She is editor and publisher of Interactive Publishing Alert, a bi-weekly newsletter from which this is excerpted.
Views expressed are not necessarily those of NewsLink.
Grab Your Partner!
Do online alliances help or hurt local publishers?
ON THE WEB, site traffic -- whether you measure
it in terms of hits, page views, or click-throughs -- is what determines
how much you can charge
for advertising. Most of the ad dollars on the Web are going
to search engines and directories like InfoSeek, Lycos and Yahoo! The most
heavily trafficked site is Netscape, the default home page for many Internet
users. As a result, many publishers are happy to trade links with just about
anyone in the hope of generating more traffic.
By Rosalind Resnick
LOCAL NEWSPAPAPER
and magazine publishers are being deluged with proposals from online city
guides looking to trade their traffic for the publishers' content. With the
$60 billion market for local advertising at stake, competition is fierce
and likely to get fiercer. CityScape, CitySearch, Digital Cities, BigBook,
At Hand, Yahoo! and others are rolling out nationwide, so publishers are
likely to see many offers from geeks bearing gifts in the months to come.
"Newspapers have to decide what their goals are," says Susan
Bokern, associate director of Gannett New Media. "It's not about
regurgitating content. It's about extending your brand name in a new
medium. Partners are great, but you need to be careful that you're not
building someone else's brand."
Stern Publishing, Inc., the New York publishing company that owns the
Village Voice, LA Weekly and OC Weekly, is providing content to America
Online's Digital Cities and/or Yahoo!'s regional directories in California
and New York.
"Shying away from alliances is an old print business model," says
Linda Nelson, Stern's vice president of new media.
It's important, Nelson says, to choose partners carefully and not give away
the store.
Only the basic Voice events listings are available on Yahoo! New York. To
see the rest, readers must click through to the Voice's site. Nelson also
refused to let go of the Voice's personal and real estate classifieds, both
of which are major draws for her site.
"I feel that what's up there [on Yahoo!] is very limited information,
and I feel it's good for our brand and our visibility because a lot of
people go in there," Nelson says. "If, at the end of the year, my
web site is doing great, then maybe I won't need [Yahoo!] any more."
And that's exactly what these online city guides are offering -- link
exchanges, joint promotion, ad revenue sharing and other sorts of
cooperative partnerships. But publishers must be careful about entering into
ventures whose primary purpose is to build the guide's brand at the expense
of the paper's own.
With all the competing city guides springing up, there's bound to be a
shakeout -- and soon. Last month, giant AT&T pulled the plug on a
Sacramento,
Calif., guide called Home Town Network which delivered information about
local government and entertainment in addition to classified ads. AT&T said
it decided that the service would have been too expensive to roll out
nationally.
"I don't sign any deals that are longer than a year," Nelson
says. "I have
no idea what the market will look like then."
Here are the deals some of the city guides are offering today:
For now, At Hand is clearly positioning itself as a distributor of
information, not a publisher. At Hand's focus is home, entertainment and
sports, not local news. The guide includes 1.2 million merchant listings plus
articles on related topics from 43 magazines and newspapers and ads from 65
sponsors including Black & Decker, Cobra Golf, Good Guys, Kodak, Mastercard,
Williams-Sonoma and the San Diego Zoo.
Editorial content for the site is being provided by 14 widely known
publishers, including American Express Publishing's Travel & Leisure Guide
and BPI Communications' Billboard Magazine and Hollywood Reporter. Time
Inc. contributes Picks & Pans and Celebrity News content from People
Magazine,
Zagat Surveys serves up reviews of restaurants based in the Los Angeles, San
Francisco and San Diego areas plus information about local hotels. Tribune
Media Services shares Siskel's Flicks & Picks.
Newspaper publishers breathed a sigh of relief last month when Microsoft
announced that it would hold off on seeking classified ads for
the new venture, focusing on entertainment-related ads and information
instead. But publishers would be wise to keep a close eye on the boys from
Redmond. CityScape has hired CUC International of Stamford, Conn., and its
1,200-strong national sales force to sell ads in its local guides.
Much of CitySearch's current focus is small business, local government and
non-profit groups. The La Crescenta (Calif.) startup employs 240 people and
generates revenue by putting up Web sites for local advertisers in addition
to selling ad space. CitySearch already has sites in Raleigh,
N.C., and Pasadena, Calif. and moved into New York City this spring by
acquiring the Metrobeat (http://www.metrobeat.com/) events
listing site. San Francisco is scheduled to go up in October, and sites in
Austin and Salt Lake City are on the way.
CitySearch's cooperative model is best seen in Raleigh-Durham where the
company is working closely with The Independent, Raleigh's major newspaper,
and one of Raleigh's television stations, WTVD. Content
providers share in the ad revenue that CitySearch sells on the site.
Digital Cities has positioned itself as an aggregator of content, partnering
with local publishers in each city where it rolls out.
"The Web components of our deal look a lot like other Web cross-promotional
or cross-linking deals," Smith said. "We have some deals where no
cash is
exchanging hands, and it's strictly cross-promotional. We've also some deals
that let the partner sell the space and we're given a small cut. It really
varies."
Ellen Siminoff, director of Yahoo! Communities, wouldn't disclose specifics of
Yahoo! content deals but says that some publishers earn revenue while others
do not. Siminoff says that traffic levels and commitments to exclusivity are
the determining factors in any ad revenue split.
Current publishing partners include KPIX, a San Francisco CBS station; the
San Francisco Bay Guardian; KNX, a Los Angeles-based TV station; KIIS-FM,
another Los Angeles radio station; The Orange County Weekly; The Orange
County Register; The LA Weekly, The Village Voice, and The Daily News.