News Publishers’ Business Model for Digital Success
February 22, 2012 Leave a Comment
The addition of digital agency services is something that every local media company should consider in 2012.
- “The Local Digital Ad Agency: Emerging Opportunity for Innovative Media Companies,” the Local Media Innovation Alliance, December 2011
To better serve local advertisers and compete for online advertising dollars, adding digital agency services is a major opportunity for news publishers, but achieving profitability is the real challenge.
Some newspapers are trying to build the internal capability and capacity to provide a range of digital production services. Many are discovering this is quite expensive operating overhead to carry and it just doesn’t make economic sense. Publishers find it is extremely difficult to outlay new capital to fund the production resources needed, and to do it in such a way that yields positive operating margins.
Another important consideration is that SMB advertisers are highly price sensitive and the price points required to sell high volumes of online marketing services must be extremely competitive.
Despite these challenges, newspapers have had no choice but to plunge into digital services: display ads, iPad ads, websites, mobile, social and video services to balance declining revenues from print. They have to juggle two roles: that of news and content provider to their readers (whether via print or online media) and that of marketing agencies to their customers, providing both digital and print services and helping small-business owners find their way in online marketing.
There are many, many reasons why someone might hate your website. If it works for you—gets you a great number of leads every month or your e-commerce sales have gone up since the redesign—you can shut this page now and go back to work. But if you wonder what it is about your website that’s just not bringing in the leads, read on: your website might be committing one of these mistakes.
How much time and effort you need to spend on marketing depends partly on what your competitors are doing. Are they doing something that you aren’t, and that might work for you? Are they getting a lot of visibility online, and you need to catch up fast? Or are they relatively clueless, and you just need to keep on doing what you’re doing?
After years of cost cutting, why are some newspaper publishers actually staffing up their in-house digital production operations and investing in technology and tools for new interactive services like video advertising, deals-of-the-day, 
“Small and medium-sized businesses look for new customers on social media,” 
