Over the two days, we heard from speakers working in the media and marketing industries. But the most valuable part of the conference was the roundtable discussions and workshops discussing the common problems and solutions that college newspapers face. Far too little communication happens between different college newspapers, and that means that the practices and strategies that work well at one place aren’t passed on to other papers.

That’s why conferences that bring together people from different publications are so valuable, and that’s part of what CoPress is trying to do by connecting people from different schools to share their questions and solutions.

As it turns out, we all face a lot of similar problems.

Ideas and topics discussed at Yale

Chief among the topics of discussion was how to make more money and how to make more money online. In the sessions I went to we explored alternative sources of revenue, ways of improving local advertising and website projects.

Among the alternative sources of revenue, many schools explored raising funds from alumni donations and selling subscriptions to parents and alumni of students. This allows many of them to maintain an endowment which can provide steady funding even when the advertising market suffers. Several were exploring a store selling branded merchandise and prints of photos and the paper. Another popular feature is graduation announcements, where parents can buy something similar to a yearbook announcement in the final issue of the paper.

But of course, advertising is still the core source of funding for any newspaper. Roger Lee, a co-founder of PaperG, gave a presentation on how to engage local advertisers. One of the key points of his presentation was to bundle print and online ads together. Since print ads still command higher rates, this prevents online advertising from cannibalizing print revenue.

Online, papers are looking to expand in several ways. Many want to move beyond news and multimedia to providing more types of information to students. Among those ideas include:

• Creating guides to local restaurants and businesses
• Listings of campus events
• Professor ratings
• Selling prints and licenses of photos (with this though, it’s careful to avoid running afoul of NCAA rules for photos.)

What other ideas do you have to make your student publication more profitable and more successful? Or what do you want to know about how other student papers operate? Let us know in the comments!

In college media, the tendency is to regard the Web as a mere afterthought in terms of revenue. For those of us at college news organizations, however, the time to start perfecting our online revenue system is now, not in five years — when it’s too late and you’re bankrupt.

Capturing value on the Web can be overwhelming because the audience and approach is different from what we’re used to with print. Chances are that your Web site users are parents and alumni, meaning that you can’t translate ads directly from print to the Web. Advertising online means leveraging resources like Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links and tailoring ads to match your user demographics, which you can track using an analytics service.

Making money online doesn’t only come in the form of advertisements — podcasts, minisites, events calendars and other features can be monetized through sponsors. Giving out promotional code coupons on certain days of the week is a way to both generate traffic and engage users with ads.

To dispel a myth about online advertising, we must realize that ads online are not all about generating clicks and traffic to advertisers’ sites. The point of having advertisements on a site is to build brand among readers. A study shows that when exposed to branded ads, the impact may not be direct or immediate, but “users engage better and transact more with brands once they’ve been exposed to them. ” Even if they don’t click the ad, they’re still building brand recognition and creating value in those online ads.

But the key to good money will always coincide with good journalism. The better the site content, the more eyes will come to our news sites. More eyes means more advertising potential, which ties into everything we’ve discussed before; investing in your staff, creating a web-native newsroom, and constantly innovating from within.

What is your approach to online advertising or how do you regard it? What steps can you take to improve your organization’s utilization of the medium? Sound off in the comments.

• It’s the season of new sites. On Wednesday, we helped Brian Manzullo take the new CM Life live. He has since written a thoughtful post to the community, as well as a more detailed post about the new features of the site. Late last night, a new, more Drupally Daily Tar Heel went online. Andrew Dunn, Sara Gregory, and other staffers give a short introduction and talk about their plans for the upcoming year.
• Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats – “The study, which was based on 2,390 online display campaigns running over the past three years, found that so-called “half banners” (those measuring 234 x 60) and rectangles (180 x 150) were more effective than ads that frame the page such as high profile leaderboards and skyscrapers.” (tks Joey Baker)
• Will Davis deserves significant props for the amount of work he’s been doing to improve the wiki. The focus of what he’s doing is configuring Semantic MediaWiki to make all of the semi-structured data on a newspaper profile available in aggregate form. We now have over 120 newspapers listed in the directory; if you see that yours is missing detailed information, please add to it!
• Max Cutler would like to see a “feature matrix with links for college news sites.” I’d like to see that, as well as a page on the wiki dedicated to just brainstorming and listing out new ideas. For instance, in the forum, Brian asked about a “breaking news” box that could occasionally appear on the home page, as well as ideas for sweet author pages. It would be great if we could capture these on the wiki in such a fashion that, if I wanted to get some inspiration for author pages regardless of CMS, I could go to that page to see what other people have done.

