Category: Business

“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” – Pinky.

The economics of letting your audience blog somewhere else

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

Spotted isolated bits of chatter over the weekend about this piece from Nate Silver, who used the available public data from Quantcast and elsewhere to make some assessments of the Huffington Post’s business model when it comes to unpaid contributors and their blogs.

Here’s Nate’s thesis:

“Although The Huffington Post does not pay those who volunteer to write blogs for it, this content represents only a small share of its traffic. And, to put it bluntly, many of those blog posts aren’t worth very much.” #

The rest of the analysis proves out that idea, which I’m not terribly interested in. It’s a fun game to play, evaluating traffic and revenue based on bits of public information, but I think there’s a less tangible benefit to hosting what essentially amount to “reader” blogs — even if the “readers” happen to be famous people or politicians.

The benefit in question? These readers are far less likely (I’m making a big assumption here, no research backing this up yet) to blog somewhere else.

So instead of diluting that long tail of niche content (this may be a nice way to put it, in some cases) across hundreds or thousands of free Tumblrs and WordPress.com blogs and Blogspots, the Huffington Post and others like it have provided a technology platform to would-be bloggers. Perhaps even to celebrity dilettantes. In return for hosting these blogs — which at scale cannot be an expensive technical tally — HuffPo gets to add another mug to its stable, another self-promoting-but-not-enough-to-get-their-own blogger to stretch that long tail out.

A few interesting metrics I’d love to see on these “reader” blogs:

  • Bounce rate: Do readers hit these posts and leave, or do they get sucked in by the gaping maw of the HuffPo photo galleries and top 10 lists in the right rail?
  • Search traffic: Do readers find these posts in search engines, or are they coming to HuffPo specifically for these authors?
  • Sell-through rate on these lesser blogs. Is HufPo monetizing the network in any interesting way?

Am I conflating HuffPo’s paid bloggers with unpaid? I genuinely don’t really know who gets paid and who doesn’t, but either way, I think my logic holds up:

The benefits of owning the platform for all these blogs, keeping the traffic moving under the HuffPo brand, keeping readers on their remarkably sticky pages, is as valuable (more?) as the revenue on the pages themselves.

Street by street, block by block

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

Back in the early days of grad school, when questions about the future of online advertising came up, I was bullish about the future of location-based mobile advertising that would by contextually relevant to the content you were viewing and the place you were sitting.

I was wrong about a big piece of how this would work: I envisioned free wireless access blanketing the world, so that you could be sitting on a bench in downtown Santa Cruz with your laptop and find out, while reading a story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s food section, that Lulu Carpenter’s had a deal on day-old pastries right now.

This was pre-iPhone, and the most “super” mobile device I had at hand was a bottom of the line half-sausage sized thing from Verizon.

Now, that next step for local advertisers looking to capture walk-in business from real live human beings in their neighborhood is becoming far more clear.

Foursquare and Gowalla, location-based services you should be well aware of by now, are already getting into this business, opening up the market.

Here’s the “anatomy of a Foursquare special” as broken down by Cory Bergman at Lost Remote:

“Clicking over to the special reveals a useful offer for a free drink with a $20 purchase — if you show that you’ve checked in from the restaurant.”

Keep in mind, a note about a “nearby special” shows up in Foursquare next to the name of the business when you’re casually browsing nearby places, or checking in at the competition across the street.

Over at VentureBeat, a look at iPromote, a company building a mobile ad network to allow local businesses to advertise to anyone who happens to walk by:

“For a minimum of $5 per day, iPromote will serve ads to mobile phones near an advertiser’s place of business. The company serves both display ads, for which clicks aren’t counted, and cost-per-click ads where the advertiser only pays when a user clicks through an ad to their site.”

Sounds like a healthy model.

Of course, there’s a disruptive elephant-sized gorilla in the room named Google.

