CoPress

We’re a day late on this because of everyone’s travel, but the show must go on!

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The discussion of advertising rates continued this week. Brad Arendt approaches the issue of click-throughs and identifies two issues: finding the proper tool to accurately count click-throughs and take down the ad when the limit had been reached, as well as educating your local business owner on the concept so that it doesn’t discount the “value in brand awareness.” In fact, Bryan Murley argues that costs per clicks are a “horrible idea for college media sites, akin to allowing advertisers to only pay for print ads per the number of coupons that are brought in from an ad.” He’s more interested in looking into selling against user engagement with the site, based on such metrics as the amount of time spent on the site.

Also, Mo Jangda reported in the forum that he’s published a better version of the Co-Authors WordPress Plugin.
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Eric Ulken has a forward-thinking post on OJR about how BusinessWeek is going beyond page views and unique visitors to define their audience. Internal metrics, things like the number of comments on a story, number of return commenters, and so on, could be exponentially more powerful if you managed them with a CRM database tied to your CMS; that is, not only keeping track of the blind numbers, but also associating those numbers with people, or your community.

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.