspaper every day, but you could hook them on this.”

Now Zoe Jacobson, 14, writes book reviews, while sister Sophie, 11, likes to straighten her dad out about language — this week e-mailing Jacobson to protest that a story about a disabled person did not adequately define “quadriplegic.”

Jacobson may have found the magic promotional bullet by bringing in teachers, whom he contacts via e-mails culled from the Internet.

Teachers said they like the fact that violent and racy content has been edited out. And TweenTribune encourages kids to comment — responses that teachers must OK before they go on the site.

Jeff Greene, who runs the computer lab at Petoskey Middle School in a Michigan town of the same name, said his sixth- and seventh-graders have really taken to the website. “Even for the kids with a short attention span, it really fires them up to use the technology and learn about something happening now, not years ago,” Greene said. “They get really engaged in it.”

Karen Ivy, a fourth-grade teacher at the private Curtis School in Bel-Air, said that she sees “a lot of potential” in TweenTribune and that her students “like the idea somebody is interested in them.”

From a trickle of users at the start, Jacobson said his site has now logged a total of 500,000 page views. That’s still a fraction of what big news sites draw, but he believes that he has just begun to nick the surface of a mass market and called the growth “pretty extraordinary.”

A handful of newspapers have signed on as partners, posting TweenTribune content on their websites and adding local stories to the national and international mix. They can also sell advertising to businesses with a niche in the youth market.

As the site grows and builds its audience, Jacobson believes more newspapers will pay to subscribe and easily recoup their investment in increased ad revenue. Schools in other countries, particularly Britain, have expressed an interest in the site, and Jacobson believes they might pay to give teachers access to the editing and oversight function (a service that’s currently free).

Sandy Sanders, publisher of Valdosta Daily Times, brought TweenTribune to his Georgia newspaper’s website and found local businesses willing to sponsor the child-friendly content.

The $18,000 in new revenue this year won’t change the fate of the 17,000-circulation paper, but it’s a small shot in the arm in a challenged industry.

With the news business swooning from an overdose of seminars, conferences and essays about the future, a series of those small booster shots could go a long way to revive the patient.

james.rainey@latimes.com

How to Become the Classified YouTube of Your Town

Janet DeGeorge — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:39:13 +0000

June 17, 2008 By Steve Outing, www.reinventingclassifieds.com

If newspaper designer and consultant Alan Jacobson is right, there is still a big opportunity open for newspapers to get in on something new online — and make some money from it — before others beat them to the punch, as has happened so many times before to newspapers on the Internet:

Video classifieds.

While that may not sound groundbreaking in the age of YouTube, applying personal video to classifieds is not yet something that has taken off. Consider Craigslist, the website network that has probably done more than any other to hurt newspaper classifieds. It has no video strategy (other than the occasional advertiser posting a link to a video), and its executives have expressed no desire to enhance the sites with video features.

Click for Video: Selling cars will be like the MTV of Classifids

It’s similar for more profit-minded classifieds ventures like eBay’s Kijiji (a slicker corporate clone of Craigslist) and classifieds aggregator Oodle. Neither of those services support video as part of the post-an-ad process. But it’s only a matter of time before they do.

Jacobson and fellow classifieds consultant and business partner Janet DeGeorge believe that video classifieds is the “next big thing” that the newspaper industry (still) has a chance of dominating. They’ve partnered in a company called Real People Real Stuff LLC, founded last year, which currently operates three video classifieds websites: RealPeopleRealStuff.com, VideoJobShop.com, and VideoHouseHunters.com.

The company is working with newspapers to use its technology to implement video classifieds programs, with local video ads published on a newspaper’s site as well as the appropriate national site. An example can be seen at UtahShowAndSell.com, a service of the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah. (Featured video ads also show up in a widget on the Daily Herald website’s homepage.)

Jacobson says that many newspaper publishers remain slow to change when it comes to classifieds, despite the sector’s well-publicized troubles. But he’s finding a few willing to take the chance on video and recognizing that they need to become the dominant player in their communities before other, larger online competitors come in and grab it for themselves.

When he got into the new business last year, Jacobson thought that people using the service would create their own video ads. That has happened to a degree, and he still believes that the personal digital video revolution will lead to more and more people being comfortable enough to shoot their own video ads. But video ads come from other sources, as well:

Small video production shops or individual video producers, who will work with small businesses to produce video ads. “These often are the same guys who shoot weddings on the weekends,” Jacobson says.
Ad companies that produce low-end generic video clips, such as used for job postings. (Here’s an example of this type of video.)
The newspaper publisher has a video production shop, serving local advertisers.

The latter represents a new business opportunity for newspaper publishers. Private parties are unlikely to pay for video production for many things, but some For Sale By Owner home sellers might take you up on an offer to produce a video tour of their homes for a reasonable fee. Realtors represent a lucrative market for this type of video production business, Jacobson says, since many of them haven’t graduated from the “Ken Burns school” of video production: using a series of still images with music background.

Click for Video: Selling a used tuxedo can get very interesting

Another opportunity is the local small business looking to make a splash without spending much money. In Provo, this video (which is truly campy) was produced for a novelty store by a 20-year-old using an inexpensive video camera and some (ahem) creativity. Fans of really late-night TV may feel some deja vu; the amateur nature of the video recalls those low-budget commercials airing at 3 a.m. along with a 30-year-old movie.