Push a button on your phone and Google tells you what’s nearby. As in, local businesses, restaurants, etc. How long before they start selling featured listings based on geography? Want to be the featured one-dollar-sign, four-star restaurant within a fixed square mile? That’ll cost ya…

Here’s the short list of location-based mobile apps on my iPhone right now:

  • Foursquare – Mostly using this these days when I’m at a restaurant or otherwise non-routine location. Especially useful when I was in New York City over New Year’s.
  • Gowalla – Trying it out. It’s cuter than Foursquare, but I don’t see how it’s any more or less useful yet.
  • Yelp – I still use Yelp on my phone whenever I’m in a strange city and just want to know where the nearest Thai, Vegetarian, or Burrito  joint can be found.
  • UrbanSpoon – Cute slot machine interface, but nothing special.
  • Brightkite – I used to check in here socially, as I way to declare when I arrived in a new town for a conference. More for social check-ins than local business action, and I haven’t checked it in months.
  • EveryBlock – Might be fun to check the restaurant inspections, Flickr photos, or crime reports here while walking down a block, but I haven’t.
  • Honorable mentions on my phone for Redfin and Zillow — both real estate apps extremely useful when househunting, especially when you just want to know what’s for sale near your current location, while you’re cruising around checking out neighborhoods.

Have any favorite location apps that I’m missing? Are any local news organizations selling their own location-based mobile ads, or just buying into larger networks?

Clay Shirky on micropayments for online news

Ryan Sholin4 Comments

I am very specifically not enjoying the current wave of handwringing over whether or not some version of micropayments, online subscription, or paywalls could work for typical U.S. news organizations.

But here’s Clay Shirky:

“The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong. The result is that small payment systems don’t survive contact with online markets, because we express our hatred of small payments by switching to alternatives, whether supported by subscription or subsidy.”

Read the whole thing.

Carnival of Journalism: Are we asking the right questions about online revenue models?

Ryan Sholin15 Comments

As is my habit, I’m running behind on my Carnival of Journalism post this month, set to the timely and tuneful whistles and bangs of talk about whether a newspaper’s online revenue could support the newsroom, how long the newspaper of record will keep the press running, and what a major metro in a failed JOA can do to survive online.

So, the question, posed by Paul Bradshaw (and be sure to check out the Seesmic thread as well) is as follows:

“How do you financially support journalism online?”

Of course, as is my habit, I’m going to have to sharpen that question up a bit, lest I fall prey to the temptation to speculate wildly about the future of major metro newspapers and their finances, as I’m sure I’ve done in the past.

So let’s get specific.

Here’s what I’m not interested in talking about:

Whether the current online revenue of a giant newspaper could support its newsroom staff.  I think that’s an apples/oranges problem.  Shutting down the press is not a hydraulic maneuver — it does not occur in a vacuum — it affects brand and upsell revenue and staffing and all sorts of parts move and grind against each other when you flip that switch on a large scale.  So, looking at two columns in a spreadsheet and saying “oh, they match” is a bit simplistic for my taste.

Great, so, moving on.

Well, wait, not yet.  One more thing to get out of the way:

I’m not (that) interested (today) in trying to figure out what revenue, then, will support major metro newspapers online.  When a major city loses its last print edition, it will be because it has already been replaced, in terms of reporting, advertising, commentary, and yes, journalism, by (mostly) smaller organizations.

And by definition, I expect a newspaper.com in a no-print city to look and feel infinitely different than it does now, to be a distributed news service, the sum of dozens of tiny parts, a portal to a wide variety of platforms where bits of news pushed out and pulled in.

(Right, so again, these are all the things I’m not going to talk about today. Right. Sure.)

My question, then, is how to support a small, agile, online-only news organization.

And that’s a much easier question to answer, isn’t it?

Let’s start with three obvious ways:

  1. Local Advertising. What?  You thought online advertising couldn’t support online journalism?  Well, it all depends on scale.  If you’re building a community news site for a 10-square-mile area, you’re likely to find a set of local businesses that have never had an advertisement online before, and certainly not running on a news source that exclusively covers the area in which their most likely customers live.  A combination of banner ads sold at reasonable rates, business listings, and sponsorships should bring in a portion of your revenue.
  2. Freemium Classifieds. What?  You thought craigslist killed every possible opportunity for local classified ad sales?  No.  Not in hundreds (thousands?) of markets in between major cities, and maybe not at the neighborhood-level.  Either way, you’re going to make money off classifieds without turning away one-time customers who aren’t interesting in paying to sell that old tricycle.  Here’s how:  Offer new customers five free ads.  After that, they pay.  Businesses always pay.  Real estate brokers and car dealerships pay a premium, especially to add video to their ads.  The key to this?  A simple self-service system.  Keep the interface basic and friendly, and tailor it to your community.
  3. Community-Funded Reporting. What? You’re worried that you won’t be able to pay for long-form investigative reporting on a small community site budget? The simple answer is that the community will pay for the stories that would otherwise be missed by a larger, slower, all-encompassing news organization with a broad coverage area. See the Spot.Us project for live examples of enterprise reporting that were funded, a few dollars at a time, by community members and other interested parties (like me) who don’t live in the area anymore, but still take an interest in local issues.

