AdStar has just released a summary of their fiscal 2007 revenue performance and those of you who currently use AdStar as a solution or are looking at them for your future endeavors, may find the release interesting.

AdStar reported a net revenue decline of 7% when comparing 2007, to the fiscal performance of 2006. AdStar directly attributes their revenue declines to what is happening in the newspaper print industry, but we’ve also heard this before.
When a technology vendor reports continuous declines customers will or should begin to ask questions. What is the supposed sustainability factor of this provider? What steps are they taking to ensure their presence? Should I be looking at contingency plans? Let’s hope that AdStar is practicing one of the key elements of client retention, which is addressing the bad stuff – be proactive in client communication. One thing that I can factually say about AdStar is that they have publicly admitted that their choice to primarily service the newspaper industry, may not have been the smartest and as a result, they have started to target other verticals. In addition, the company has just finished development of their mobile application.

“The contraction in newspaper print advertising throughout the industry is having a significant impact on our core business,” stated Leslie Bernhard, president and chief executive officer of AdStar, Inc. “We will continue to support the newspaper industry with Web-based ad sales and payment processing services, while we direct our focus towards providing advertising services in new publishing channels. Our mobile advertising order entry dashboard development activities during the past year have allowed us to target new digital publishing opportunities, and we anticipate traction in this area during the months to come. We will continue to develop strategic partnerships and pursue business opportunities with content publishers, and we have launched a major initiative to advance sales and partnership opportunities in the wireless industry.”

Will the increase in breadth of focus, negatively affect the service newspaper publishers are receiving today? AdStar does run the risk of depleting their incumbent customer list, in light of declining revenue performance and resulted lessened R&D dollars.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: AdStar

AdMission and Builder Homesite Inc. have teamed up to create an information deep, new homes site network, combined with targeted advertising display spots. The partnership between the two seems unlikely, especially in a niche site such as this, but BHI has cleverly combined a great user experience, with a source of commercial advertising revenues. When a site visitor searches for a new home, or developer project in a particular area, not only will the appropriate classified homes listings appear, but now a display ad, derived from the users queries, featuring images and details on new homes from BHI’s associated home building firms, will also appear on screen.

BHI has just officially started to offer this form of advertising to builders in it’s network, but the feedback has been positive from those who were involved in the programs beta. BHI also plans to roll out the display ads to their partnering sites Yahoo Real Estate and Trulia.

AdMission has done a lot to get involved in the world that was once deemed the territory of traditional classified forums. AdMission has worked on programs with third party automotive sites such as Autobytel, all the way to independent car dealers who can create their AdMission ads on their own (and a good-looking one too) using a simple self service tool found on the AdMission Website. An interesting thing to note is that if a dealer keeps their inventory updated in the AdMission database, any ad they choose to create will be fit with current content. Asking dealers to update their inventory however, leads me to believe that AdMission, at some point in the future, may be interested in another business model that would be in direct competition with the traditional classified players. In addition to auto, the group has worked with Career Builder, LA Times and Coldwell Banker, just to mention a few.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: AdMission, Builder Homesite Inc., New Homes, Targeted Advertising, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate

Take a look at how New York Magazine incorporates mobile (content and advertising) into their product set. It’s a great idea and one that can be adopted by publishers of newspapers or niche magazines, servicing larger cities.

http://nymag.com/mobile/

New York magazine has a readership of 1.6 million per issue and it is published by New York Media Holdings, LLC.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Mobile Advertising, New York Magazine

Autobytel has created a product called Local Connect, designed specifically for automotive dealers who value geo-targeting. The product officially launched late in February, but has seen somewhat of a slow start.

Local Connect has been designed to aid in increasing lead generation for car dealers. When users search Autobytel’s MyRide for vehicles (both new and used), their results page will display something similar to a sponsored-link beside the thumbnail ads return. These links however, differ greatly from the sponsored link you would find on Google for example. Here, on the Autobytel site, they will be filled with dealer call to actions when expanded. These expanded links can feature video, close-up photos of vehicle interiors and parts and as they do in their local papers, dealers can promote weekly specials, targeting them down to a minute geography, based on a users IP address.

Any customer wishing to contact a dealer through their Local Connect ad can do so via a trackable toll free number. “We provision the number for the dealer so we can show trackable results,” said Tara Wagnor, director of dealer consumer services at Autobytel.

Of the 3,700 dealers that use Autobytel for lead generation, only 50 of them have signed up to use Local Connect, and only 10 of those dealers actually have running Local Connect ads. The programs acceptance amongst the Autobytel advertisers has been slow moving. Autobytel is probably finding it difficult to convince auto dealers that they need to spend more money with them, when all indications show that 2008 will be slowest year for vehicle sales since 1994. However, if Autobytel sales reps are equipped with the right product value proposition statements, they can easily turn this negative forecast into a compelling reason why auto dealers need to advertise more now than ever.

According to Borrell and Associates, auto advertisers will spend approximately $3.4 billion in online advertising this year, as opposed to the $2.8 billion spent last year and based on what Borrell knows of the industry and where they plan to spend their money, he seems to think that Autobytel has gotten it right this time. “That’s what they (dealers) all want,” said Gordon Borrell, president of Borrell and Associates. “They want exclusivity, and they want their advertising to be limited to a certain geographic area. The exclusivity, as well as the timeliness of the ad content means the ad offering is positively geared toward newspaper advertisers,”

Let’s hope Autobytel can encourage more dealers to sign up before the product loses its luster or worse yet, one of their competitors come out with a similar product and a better sales message.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Autobytel, Automotive, car dealers

Covering stories from blog.ad-ition.com and other relevant classified media news.