Click here for Video: Local business video that is campy and fun

Newspapers getting into the video classifieds business will want to host videos directly, as well as support videos hosted on sites like YouTube. (Bakotopia.com, a website of the Bakersfield Californian, allows classified advertisers to add a YouTube video to their listings for a $1 fee.) Jacobson warns, however, that YouTube’s license prohibits videos used for commercial purposes, so beware going beyond personal usage of that site.

One other key point about video classifieds is that they also represent interesting content. Indeed, for some types of ads that you may choose to offer free to advertisers, the advantage is in bringing more traffic to your website to monetize in other ways. Looking around Jacobson’s VideoHouseHunters site, I spotted this video classified for a condo for sale in a nudist resort. I’ll bet that will get a lot of curiosity clicks.

Click for Video: Condo for sale in nudist community

Jacobson suggests that video classifieds can be priced according to the type of ad. The Realtor above is more likely to spend money on posting her video ad than the person selling the used truck, who has free options like Craigslist available and doesn’t have the motivation to pay. He also suggests offering video as part of packages that may include multiple features and placements (including offline or print, of course).

Whatever specific approach you take, “get on the bandwagon now,” Jacobson urges. “Newspapers have got to stop playing catch-up” and grab onto important new trends like video classifieds while competition is still slight. Video classifieds are out there, certainly (especially for niches such as dating and real estate), but in the general merchandise categories, no one has hit it big yet. This situation won’t last.

New revenue from video: Click to play

admin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:58:46 +0000

[MYPLAYLIST=0]

Recruitment: Video is hottest tool

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:18:02 +0000

According to Gordon Borrell of Borrell Associates, video is the hottest new tool in the arsenal for both employers and recruiters. Total ad spending for online video was $522 million in 2007 and is expected to reach $10 billion by 2012. A significant portion of the early spending on video ads is going to job and employer-related video. Hundreds of major companies have added short-form videos to job sites expounding the virtues of working at their companies.

he employment sector will change dramatically in the next five years. January 1, 2008, marked the date the first baby boomers became eligible to collect Social Security. As they begin to exit the job stage over the next several years, recruiters will have a harder time finding professional-level candidates to replace them. The challenge is a big one: There are more than 77 million baby boomers and only 49 million in the Gen X group to bridge the 11-year gap before Gen Y and its 74-million-strong work force can start making an impact.

Companies will be rethinking their recruiting strategies. Over the next four years, we expect total recruitment spending to increase 25 percent, from $58 billion in 2008 to $73 billion in 2012. The beneficiaries will be online media and full-service employment agencies. Online spending will increase 23.5 percent to a record high of over $11 billion. Opportunity abounds online: nearly half the job seekers who have Internet access are not using online media to look for a job. The main losers of recruitment revenue will be large-circulation newspapers, which will see their job-related revenues decline by 12 percent over the next four years.

There are sites geared toward hourly and part-time positions and there are sites focused on demographic and lifestyle groups such as retirees and stay-at-home moms and dads or residents in a particular geographical area. The rise of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and management tools for “active job seekers” will increase the options for recruiters and jobseekers alike.

Complete report

NAA on Online Video

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:15:25 +0000

Last year, research from the Newspaper Association of America revealed that the majority of newspaper Web sites features video. Results from this 2008 NAA survey, which looks more closely at the area, show newspapers’ video operations are quite extensive. This is a pleasant and encouraging surprise from an industry going through a difficult period of change. To help newspapers further develop their video initiatives, NAA has developed a guide to online video that you can download in PDF format. The NAA online video survey report is part of that guide, which will also include articles and information on purchasing hardware and software, expert advice and several case studies. Read more

Forbes: Video advertising at pivotal stage

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:14:50 +0000

The online video advertising market has reached a pivotal stage. More and more users will flock to the online video medium, creating great opportunities for innovative companies. While the revenue size of the opportunity is rather small today, the most important metric–consumer use–continues to skyrocket. For this reason, it should be of significant interest to both Microsoft and Google. More

Yellow books pushing video advertising

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:14:06 +0000

Superpages.com, Yellow Book USA Inc., and AT&T Inc.’s Yellow Pages already offer listings on the Web. Now these companies and others are beginning to offer online videos, allowing advertisers to post versions of their TV commercials alongside their Web ads. The directory companies are even offering to produce new videos for businesses, which run as long as two minutes on some sites. In a video posted on Superpages.com for Kent Floral in Kent, Wash., the camera pans a flower shop where a baby holds a yellow flower and an announcer declares, “We’re not your typical dot-com florist.” More

Google’s #1 Goal: Monetize YouTube

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:13:18 +0000

Despite its ubiquity and budget-busting billion-dollar-plus price, YouTube has yet to pay off for Google. So Google, the world’s largest advertising company with a market cap of $160 billion, has announced that monetizing YouTube is its number one priority for 2008. More.

Video advertising growing at 49% annually

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:12:16 +0000

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising, as its revenue grows sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate of 49.4%. Brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television. More

How to exploit video advertising

Alan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:40:39 +0000

By Amir Ashkenazi, Founder of shopping.com

The emergence of online video as a mainstream source of both news and entertainment has been a global phenomenon of immeasurable proportion. From industry pioneers such as YouTube, MySpace and Metacafe to more recently created platforms like HULU, Joost and Bit Torrent, Web surfers from around the world are flocking to online video portals at an unprecedented rate.

According to ABI research, over 1 billion people across the globe will regularly watch video content of some sort on the Internet by 2013. In the United States alone, Forrester Research has reported that video advertising will surpass $7 billion by 2012, constituting a 72% growth rate in the market. These numbers, while measuring different entities of the online video revolution, clearly support the notion of the global growth of online video that will be advantageous to both publishers and advertisers. More