After that, there are less obvious ways to keep a small organization financially afloat, but they’ll vary based on your skills, staffing, and neighborhood.

Does that local business need a Web site to go with their banner ad?  I hear there are these new things called “blogs” that might be easy for them to maintain once you set them up with one, handling the hosting, domain management, and upgrades for a fee.

Other moving parts to keep an eye on:

  • Ethan Zuckerman asks if ad-support journalism is viable, using the example of a 25k print circulation newspaper as a point of reference for his thoughtful analysis of the logic behind CPM ad pricing online.
  • VentureBeat on changes at Federated Media, a display advertising network for technology blogs and news sites.  The changes seem to focus on getting away from straight-ahead banner advertising.
  • No News Is Bad News, a group in Seattle trying to figure out what to do next with the Post-Intelligencer, which is likely to fold as a print newspaper around 50 days from now after not finding a buyer.

Dealing with the elephant: Cutting ties to the legacy albatross

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[Some time ago, I wrote a series of posts that attempted to address some of the revenue-related issues facing traditional news organizations and suggested some possible solutions to making incremental (and larger) changes that might help them stay profitable. For no good reason, I’m going to carry on the ill-advised, barely meaningful elephant metaphor (or is it a metaphor piggybacking on a cliché?) every now and then when I write something about the changing business models for news production and consumption.]

Zac Echola has posted an essay (it’s really longer and far more in-depth than the average blog post, although that’s par for Zac’s eloquent course) called “Cutting the cords, bridging the gap.”  It’s mostly about making serious changes to your news business to keep up, increase online revenue, and (crucial part here) decrease what I’d call your legacy expenses.  As in, print.  As in, outdated systems and vendors that aren’t geared toward

Here’s a long clip from early in the essay:

“Media companies must sever the bindings that drag business in the long run. Market fluidity, the key to the successes of the few that weather the coming storm, will only come through agility and unyielding focus on the future. Mammals didn’t inherit the Earth because the dinosaurs died. The dinosaurs’ extinction was a product of an outside force that lead to a more hospitable environment for mammals. Yes the majority of revenue comes from the ‘core’ print product, the ‘core’ broadcast product. But we aren’t in the ‘newspaper’ business. We aren’t in the ‘broadcast’ business. We are, by definition through ownership of web domains, in the information business. We’re in the advertising business. The medium is just that—a medium for passing information and advertising, connecting audience in search of information to business in search of audience. The Web is best suited to show measurable results to advertisers looking for ways to not spend advertising during a recession.”

Now, that’s the hook.  Zac goes on to explain — in far more detail than I have, with a lot of knowledge of precisely the sort of legacy systems, vendors, and thinking that forces the hands of news organizations and their corporate parents — some of the particular advertising-related problems facing the news business online and suggests a number of good solutions.

The hitch, because there always is one, is that doing the job right often requires doing it yourself.  At the scale of one newspaper that can logically pay a developer instead of three vendors, great, no problem. Done. But at the scale of a consolidated newspaper or broadcast company, perhaps it is more difficult to rationalize that change, depending greatly on the resources available, and the scale of the company.

Read Zac’s post and add your comments there, especially if you’re someone in a position to make changes like this in your organization.

Depressing bonus link: Alan Mutter details the financial problems of a newspaper company, answering common questions about stock prices, bankruptcy, and debt.  See also: Steve Yelvington calls it an “ownership crisis.”

Inspiring bonus link: Mark Glaser’s recent MediaShift post rounds up alternative and innovative business models for news.

Dealing with the elephant, elsewhere

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

Paul Bradshaw comes up with a list of 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers:

“…how about a slot against the ‘most popular’ story of that minute (if it helps, think of it as the equivalent as the front page ad), second most popular, and so on (you could even auction these slots in the same way as Google does with AdWords).”

Daniel Victor calls for online news workers to stop playing the Underpants Gnome game:

“Basically, Web-savvy reporters right now are the Underpant Gnomes. We’re getting better at gathering the underpants, but we don’t know how to turn them into profit yet. That Web content is providing very little revenue now, and we don’t know how it’ll produce more revenue in the future.”

