Online Ad-Spending will Surpass Print: 3 Solutions to Get Involved

Many publishing companies are doing a fine job of tapping into online ad revenue. Many aren’t. Online advertising offers a publishing company the opportunity to tap into new advertising real estate. It is there waiting. You’ve already grown your publication and attracted a substantial list of subscribers and advertisers. You’ve put in the work. Online advertising is there waiting. If you’ve already moved towards complimenting your publications print sector with the online, then kudos. If you are still waiting to make this jump that is fine, no one is going to force you. Our two cents here is that now is a very important time to make this jump into online content and advertising. For publishers that are waiting to do this, you’re not ahead of the game although you’re not necessarily behind.  I’m not going to say “Welp, looks like you missed the boat,” the internet segment is vast and growing and to the publishers that we work with, “missing the boat” is the last thing that has happened here. In fact, not only have these publishers not missed the boat, they hopped on years ago and grew the print side of their publication to where it is today. Online content is simply the next step, another branch. There is a problem with viewing the online side of publishing as a competitive force against the print side. This is not the battle between print publishers and online publishers. Print publishers and online publishers are the same people. You are a print publisher. Have you made the necessary steps to grow the online side of your publication? No, well then you are not an online publisher yet, although the second you make a couple of steps towards the digital side, you will then be a print/online publication. You have the readership already, and online will just be another medium for your readers to access your content. Not only will online be another medium for your readers, it will be another medium for your advertisers.

If your publication is doing well without online ad revenue, then you should feel one of two ways: 1) awesome or 2) totally awesome. This would in my opinion mean that not only is your publication profitable in a slow market, your publication has the ability to expand into a new market and continue to increase revenues by tapping into online advertising. You already have interesting content, you already have a subscription list. Every thing is in place for you to begin pushing your content online and growing ad-revenue online. If you’re having difficulty tapping into ad-revenue then here are a few areas to start:

1) Website banner advertising: you already understand selling ad-space for print, this is the same thing. Online articles and webpages provide your publication with new space for advertising. Selling space next to your articles and videos (above, below, to the side… where ever you so please) will allow you to almost immediately make-up for online start-up costs (if your new to online), to offer new diversified means of advertising to your advertisers, and simply to increase revenue. One other cool thing here. With print, advertisers pay a fixed amount for a specific spread in your magazine. This ad is effective for roughly a month, and then a new issue is published, new spreads are sold and old spreads are forgotten. With online, you’re not only writing an article that will be E-mailed out to your subscription list, you’re also writing an article that will be indexed in search engines for ever, becoming part of a database of online articles on your website that, over time, will begin to become relevant to people searching for similar information. Boiled down, this means that you will eventually be able to charge annual advertising for articles that rank well with search engines and are viewed by potentially hundreds of thousands of people.

3) Video advertising: Let me preface this.. this is what Production Bucket does. We want to be clear and have no intention of being deceptive here. That being said, I shall continue. As your magazine continues to explore new fields of digital content, video will find its way onto your to-do list. One of the most exciting opportunities of expanding into digital publishing is the ability to reformat your content into different mediums. You have the ability to provide new ways for your readership to interact with your publication. There is a reason that most journalism schools are adapting to include expanded media programs, expanded media is the direction that the industry is heading towards. Videos allow your readers to connect with your content in a different form. According to the most recent Magazine Media Factbook, more than 7 out of 10 readers reported that videos enhanced the reading experience. Videos provide your magazine with diversified content, and open up an especially unique advertising opportunity, sponsorship advertising. By partnering with a video production company to assist your magazine in creating a recurring video series (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) you open up the opportunity to offer this unique sponsorship advertising to your clients. By running a short 5-15 second advertisement before each video that plays, you have now developed a content solution that opens up consistent recurring ad-revenue and pushes out recurring content that “enhances the digital reading experience”. By searching for the right video production company to partner with, you will be able to push out recurring video content and receive a new source of recurring ad-revenue, of which dramatically offsets any costs involved with the video production. If you find the right video production company, this entire process will be made as simple as possible and the production company will search for solutions to keep as much as the load as possible, off of your publishers and editors shoulders.

3) E-mail / digital collateral advertising: Similar to selling ad-space on the different webpages on your site, the E-mails that you send out to your subscribers offer you another opportunity for selling ad-space. You can get creative here. You can, once again, sell side bar or overheard ad-space. You can have the E-mails “Sponsored By ___”, “Powered By ___” or “Brought to You Thanks To ___”. E-mail, apps for phones and tablets, digital flip publications, etc. offer new and unused space that can be used for advertising. Furthermore, if you have no intentions of selling new space in these areas, you can offer these spaces to current advertisers as a means of providing them with extended and disproportionate value to their investments.

Now we all know that it makes readers sick to have to scroll through spreads that are covered from head to toe in advertisements. There are good reasons as to why we don’t sell ad-space on our foreheads, rear view windows and our business cards. My intention here is not to imply that all of these areas need to be immediately tapped into, and I most certainly am not suggesting that we should all make ad-revenue our primary aim over readership experience and value. My intentions here are to provide you with different options for thinking out of the box when it comes to looking for new areas to grow your magazine, specifically new and untapped areas for improving readership experience and increasing ad-revenue.

Let us know what you think. Agree, disagree, please express your thoughts in the comments. It’s through collaborating and sharing knowledge that we all stay relevant.

Over and out,

Sam Weinstein

CEO, Production Bucket