Mediabids' mention in Niche Magazine's "Niched Out" Newsletter. Available here

SUCCESS STORY OF THE MONTH

Rapid River Arts & Culture Flourishes with Mediabids Rapid River Arts and Culture magazine has used Mediabids Per-Inquiry advertising for several years. According to Publisher Dennis Ray, the ads themselves helped make the magazine look more successful, full, and professional, while helping them track readers’ needs by the types of ads they most respond to and when. Per-inquiry advertising enables Rapid River Arts and Culture to run ads from national advertisers and get paid based on the response the ad generates in their magazine; payouts currently range from $6 per call to $900 a sale. The companies Mediabids Per-Inquiry advertising has are well-known, well-respected national businesses. Dennis has even received emails from readers thanking him for bringing to their attention a product or service they found through a Mediabids ad. He likes their customer service, too - a check from Mediabids Per-Inquiry had gotten ripped in half in the mail and they had a replacement check in a couple days. "I have only positive things to say about Mediabids Per-Inquiry advertising and their staff," he says.

Interesting idea. The article on mediabuyerplanner.com does not elaborate on how successful the ad selling effort has been in conjunction with the publication experiment.

A company called Printcasting is experimenting with a way to attract more advertisers and readers to print magazines while using an innovative model that allows nearly anyone to be a magazine publisher.

Printcasting (“People-powered Magazines”) lets would-be publishers choose articles and blog posts, along with a template, and then print and distribute their magazines themselves, The New York Times reports. Advertisers create ads on the site, then choose which magazines they will appear in; ads start at $10 an issue, but publishers can choose to charge more. Printcasting keeps 10% of ad revenue, gives 30% to the writers, and 60% to the publishers.

The company says about 250 magazines have been created since the company launched in March. For example, a runner in Bakersfield, Caifornia, blogs about high school track teams in the area; another publisher, in Wasco, California, collects articles from local bloggers and publishes a town newsletter. Both are distributed for free. Small organizations like schools, homeowners’ associations and wine clubs can make use of the service and, if the company sees a magazine that “really has potential,” Printcasting will print it, place additional ads, and distribute it, says Dan Pacheco, senior manager of digital products at The Bakersfield Californian newspaper and founder of the company. Pacheco says magazines can be saved by reducing production costs.

The popularity of online newspaper products has fallen with real estate advertisers, according to this article in ClickZ and the reasons why are worth paying attention to. The article lists two primary reasons why real estate agents are staying away from online newspaper products and they are both reasons we have mentioned in the Mediabids' blog before in other contexts: too often the prices being offered are out of line with the audience and with competing sites; and the packaging with print oftentimes creates a burdensome, confusing ad buying process. Here is part of the story:

"Over 60 percent of the 200 real estate agents studied for Advanced Interactive Media Group's Real Estate Advertising 2009 report said they do not plan to spend any money on online newspaper ad products this year. Almost the same portion said paper sites are not effective for leads. The AIM study was conducted with support from real estate industry publication Inman News.

There are two primary factors contributing to the failure of newspaper publishers to offer value to real estate advertisers, says the report. One is bundling, the practice of selling print and online ads together as a package. For some newspapers, "The only way you can get online is to buy something in print," explained report author and AIM principal, editorial director Jim Townsend. "It's a model that's eating itself." In earlier days, newspaper sites offered online advertising as value-adds, essentially providing them for free when advertisers bought print ads.

Pricing is another contributing factor. A lot of paper publishers still set display ad prices based on their presence in their local markets, even though advertisers can buy geographically-targeted display ads for far less through national sites and networks. "They think the model they had 10 years ago or even 5 years ago is still something they can use," suggested Townsend"

A former staff writer, Dennis Romero, gives a first-person account of what is wrong with Entrepreneur Magazine, focusing primarily on the editorial and personnel issues dogging the business magazine. The author's account seems pretty believable to me but it is fair to point out that there are oftentimes two sides to stories like this. At a minimum, Romero's blog offers some insight into some of the things I always wonder about with magazines like Entrepreneur, such as: how much do they cater the editorial in an effort to attract specific advertisers. (Romero's answer: quite a bit)

Full blog here.

Here is a taste:

"So, essentially, Entrepreneur is hostile to journalism because it costs money and requires tolerance of diverse, smart, and educated people. At the same time, there’s a sleight of hand: Entrepreneur’s owners crave those advertisers that crave educated, savvy and demanding readers. How they connect the dots between dumbed-down “take-away” stories for people who haven’t the slightest notion of business, and a moneyed advertising base keen on the educated and affluent, is pure salesmanship."

As a follow up to our diatribe yesterday on BusinessWeek consider this typically snarky comment from AdAge:

"Why the persistent drop for the business bibles? Business-to-business advertisers have found many more efficient, targeted ways to reach their customers. Brand campaigns remain an important component of their marketing, but they've also gotten much better at maintaining databases of the crucial decision makers who buy their products or services, focusing on preserving their loyalty and contacting them more or less directly than through a major magazine ad buy."

If you are in print - newspapers or magazines - this comment should really bug you. The author, Nat Ives, is wrong about the potential for print publications to generate response for non-branding campaigns but he is expressing a sentiment which is common in the advertising world. In other words, the advertisers you covet think he is right about magazines being a branding advertising medium. Further proof, that if print publications don't start proving response to their customers using any number of rudimentary tracking mechanisms (800#s, text addresses, unique urls), no one will.

The basic idea of "individuated news" has been around for a while - readers define what interests them and then publications deliver the news based on relevancy through electronic mediums. Last week, the Washington Times and Media News Group began laying out plans on putting this into practice. It is a great idea that is worth keeping an eye on but there are some unaddressed issues.

In a not-so-surprisingly, glowing story in The Washington Times about the effort by The Washington Times and Media News Group, a representative from Media News said: "Once, the medium was the message. Now the message is the medium. Content is driving this, and in a way, it's a form of citizen journalism. They're close cousins. In this case, the news is citizen selected, but not citizen produced." Read the full story here.

It is a good point. And this effort will be fascinating to watch.

A few hurdles :

Will readers pay for it? Will advertisers pay more for it? Can the industry come together fast enough to offer its content on a large scale before Google adapts its alerts to do precisely the same thing with content that they rip off already from publications' free websites?

I think it is a great idea but these issues will ultimately decide its success or failure. I wish the Washington Times story had addressed them.