A few weeks ago at Idealab, MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihályi questioned the wisdom of looking for a “business model” at all:

“While the model in which a firm produces a product is common and viable, some of the biggest product success stories in recent history don’t actually come from businesses. That’s not to say that no one is making money from these products; there is plenty of green in these fields. But there isn’t a one-to-one mapping between business (in the sense of a firm) and product. These new products are generated under the alternate organization of knowledge, labor, and capital called the free software model.”

When the term “open-source news” has been thrown around in the past, it usually was related to what became a logic (if not exactly a movement) called Citizen Journalism. But what about the idea that the business of a news organization could be open-sourced? What does that even look like, organizationally speaking. And financially?

Things to continue to think about:

  1. Practical, iterative ways to work within today’s organizational structure to increase online advertising revenue.
  2. Getting the Webbiest brains in the newsroom to think about monetizing their work.
  3. What does a news business look like after we throw out the existing model and start fresh?

Dealing with the elephant: Build the software you need, then sell it.

Ryan Sholin4 Comments

This is the fourth post in a short series I’m pretty much done with about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual routine of pointing out the obvious to people wearing dark glasses.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest which windmill I should tilt at next using the Skribit widget in the sidebar of my blog while it’s still there.

elephant by droolcup on Flickr
“elephant” by droolcup on Flickr

There’s something funny about software for publishing online news.

Newspapers don’t develop it.

There’s an exception or two to that rule of course, but I hope I’ve force-fed you enough fine LJWorld.com products at this point to hammer that exception home.  (I almost wish they had an affiliate program.)

But usually, instead of spending money to hire developers to build software to match the specifications of their own needs, newspapers and the companies that own them reach out the third-party vendors on a daily basis in order to provide basic functionality to online readers, consumers, and advertisers.

Follow along with me for a moment, substituting your own organization for the Royal We, in the parlance of our times:

  • Classifieds? Let someone else build it, sell it, and profit from it.  We won’t have much input into what they build for us, but we won’t need to worry about the servers or credit card processing.
  • Databases? If we know what to do with them, we certainly haven’t hired anyone who can build them with journalistic intent.  We outsource them, or we trust the one developer in the newsroom who knows what they’re doing to build a framework we can use more than once, or that we can use when they move on.
  • Calendars, content management systems, even project management tools? We seem to have been out sick from school on the day “vertical integration” was covered in AP Economics.

No, I wouldn’t recommend you drop everything you’re doing so you can re-invent the wheel, especially when some of those wheels are pretty darn good at filling your needs for a relatively small short-term price.

But yes, I heartily recommend you build an extensible Web application for the next unserved need in your organization.  Just pick any one of those that pops up in the next month or so, and go at it.

After you’ve launched it and earned the praise of your peers, slap a price tag on a license and get to work marketing it.

You’ve made a long-term investment by hiring developers.  The capital is coming back in the form of the application that’s useful to your organization; think of the license fees for the software as interest income.  You’ll be supporting the software for your own papers, anyway; might as well serve a few other organizations at the same time, for a price.

So ask yourself which software needs are going unmet in your own organization.  If you can’t find the right tool for the job, chances are, no one else can either.

A caveat: I’ve given out a lot of advice (some of it unsolicited) to newsrooms about using free, Web-based tools for online news production.  I still think that’s the right approach for many news-related purposes, but as soon as you find yourself paying for a mediocre service that’s part of your core business routine, it’s time to build something better.

Dealing with the elephant: Hire Web-native salespeople

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This is the third post in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual habit of banging my head up against walls made out of giant rolls of newsprint.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest what I should throw my weight at next using the Skribit widget in the sidebar of my blog.

Elephant in the room, part deux. by Cody Simms on Flickr
Elephant in the room, part deux. by Cody Simms on Flickr

Perhaps you’ve read, once or twice, a screed that I or others have written about what sort of skills an entry-level reporter should have these days if they expect to get a job anywhere other than a community weekly. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

The problem is, I don’t know if anyone has given your advertising department the same speech.

This is a crucial step in the incremental-growth projects I’m laying out here.

