Get to the bottom of our stairs

New software called PlaceLocal builds display ads automatically, scouring the Internet for references to a neighborhood restaurant, a grocery store or another local business. Then it combines the photographs it finds with reviews, customer comments and other text into a customized online ad for the business.
The program, developed by PaperG, an advertising technology company in New Haven, Conn., is aimed in part at small businesses just beginning to advertise on the Web sites of local newspapers or television stations, said Victor Wong, its chief executive. Such advertisers will have a growing number of choices as national companies like ESPN create local Web franchises like ESPN New York, said Randall Rothenberg, the president and C.E.O. of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of more than 400 companies selling online advertising.
PaperG’s PlaceLocal is simple to use, said April Koral, co-publisher of The Tribeca Trib, a community newspaper in lower Manhattan. She tried the program to see how well it could create a display ad for a local Tribeca restaurant — a job usually done by hand at the paper. “All you have to put in is the company name and address,” she said.
Then PlaceLocal takes over, gathering basics like telephone number, hours of business, maps and directions, and adding positive comments extracted from local blogs. Samples of ads may be seen at www.paperg.com, the PaperG Web site.
PaperG’s program is up and running on 32 local media Web sites, including Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago, and on 29 network TV affiliates owned or managed by Hearst Television, said PaperG’s chief operating officer, Roger Lee. The company has also signed up the McClatchy newspaper chain and will soon be on some of its Web sites, he said.
Sales representatives at the media companies who have signed up with PaperG often use PlaceLocal to build sample ads they show to small businesses, said Mr. Wong. Pricing, typically a flat monthly fee, is set by the media company and varies from about $150 a month to $500 or more, based primarily on how many times the ad is shown. PaperG takes a percentage of this fee, he said. In the future, small businesses will also be able to create their ads by going directly to the PaperG Web site, Mr. Lee said.
Shaina Park, a sales representative at Time Out New York who handles Web and print advertising by local bars and restaurants, is using PlaceLocal to sell ads. “Instead of sending customers a rate card, I send them an ad that the program has built,” she said. “It’s easier to sell ads if customers have an example in front of them.”
Because the program creates an ad in moments, it saves the time of people on the Web site who might normally need to build the ad themselves, or work with the customer to build one. That can translate into lower charges, Ms. Park said.
Normally Time Out New York requires companies to submit their own ads that adhere to the specifications of the site. “Images have to be a certain size and a certain format,” she said. “But often local clients don’t have those at their disposal.” She hopes that the instant ads and lower prices will bring in new small businesses that have been put off by the difficulties of advertising. “The program makes the ads much more accessible to local clients with smaller budgets,” she said.
The program can pan over photographs in the ad, zooming in to show off images of a restaurant or real estate listing, Mr. Wong said. Even if the business has no Web site, the program can usually turn up a wealth of information on it to include in the ad. “For a lawyer, we might find information in the yellow pages or on a Web site that rates and reviews lawyers,” he said. For a local company that bakes dog biscuits, the program might find comments from pleased shoppers that have appeared online, rotating different quotes in the ads as they run.
Gaby Benalil, who lives in Albuquerque, recently signed up at the Web site of a local TV station, KOAT, to advertise her new business offering cello and vocal performance lessons. “I’m just starting out,” she said, “and I don’t have much of a budget to invest in advertising.” PlaceLocal created the ad for Vocello Music Lessons that will run on the KOAT’s Web site. It will cost $200 for its six-week run, she said.
PaperG has raised over a million dollars from, among others, Brian O’Kelley, chief executive of AppNexus, an advertising technology company.
COMPUTERS are not only creating ads; they are also adding new information to them automatically. The Web site TheDigitel Charleston is offering advertisers a free updating service, said Ken Hawkins, editor. “People typically put in an ad and then don’t change it. But messages can get stale very quickly,” he said. If a customer, like a pizza shop, decides to run a special, the customer can send the revision from a blog or Facebook page, or from Twitter.
Ads that are easily updated this way will have an advantage, Mr. Rothenberg said. “It’s really important on the local ad level to make the whole process simple,” he added. “The dry cleaners, the grocery — they want the process to be easy and visible.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

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my type of cowboy.... remind which century we are living in!

2010-05-18T08:12:00.001-07:00

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Love the music as well

2010-04-22T13:10:00.001-07:00

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Uncoached - Cute Pictures of Animals Who Make a Mess |

2010-04-22T13:01:00.001-07:00

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I used to dance like this..... well sort of

2010-03-26T10:19:00.001-07:00

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Wisdom

2010-03-17T08:53:00.001-07:00

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Watch out for #4

2010-03-13T11:21:00.001-08:00

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Another reason to go to Delhi

2010-03-12T08:40:00.001-08:00

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Uncoached - Funny Fanmade Sports Signs |

2010-03-12T08:26:00.001-08:00

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Fascinating: extremely flexible man (I’m not sure he has bones in his body) « Viral Footage

2010-03-12T08:25:00.001-08:00

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so this is how sponge bob lives

2009-12-30T18:10:00.001-08:00

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Forget about the exits

2009-11-25T07:32:00.001-08:00

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I would use this.... its works

2009-11-17T14:45:00.001-08:00

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Where is child services.....

2009-11-17T06:04:00.001-08:00

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Dominoes

2009-11-02T16:42:00.001-08:00

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Something out of an "Indy" movie

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Is that the Olympic torch or is it...

2009-10-30T11:58:00.001-07:00

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Apparently the Olympic torch arrived in BC Canada today... but this suspiciously looks like something else our friends north of the border often partake in... Good luck with that?!?!

