I understand that this is all very new, made obvious by the fact that mine is the first post here. Nevertheless, I’ll see if I can get things rolling here.
My wife and I, along with a group of volunteer writers, have maintained a local Internet news and opinion site for the past few years, which began by covering local news only, in a straight HTML format, but has evolved into a more eclectic focus.
I’m impressed by the number of new articles you get there considering you are working with an all-volunteer staff, which indicates that you have a lot of people who really believe in what you are doing. That is great to see. It looks like you are getting about seven or eight new stories a day on weekdays, is that correct? Also, you seem to have a pretty involved group of posters on your forums.
How much traffic do you get? Is the site fairly self-sustaining, financially?
How much traffic do you get? Is the site fairly self-sustaining, financially?
We’ve had volunteer writers go on to paid positions with other newspapers, which is always nice. And we do permit our writers to advertise their book, organization, web site, or cause, both at the end of their articles and in our advertising section, so there is some recompense.
We receive from 2,000 to more than 20,000 unique visitors per day, with multiple visits from the same person counting only once. The average is 3,000 to 4,000, roughly half of them coming to us from computers in Maine.
We have had difficulty monetizing the site. Due to some of the local political stances we’ve published, local advertising is difficult to come by. We do have some, but the bulk of our income from the site comes from Google and Amazon, with limited results from any other affiliate marketing efforts.
The site goes just beyond paying for itself, but I thank God every day that I’m not depending on it to pay the mortgage.
Your site is great. I really like your mission and history pages—they’re so straightforward, a real change from jargon-heavy corporate MISSION STATEMENTS. I think if you keep that clarity, your site will grow to surpass your expectations.
My two suggestions for you would be:
* Add an RSS feed. This could be easily done, and would give your site a really nice traffic boost, as the new Mac and Windows browsers all have RSS readers built in.
* Add commenting on your articles. Let your community share their voice not only by writing for you, but by writing back to you, and to each other.
Small town newspaper have often made themselves unpopular with advertisers, but were somewhat protected by being “the only game in town”—Internet sites won’t likely be in that position ever, so I hope that others will be able to come up with more revenue suggestions for you.
RSS Feeds - I’m in the process of trying to understand them and to figure out how to add them to the site.
Commentary - We do have a fairly active forum, linked from the top of our pages http://forum.magic-city-news.com and a blog that exists but hasn’t been put into public use yet.
You may be interested in Listgarden, a piece of software that allows you to generate and manage RSS feeds. It is written by Dan Bricklin—who wrote one of the first successful PC programs (Visicalc). It’s possible Dan will be coming to give a demo at a future bloggers’ meeting, where we get together and demo software & talk blog.
Ken, the advertising issue is a concern for me with my own efforts as well. Currently the political stands I’ve taken on the site have been based on facts (with links to sources) and the political side that is cast in a bad light as a result has the support of only about 1/3rd of the town. However, in all likelihood when they other side takes control after the April elections (assuming they are successful), I will be as big of a problem for them as I was for their opponents. I want to inform the local community about everything the town is doing (or isn’t doing) and generally no politician wants the voting public to know ALL the details. Add to that a history in our town of politicians abusing their limited powers to vindictively strike back at their political opponents and it is highly unlikely that I will gain local advertisers, even though I’d prefer to promote local businesses over anyone else.
It is interesting to me that the local daily newspaper can take political stances in their editorial / opinion pages and still get local advertising, yet sites like ours cannot. Thinking out loud for a moment (is typing loud?), perhaps a detailed analysis of the customer demographics and advertising costs at the local paper vs. our own demographics and advertising costs would show a greater value to the ad space on our site due to the lower (usually significantly) cost per ad.