Because you can’t sell video business listings if your salespeople don’t know what’s going on in the online video world.  Because you can’t explain why your business directory looks so superior to search engines if you don’t read up on SEO.  Because you certainly can’t explain your local blog network to advertisers if you’re not familiar with the traffic and content and level of activity in the local blogosphere.  Because you can’t sell a fleet of niche social networks to advertisers if you can’t explain the value of the Long Tail.

The list goes on, full of things that should be obvious to news content producers at this point, but what about advertising content producers?

That’s right, you’re going to need sales reps who can produce content; I’m talking about something more than a graphic artist here.

Here’s what I’d be looking for in an ad sales rep if I were hiring one today:

  • Blogs and reads blogs.
  • Participates in social networks.
  • Knows how to shoot, edit, post video, and watches online video.
  • Has marketing skills beyond stickers and t-shirts.  Can make an engaging presentation in any format, whether it’s a handshake/smile/chat, Powerpoint, flip chart, or video conference.

And if you can’t find someone who can fill that role full-time, consider hiring a local videographer or small production house to put together advertising video from time to time.  Find a local partner and try to pay them (in part) with a sponsorship or advertising in trade.

When it comes to marketing, keep in mind that you, news producer, desperately need to get across to sales reps what it is that’s new, different, better, improved about your online product.

That means making presentations to them about new products, verticals, databases, and your fancy new content management system.  Yes, to be clear, I’m saying that you absolutely must get up from your desk and go stand in front of a room of advertising employees and explain to them why that mashup you just built is so cool, and what sort of advertisers you think might be interested.

Crazy, right? News and advertising working together?  Get used to it.  If you can’t find sales reps that understand what you’re working on, then you’ll need to consider going out on sales calls with them yourself.

That doesn’t mean you need to start memorizing rate cards and upselling, it means that you, person who built that awesome map with all the data overlays of crime, liquor store robberies, and standardized test scores, need to go tell the community (read as: the chamber of commerce, or the Elks, or the Rotary Club) why your project is so cool.

So get out there.  Hire people who can sell more than a banner ad.  Train your current reps to shoot and edit video.  Don’t skip over the advertising department when the new computers and cameras get ordered.  Write simple one-page summaries of the cool stuff you build online, and send it out to the whole department.

Hire like you mean it.

Hire a sales force for tomorrow’s product, not yesterday’s.

Dealing with the elephant: Incremental change

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This is the second post in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual divisive blathering about how to avoid bureaucracy and feed trolls.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest what I should tackle next using the Skribit widget in the sidebar of my blog.


“Elephant Mud Frolic” by Intrepidation on Flickr.

If you read the post I wrote last week about building better business directories on news Web sites, you’ll notice a few things about the approach I’m taking to talking about the business model(s) for making money in online news:

  1. I’m not offering up some massive overhaul to the entire system of paid journalism at the moment, like taking newspapers non-profit, but there’s a lot to be said for that model, depending on how you feel about PBS or the BBC.
  2. What I’m making an attempt to focus on are incremental changes; ideally, these should be moves that can be put into action at your site quickly and effectively, without major staffing or organization overhauls, even though that might not be the worst idea.
  3. There are plenty of ideas floating around the Web that qualify as “little things” you can do to grow revenue on a news site, but I think somewhere in between the smallest things (like adding Google AdSense or other targeted text-link ads to all your ad positions) and the largest things (complete re-organization of the news industry), there’s a market for ideas that revolve around some of the medium-sized steps you can take to open new revenue streams that have little, if anything, to do with your print product.

For example, how about starting an ad network for local blogs?

It’s a simple equation:  Local bloggers have content; the local news organization has advertisers.  Keep it simple: Sell banner ad positions on the network as an upsell when an advertiser buys a spot on your news site.  “For $5 a month more, we can put your ad on a network of 25 local blogs with X average page views per month.”  Split the revenue with the bloggers 50/50 or come up with a formula based on page views.

Also, add a page featuring the latest headlines from the blog network to your news site.  For bonus points, keep an eye on that page and feature links to posts on relevant local blogs on article pages on a regular basis.  For super extra bonus points, throw up a Ning network for the local bloggers to give them a place to talk with each other directly.

So again, as with the business directory plan, you’ll find that running an ad network for local blogs involves the news and advertising sides of your organization actually communicating from time to time as you add new blogs to the network and award monthly revenue shares.

I’ve seen examples of local blog networks maintained by news organizations, and I’ve seen examples of advertising networks for higher traffic blogs, but has anyone tried what I’m pitching here?