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Watch out...

2009-10-26T11:59:00.001-07:00

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Amazing idea

2009-10-21T22:17:00.001-07:00

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toy town

2009-10-10T08:25:00.001-07:00

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Google Reader (1000+)

2009-10-07T18:10:00.001-07:00

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

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Google Reader (1000+)

2009-10-06T11:28:00.001-07:00

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I've heard of the italian Job.... what Job is this..?

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Perez Hilton: Jude Law Is Bluffin' With His Muffin

2009-10-01T12:47:00.001-07:00

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How its should be done.. right?

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Newspapers' Plea: We're Still Relevant!-Minyanville

2009-09-22T12:54:00.001-07:00

Newspaper executives hope that keeping it local will keep them in business.
“What newspapers do best is deliver the local perspective,” Susie Ellwood, chief executive officer of the Detroit Newspaper Group and the Detroit Media Partnership, said Tuesday during a panel discussion held as part of Advertising Week in New York.
Making the news relevant to local readers means newspapers will continue to deliver key consumers to advertisers. But there are huge challenges ahead.

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The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that declines in print newspaper circulation, which began to accelerate in late 2003, deepened in 2008. Overall, newspaper circulation fell 4.6% daily and 4.8% in Sunday issues for the six-month period ended September 30, 2008.
Still, total daily circulation was 48.4 million and Sunday circulation totaled 48.8 million, making newspapers an effective way to reach a broad audience in a single advertising buy.
Page views of newspaper websites were up 25.2% in the survey period. On average, unduplicated Internet readers added 8.4% to a newspaper’s readership in its home market.
Like other media, the basic question for newspapers is: Who sees the ads and actually responds to them?
Current measurement techniques are imprecise, but that may change as electronic delivery becomes more important to newspapers.
E-readers, such as Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle DX will allow newspapers to know who sees the ads and to better measure response. Sony (SNE) offers a competing product and Apple (AAPL) is expected to launch its e-reader in 12 to 18 months.
One disadvantage: So far, e-readers don’t offer color and advertisers may not be enthusiastic about making their pitch on a screen that has all the emotional snap of a monochromatic computer at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
E-readers are often pitched as the next big thing, but it’s not yet clear that newspaper readers will adopt them in huge numbers. Newspapers, the original portable media, are cheap, easy to use, and not damaged if dropped. E-readers are expensive, fragile, and using one on a train or a bus in a large city may invite theft.
Don Meek, president of Tribune 365, says some critics overlook a basic strength of newspapers: their ability to deliver ads or sample products to every residence in select areas, typically portions of upscale zip codes.

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Newspapers: What Would You Pay For?

2009-09-21T21:25:00.001-07:00

This is $64M question... of is that now the $64B question... anyway's I believe their is a way via micros payments, Fanbox probably has the best solution for the NP's are they even talking with them??

Newspapers: What Would You Pay For?

via Screenwerk by Greg Sterling on 9/21/09

There’s a bunch of news and interesting writing around the forthcoming efforts to charge for content (specifically online newspaper content). A recent study conducted by The American Press Institute and ITZ Publishing/Belden Interactive, involving 118 online interviews, finds various attitudes and strategies among the majority of news publications that are moving toward a paid model.

Here’s the top-line summary of the research from Media Buyer and Planner:

58% of publishers said they are considering charging for content, but 49% said they have no timetable in mind for how that will play out.
12% said they plan to charge for content by the end of the year, 18% said they will do so in the first quarter of 2010, and 10% said they would begin charging by the beginning of next summer
10% currently charge for some portion of the web content

The models under consideration:

38% say they will limit full access to stories to monthly subscribers
28% say they will likely offer monthly subscriptions as well as micropayments for individual articles
15% expect to offer monthly subscriptions, micropayments, and “day passes”
19% expect news articles to remain free but that they will produce content specifically for the website which would be behind a pay wall
9% say they may adopt a system which would make visitors pay separately for each story they want to read.

What these charts above say is the following:

The mostly likely strategy is a free homepage with headlines and content snippets. Full article access would be paid
Single article micropayments is the top monetization strategy
Top objectives of paid strategy: 1) preserving print circulation, 2) new revenues

Allan Mutter focuses in on the contradictions and hidden pessimism of the report:

A bare 51% of the newspaper publishers in the United States believe they can charge successfully for access to their interactive content, according to a survey released today. The other 49% of publishers either fear that pay walls will fail or just aren’t sure.

The survey, which was conducted for the latest in the series of industry conferences this year studyng how to monetize the valuable content most newspapers give away for free, shows that publishers who are worried about charging for content have good reason to be concerned.

A great deal of the public discussion around pay walls in the newspaper industry, I believe, is to condition the public regarding the idea that they’ll soon have to pay for online news content. Most people will be reluctant to pay for what they have been able to receive for free but there might be success in holding on to print subscribers this way. If everyone goes to paid simultaneously it will have a greater chance of success.

PaidContent summarizes results from some of the newspaper sites that currently charge for online access. The conclusion is that they’re mediocre performers and subscriptions have been generally lackluster.

Online newspapers are going to have to balance circulation and ad sales because ad revenues will take a hit from a pay wall strategy like this. The NY Times abandoned TimesSelect because it calculated it could make more money from ads than subscriptions.

What would you do if you were running a traditional news organization? Would you go to a paid strategy? How would you execute?

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2008-08-31T23:25:00.001-07:00

in bed asleep - no kiddin'

2008-08-31T23:16:00.001-07:00

just watched Mad Men, Don's a quiet shaver

2006-08-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

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