Help us out with the curation process by joining the CoPress Newsgroup.

College media is a funny beast. It seems to lag about a year to three years behind the mainstream media. This applies web-first thinking, blogging, web site design, and monetization. So, this weekend, when the CoPress forum became an active discussion of CPM vs CPC vs CPD ad models, I couldn’t help but grin twice.

First, because this is a conversation that the rest of the media had a few years ago (and has never resolved), and second, because this struck on a particular passion of mine – monetizing online media. (Go figure, the Business Director is interested in monetization)

The following post is an expansion of my forum comments, and still worth a read if you’ve already been through the forum.

The Current System

There are really three ways for advertisers: by impression, by click, and by time period (usually day). Of course, there are hybrids of all three models, which the top ad networks utilize (Facebook, Google). The issue, is that all of these models have some inherent flaw. CPM doesn’t reward for the effectiveness of an ad, CPC necessarily reward high traffic, and CPD, while it guarantees a nice minimum about you can make, has both of the same issues.

Take into account that college media has a monopoly over the vast majority of the 18-24 year-old US population. That’s demographic is the most desired by advertisers. And if my rough, non-scientific, survey is to be believed, less that one third of online college readership is actually students, it’s parents and alumni, who represent a middle-class, educated, demographic – precisely what any good advertiser wants.

Translation: you’re serving ads to a very valuable, niche, audience, that you have a monopoly over.

Analytics

One of the things that the forum conversation pointed out was the inaccuracy and the poor quality of the analytics available right now. Different software suites give different numbers, and non of them are really ‘correct.’

That’s a huge issue, because if you’re relying on those numbers to charge CPM, you stand to loose money.

Of course, as Bryan Murley points out, the holy grail of analytics right now is the ability to measure user engagement. Which would tell us how much a user was – using – the site. But, with such poor basic analytics, the challenge to create this data is compounded.

The moral of this story, is to have several different analytics suites measuring your audience. Know you can’t really trust any of them either.

Geography

The huge downside to these awesome demographics is that they’re usually not geographically similar. That means that you’re local adverts may not be your best market for online ads.

Take a look at your analytics, and I’m sure you’ll find that your pageviews mostly aren’t local. Try to serve ads that target all your audiences. Yes, an ad for a local pizza joint is good, but irrelevant if you don’t live near campus. Ads for Macy’s on the other hand, apply to everyone. Not to mention, national ads pay very well.

In the same vein, don’t forget that you’ll have a lot of alumni visiting the site. Go to your alumni office. Tell them you have a lot of alumni viewership. They may not know.

Alumni offices spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to contact alumni to get more money out of them. You can get a chunk of that money too! Make your case, and sell them a decent spot for a long-term contract. Then charge them a hefty amount – after-all, you’re a great way of reaching their market.

Concerned about relevancy for students? Go to the career center, and have them team up with alumni office. There’s gotta be alumni who want to hire interns and grads.

Crazy? I was Crazy Once!

Okay, normal, plain ideas out of the way. Let me present some crazier, more involved ones.

One suggestion of Revenue Two Point Zero, was to limit your ad inventory, therefore decreasing supply. This will allow you to drive up costs. Simple economics, right?

Even better, fewer ads means users aren’t nearly as annoyed by an assault of brightly colored, non-relevant content. A better UX means you’ll get more repeat users.

Another idea out of Rev2oh, was to sell only larger, more eye catching ads. The idea is to help avoid ad blindness.

Our example from the forum, the Tulane Hullabaloo, has 3 display ads on the site, one of which ia Google AdWords. Google Ads, while convenient, don’t have great revenue, and you’ll make much more money from selling ads yourselves.

Of course, that means having a motivated and trained online ad sales team. Who, since they’re paid on commission, don’t stand to gain much by selling online ads. Increase the cost of online ads, and you actually stand to sell more.

The Better Plan

OK, with me so far? Now let’s get out-of-the-box:

Institute a rule that 60% of your ads must be either a coupon, or a notification of a sale/deal (that’s actually legit), with the intention of increasing this to 95%+ in the coming years. I base this off two facts: people describe online ads as annoying, and in my own observation, print ads, which are usually described as informative, are primarily coupons or notifications of sales.

Of course, coupons are really the way to go. They will not only make your users happier, but they’ll drive traffic to your site and to your advertiser’s site and store. It’s a win all around.