Dealing with the elephant: Build a better business directory

Ryan Sholin8 Comments

This is the first in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual harangues at editors and rants at reporters, among others.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest what I should tackle next using the Skribit widget in the sidebar of my blog.

Product Placement: Elephant Car Wash by Ricardo Martins on Flickr
Product Placement: Elephant Car Wash by Ricardo Martins on Flickr

Let’s get down to business.

My goodness, do you pay a vendor for some sort of business directory full of aging addresses and phone numbers and little else?  Honestly, I know you do. And while some vendors might be better than others at keeping their data current and you (possibly) have some sort of forced upsell from print (see #2 here) that brings in a few dollars for each “featured” listing, you’re missing out on a boatload of revenue because the data is mediocre, and the presentation is always worse than that, with one notable exception.

I often throw the LJWorld’s Marketplace up as an example of a forward-thinking revenue stream.  Yes, it’s a business directory, but each listing comes complete with a graphic ad, video in some cases, hours, a locator map, and — here’s the important thing:  It’s easy for a local business owner to log in, claim their business, and update their own information.

That’s not some magical wonderful technology, it’s just taking advantage of the idea that a local business owner probably knows more than a cold-calling salesperson in a cube farm trying to verify data and upsell a “featured” listing.  As a bartender, I hung up on this sort of salesperson on a regular basis.

Make it dead simple for business owners to claim and update their listing.

Then, once they’re involved, maybe it’s time for a nice little online upsell.

When you sell a business a “featured” listing, really feature it!  Not just at the top of the list, but on your site’s home page, like at LJWorld.com, and not just there, but on relevant section pages.  Targeting advertising to content should be obvious enough by now: The sporting goods store wants to advertise in your sports section online, just like it does in print.

I’m not talking about banner ads here.  Keep that in mind — image-based advertising is useful for branding, but you cannot live on CPM alone.  Unless you’re an absolutely massive major metro, you don’t have the inventory (read as: traffic) to sell.  Instead, you’re offering a business listing (with a higher price for bells and whistles like video, mind you) that includes high-powered text links from places like your news site’s home page to your advertiser’s domain.  Search engines love that stuff.

Once you have that database of engaged business owners, tagged with relevant categories and sections, you should have a ready made list of sales leads when it comes time for that annual high school football preview or that summer event package.

Steps to implementation:

  1. Start gathering information.  Choose the fields you want to include on your business listing pages.  Create a (free) simple web form using Google Docs, then start collecting data from your existing advertisers and local businesses. Act casual. You’ll be calling them back later once you have a prototype ready to show off and sell.
  2. Develop or purchase a better piece of business listing software.  I recommend Marketplace, or develop your own in Django if you’ve got the staff/chops. SEO is crucial here. If this step is financially or contractually hairy, consider whether your existing business listing provider’s software creates an XML feed of entries, or a CSV export, or something similar, in which case there might be some structured data in there that you can work with.  If all else fails, plan to hand-code the featured listings you’ll be selling on select pages.
  3. Start gathering content for businesses that are buying the bells and whistles.  You’ll want existing video if they have it, but a more likely scenario is that you’re going to need to send a human being to the business with a video camera.  It would help if you trained advertising salespeople to use a video camera — and even better, to edit and produce short pieces about businesses.  More about that in another post in this series as soon as I get to it.
  4. Roll out the targeted featured listings and your new directory.  Make it clear to advertisers that they can edit their own listings.  If a business is mentioned in a news story, link to the listing. Promote the new directory and point advertisers to the upgraded listings with video.  If you’ve chosen to let readers add ratings and reviews, promote that feature in print and online in any story that mentions the business.

Bonus Round:

Build a local database (or wiki?) of local questions and answers, and sell featured placement in those pages to the relevant businesses.  Lucas Grindley wrote about this idea recently (business plan and all) after Google’s Knol launched.  Mahalo is a better model for this purpose than either Knol or Wikipedia.  The goal should be a human-authored page that contains the answers to a common question about your town.

For example, in Santa Cruz, answer questions like “Where can I park for free downtown?” and “When is the Boardwalk open?” to really please actual readers looking for actual information.  It’s not hard to imagine the businesses on Pacific Ave. and Beach Street that would fight for the chance to sponsor those pages.

The local FAQ is fodder for a different post, and deserves some mockups and diagrams, too.  I’ll get to that shortly…