This episode’s covered news bits include a report covering the business of repossessed bus tours, Yahoo! and Quadrant One, Yahoo! and Light Pole, the success of online Q&A sites and how that could be applied to a publishers property, and the popularity newspaper Websites among even non-readers of print.

 

 This Week's eMedia with ad-ition (ep.3) [26:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: podcast, quadrant one, repossessed bus tours, Yahoo

Question-and-answer Websites have seen their audience and usage numbers more than double, when compared to the previous year.

Yahoo! Answers sticks out as the clear winner with 74% of the Q&A market share, but there are new players who are quickly growing in size: WikiAnswers, Answerbag and Askville (a beta Amazon site). Q&A sites probably wouldn’t have been as popular four years ago, but with the rising UGC participation online, people are using Q&A sites as legitimate resource tools and sources of authoritative information. I for one was impressed by the caliber of answer I received when I first tried Yahoo! Answers, just after their official launch date.

“As we see user-generated content proliferating in different flavors, this is yet another way people are interacting with social media,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise.

The success of Q&A sites speaks to something we have been saying to publishers all along – create an “ask the expert” section to service your niche categories – automotive, real estate and recruitment. And unlike business models such as Yahoo! Answers or WikiAnswers, you rely on a rotation of your larger advertisers in each vertical to own the Q&A. In doing this you not only avoid the staffing costs associated with managing the product, but you also cover a few crucial areas:

Win an advertiser for life: flattery will get you everywhere. Through asking one of your advertisers to own a portion of your site for three months shows that, you not only value them as a customer, but you think they are experts in their field.

Provide more tools and resources for your readers: an Internet user’s biggest pet peeve is not being able to find or access the information when they want it. This is why navigation and site audits are so important. By providing the “ask the expert” section you give users another way – period!

Comply with information gathering and online consumer trends: if it can work for generalist Q&A sites like Yahoo! then it will definitely work for niche categories.

According to comScore, Yahoo! Answers, had monthly traffic of 25.3 million in February (up from 17.4 million in 2006) and an average time spent online per user of nine minutes per session, according to Hitwise.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Answerbag, ask the expert sections, Askville, WikiAnswers, Yahoo! Answers

There is a revenue model in almost everything. I am convinced of it now. In Nevada and Michigan, they have made a profitable business out of hosting bus tours to repossessed homes. A real estate agent usually guides these tours and they are fee-based. Therefore, the agent has the possibility to make revenue off the sale of a home, as well as the bus tour. Oh how the real estate market has transformed itself during times of adversity…

Michigan Tours

Nevada Tours

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Real Estate Michigan, Real Estate Nevada, repossessed home

LightPole Inc, a new mobile software and services company, has finally come out of beta with their flagship product cleverly called LightPole. What makes LightPole of special interest to us is their partnerships with Yahoo! Local and Yelp.

The way LightPole works, is that mobile users can download the LightPole software to their phones and by doing so, no matter where they are in their city, they can quickly access information about restaurants, shops, Wi-Fi hotspots and pretty much any type of business in the LightPole database, aggregated from their partners.

The LightPole model is an ad supported one – so while users are sourcing information they are seeing relevant ads segmented and in alignment with what they were searching for. For the most part, the only credible partners on LightPole are Yahoo! and Yelp, but with Yahoo! working on strengthening their newspaper consortium with product offerings and services, you may soon find that some of your retail advertisers are being accessed via LightPole. A play I am sure Yahoo! has already discussed because of the revenue share model in place with LightPole.

If anything, this release tells us is that mobile advertising is coming closer and closer to a natural point of integration for publishers.

With its first public release after a year in quiet beta, LightPole’s free application looks promising. While not swimming in features, LightPole is fairly easy to use on any Java-enabled phone.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: LightPole, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Directories, Mobile Technology, Yahoo! Local, Yelp

A comScore report confirms what most publishers have come to know about their readership demographics - the young are less likely to read news items in print, especially when compared to those who are older. However, what the comScore report does in addition to forming up the obvious is analyze the types of sites that online news readers are accessing and it paints a solid picture for newspaper publishers, with a well designed Website.

“That current generations are growing up getting their news online for free is an indicator that print circulations are likely to continue their decline,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore EVP. “But the internet represents a significant opportunity to extend - and even improve upon - existing news brands and reach out to new consumers with living, breathing real-time content.”

When studying news consumption habits of heavy, medium, light and non-print readers, comScore looked at their propensity to visit top brand news sources online, including print publisher Websites.

When analyzing the above, publishers should feel motivated to either implement or ensure usability of their Websites as this table indicates Websites with news content have the ability to standalone as a separate brand. This opens up many possibilities when looking at the value of online and pricing it appropriately. Including stats, such as these from comScore, in media kits should lessen the strain publishers have in pricing online to recoup some of the losses seen on the print side of their business.

“Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier-than-average news consumers - they just prefer to consume it in a digital format,” said Flanagan. “That they are receptive to print, TV, and Internet news brands indicate a broad opportunity online, but the brands that will ultimately win over these key news consumers are the ones that successfully integrate cutting edge digital content with high-quality journalism.”

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: comScore, newspaper demographics, newspaper readership, online news readership

Covering stories from blog.ad-ition.com and other relevant classified media news from this past week.

 

 eMedia with ad-ition [21:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: aol, bebo, classified podcast, Hulu, newspaper podcast, online classifieds, thin data, Transcontinental