Now, how do you serve them? Offer some sort of hybrid: charge for a run time, but make a deal with your advertiser that if you get a spike in traffic, they’ll be charged for the additional views. It’s your market, control it. This clause will allow you to ensure that when high traffic comes, you’re not out of inventory.

But… don’t be evil, if your advertiser wants to opt-out of the deal, then let them. With no hassle. Just be sure to sell enough ads to have an inventory ready if you do spike.

No One Really Knows

The single biggest issue with online media is monetization. I’ve noticed college media becoming more interested in the topic over the last year or so. That’s a good thing, because the mainstream haven’t cracked this nut yet, and it’s very possible that the niche, high-value demographic, monopolistic market of college media will be the one to solve it.

There’s a related discussion on advertising rates in the forum right now. Just think about how you could sell advertising much more intelligently with better data and you’ll begin to get the picture.

The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

Getting back to my opening thought…

The reality

College news sites have mostly been playing catchup to the pros. OK. “College students still read campus newspapers,” according to a 2008 Alloy Marketing study. No real harm done by being late to the video game, for example.

Student media are also looking to the Web as a way to generate revenue, mostly through different forms of advertising. This could mean banner ads, contextual ads, floating ads, video pre-roll (cringe), pop-ups (double cringe) or something else. Nothing innovative, from what I’ve seen. Nothing that’s resulting in a possible paradigm shift, such as the buzz from Russ Stanton’s LA Times onlne revenue revelation.

“But we’re getting along OK online, right?” you might ask. Probably. But the point is that we cannot wait until we need solutions to devise and implement them. Unlike some metro papers, college publications can’t afford to lose a million a week (scroll down halfway).

We need to be proactive. We need to be at least two steps ahead.

The proposal

And those first two steps are really not hard. It’s could be as easy as changing the mindset of the business office and bringing in new people. OK, the first one can be really hard.

In the context of college media, where print revenue appears to be holding up better than the big metro papers (with exceptions: “College papers cut staffs, Friday editions due to lagging ad sales”), there’s still plenty of room to grow online advertising. With this in mind, “an estimated 1-2 percent of total revenue for many college media outlets — if that,” says CICM’s Bryan Murley.

Beyond that, there’s an immense opportunity for generating revenue in other ways, which is the second step. That could be anything from offering consulting on how clients can more effectively reach the 18-24 demographic to selling baked goods in the student union.

So who’s responsible? Everyone on your staff, from editorial to business. That doesn’t mean news reporters will be selling ads, just that everyone should be part of the solution. Contributions could be as simple as brainstorming or as hands-on as consulting in ways that don’t conflict with one’s news role.

“But I’m not a business major!” Rev2oh comprised only non-business people. Participants had a variety of backgrounds, but it was primarily a design-oriented group. At least one person asked why there weren’t any business/advertising people. Alan Jacobson, who organized the event with SND president Matt Mansfield, basically said: They’ve had their chance, they haven’t done enough or haven’t been successful and now it’s up to us.

That doesn’t mean you should “go it alone,” but you don’t need that crowd to get stuff done. In many cases, I’m sure they would provide excellent insights.

Just like we need to take lessons from outside of news in order to improve news, we need to take lessons from outside the normal news organization business office to keep the money flowing.

The idea

We need revenue, not just advertising.

I like many of the ideas Steve Outing has discussed (check out his business model-related posts). Instead of rehashing them here, I’ll just say that all of the following thoughts developed after listening to him on the Journalism Now podcasts and after hearing a number of similar ideas from the small business group at Rev2oh, namely Scripps Interactive’s Jay Small.

• Your college news organization’s newly renamed “Revenue Office” no longer focuses solely on advertising, nor does it serve a single customer — your news organization. It should offer specialized services for off-campus clients.
• This could include everything from helping them establish a Web site and online brand to helping them promote their product or service on campus.
• Regarding setting up a site, there is certainly demand. I couldn’t find reliable statistics, but it’s safe to say that many small businesses in college towns could benefit by having (A) a Web site, (B) a freshly redesigned site, (C) a more interactive site, (D) presence on appropriate social media and (E) better presence on social media, for example.
• Another idea would be to have the revenue office offer research and data that would help the client, from student surveys to conducting focus groups. Basically, as Outing and Small separately referenced, this staff would be like an advertising/marketing department for the client.
• An important note: they would NOT be public relations.

There are so many possibilities, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel as a starting point. Yes, we need to look for new models and think outside the box, but we can start by adapting existing models in different fields.

I’m going to be speaking with The Miami Hurricane‘s business manager about these and other ideas soon. The adviser for the yearbook asked me to meet with those leaders to discuss ideas. I implore you to do the same, even if it’s just to get the conversation started.

Final thoughts:

• Open your mind.
• Listen to any and all ideas.
• Don’t be afraid to fail.
• Read Alan Jacobson’s initial posts on Rev2oh. Contact him. Find others like him. Their out-of-the-box thinking will open your mind. I certainly didn’t agree with Alan on every subject, but within half a day I saw the business side of news — and the possibilities — in a whole new light. He and Matt didn’t simply put us in a different pair of shoes. We were in a whole different outfit.
• Live long and prosper.

UPDATE: Check this out, Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.

Link-tastic

Here are some links to help provide more context and background on Rev2oh:

• RevenueTwoPointZero » March 21st Manifesto
• RevenueTwoPointZero » The Opportunity
• SND Update – An effort to find new revenue models launches

The results on Rev2oh site:

• Display advertising solutions
• Classified solutions
• iPhone solutions
• Small business solutions: Beyond the click

More details about the results on SND Update:

• Small business solutions: Beyond the click
• How news organizations can take back classifieds
• Rethinking advertising + the homepage experience
• Mobile: Paying for functionality in news apps

Other related links

• Putting the search for a business model into perspective – Visual Editors
  
• RevenueTwoPointZero posts prototypes – Visual Editors
• Day after Revenue 2.0 #rev2oh – Patrick Cooper
  

Links that were passed around before and after:

• Online Payment Plan? How About a Print Print Payment Plan? (Matt Mansfield) – requires free registration
• Huge New Ad Unit Spotted In The Wild At NYTimes.com (Patrick Thornton)
• 27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner (Patrick Thornton)
• iList and Micro iList (William Couch)

Podcasts about revenue for news

• This Week in CoPress: Monetizing Online Student News
  
• Journalism Now Podcast – Making Money without Micropayments

Guests: Brad Arendt, Boise State Arbiter; Kevin Schwartz, Daily Tar Heel; Max Cutler, Yale Daily News; Joey Baker, Daily Orange

Summary: A comprehensive introduction to the current state of online newspaper monetization. Most student newspapers make less than 10% of their overall revenue from online, and the limitations seem to be a lack of infrastructure and inventory. The Daily Tar Heel has had success with Heels Housing, an interactive student housing guide, and Max Cutler recommends Google Ad Manager over OpenX because of its relative ease of use.

Related: Forum discussing strategies for monetizing online

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Have feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

We’ve got a problem at The Daily Orange: our ad revenue is shrinking.

Sound familiar? A newspaper that’s having trouble making ends meet!?

We were having such difficulty balancing our budget, that we cut our print Friday edition (we still publish online).

The Daily Orange is an independent student newspaper. “Independent” means that we receive no money from the academic institution that we cover (well… they don’t charge us rent; but, that’s the only help we get). We pay a heavy price for the freedom to set our editorial content – we rely on print advertising for nearly all of our income.

This is a problem. As we’re forced to slowly transition toward an online newsroom, we risk abandoning the money making print edition. This scares our business manager to death. It frightens our board. We all know that the internet is the future, but can’t see a way to monetize online content.

Some choose to bury their heads: we receive roughly half of our daily eyeballs from our website, the other half from the print. That’s means we’ve beat the 10% problem. (Though we don’t come close to the average online revenue percentage of 10%.) Why is it that we seem to be bucking the national trend? I’ve got three guesses.

1. College newspapers are freesheets. The freesheet experiment has been going on for a while now in Europe, and is getting another serious look in the US. The internet has gotten people use to the idea of getting their news for free. The freesheet model gives them this access in hardcopy. Since college newspapers already use this model, they might already have a leg up. At the very least, a high subscription cost is not problem.
2. Colleges represent a niche market. If the internet is leading to a need for hyperlocal news coverage, college newspapers have already mastered the skill. This is a perhaps the one area where we’re ahead of the curve.
3. College students work for cheap. I’d imagine that most college papers pay at least some of their staff (we pay just our editors), but that payroll is extremely small. Therefore our expenses are much less than a professional papers that must pay a living wage.

But, this trend can’t possibly last. Like I already mentioned, we’ve seen ad revenue slip. It’s going to continue to do so unless we come up with an online revenue model.

On a macro level, there are three ways a newspaper can make money.

1. Advertising. Both online and in print.
2. Subscriptions. Charging for the print product, or following the freemium model and charging for premium content online.
3. Donations. From the public (i.e. spot.us) or from a foundation (like ProPublica or a college newspaper).

A part of my job over the last 4 months has been to blend these sources of revenue to generate new income. While I don’t claim to have come up with a solution, here are some thoughts:

• Experiment. Leading off with the most important point. Yes, budgets are tight. Yes, it costs money to experiment. Do it anyway. No one is really sure how to “do” online news. Chances are your budget is only going to get tighter before it gets figured out. Spend the money now ’cause you won’t have it later.
• Video doesn’t make much money. Ouch. Yea, I know it stings. Video takes a lot more effort from the staff, and requires a lot more infrastructure. Translation: it’s expensive. It also doesn’t really pay for itself … yet. But, video is hot. People like it; it’s an area that demands experimentation. We’ve started a few video podcast shows with our sports department. My pitch to convince them to do it? “You guys sit around and talk about sports anyway, just do it in front of a camera.”
• We’re not in the newspaper business, we’re in the media information business. This is the scary part that no bean counter wants to hear. But recognize the truth: if you’re producing online content, you’re not trying to sell a paper. You’ve got a different product all together. A newspaper’s biggest asset is its reporters. They’re experts in their field and have information that the public wants access to. A video podcast may be a good way of distributing that information, but if it doesn’t have a means of monetization it’s not a good business decision. In the same way you wouldn’t print an insert for your paper without selling ads, don’t produce new content online without a plan to make money.
• It’s all about the version 1. If you’re a perfectionist, take a step back a breath, you’re not going to like this one. Experimenting means getting some things wrong. Which means perfecting a new feature before you launch it, is a waste of time. We can’t afford a video camera (yet). So we’ve been shooting nearly all of our video podcasts on the iSight built into our laptops. No, the video quality isn’t great. But, it was affordable, and it gives us an all digital workflow. Not having to transfer video off tapes saves us a lot of time every night. Getting something out the door at 80% is more important than holding it to achieve perfection. Plan on getting better as you do more. You’ll be learning by doing. By the time you get around to version 2, you’ll be ready to tackle the harder stuff. It’s more important that you can deliver regular, ‘just okay’ content, than amazing content that you can only pull off once a year.
• Online publishing doesn’t mean a smaller staff. For small organizations like college papers, you’re going to need just as many people to publish online as you will in print. Trade your designers in for developers, teach your editors how to use your CMS, and get some reporters to blog. Publishing online is cheaper not because you can cut payroll expense, but because you don’t have to pay for newsprint.
• The link economy works. The copy-paste website method that most papers practice isn’t going to cut it in a web-centered newsroom. In order to be a first-class web citizen, we’ve got to start linking out in our stories. Abandon any rules you have about only linking internally. Link to as many places as you can. Google is the number one way people enter our site. Which means SEO is the name of the game. All of this means more site impressions, more impressions translates to more ad dollars. It’s worth your time to train staff on how to embed links because it directly affects your ad revenue.
• Local advertisers need to have incentive to buy online ads. The majority of our site traffic comes from parents and alumni, so local advertising doesn’t make sense. Or, they don’t have websites to advertise.Offer them alternatives to banner ads. Consumers generally find online ads annoying where print ads are seen as informative. Since print ads are usually coupons or notifications of sales, bring those kinds of ads to your site. Students will gladly to to your site to print a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for a local business. Even if that’s all they visit your site for, it’s still a win for all involved.
• Use the free stuff. There’s lots of good, free sites out there that can make your life easier. Vimeo or Blip.tv will gladly host your (HD) video content. Google Calendar will gladly host your community calendar. WordPress will host blogs for you. You can almost run a website for free! Furthermore, putting your content on web 2.0 sites gives you access to a social network greater than your own. This will get your content noticed by an audience that might otherwise have never seen your hard work (especially true for videos). Web 2.0 is your friend!
• Consider alternative forms of online revenue. Some newspapers have setup sites that help students find housing. Sites like this can help replace/supplement classified revenue that newspapers are struggling to account for. This is also a great opportunity to use the freemium model. One idea: let users post one housing listing for free. But charge for more than one listing (landlords with multiple properties).

Producing online content now will prepare your newsroom for the eventual day when online, instead of print, is their daily grind. It takes a while to setup an infrastructure, and with your cash flow unlikely to increase in the near future, now is the time.

Update: Link added to show that coupons are in demand.

Update2: There’s now a page on the wiki about this topic, but it does need to be expanded. Go go crowdsourcing! (Dec 4, 08; 18:10 EST)

Update3: Added alternative forms link. Added “One idea:” (Dec 5 08;, 00:58 EST)