Local Newspaper Reprints Blog Post

After the last week of rants concerning some roadblocks a group in the local Farmington area were trying to put up for Big River Telephone moving to the area I have to give a thanks to the Farmington Press and Daily Journal newspapers.

Last week I discussed my feelings on the topic on both my radio show and then made a post on my blog, typically I do not talk local government or topics on here but in this case I felt it important to use whatever voice I had to help.

Last week MyMoInfo.com posted a news story with excerpts from my show concerning Big River Telephone and this week the Farmington Press and Daily Journal reprinted my blog post. I appreciate them taking the space (a full page outside of the ads) to print my opinion on the topic.

Big River Telephone President, Kevin Cantwell, presents his plan in a city council meeting this evening and will lay out the plans for development of the building they are looking to acquire and what jobs (and economic development) it will bring to the area. Should be interesting, I am sure the opposition will be there but the very large majority can see the value in helping bring quality jobs to the area and see the BIGGER picture in what development of technology related jobs can do to an area such as this.

Few Website Visitors To Rural Newspaper Websites

Tonight I decided to do some competitive analysis comparing traffic to certain towns and areas in Missouri to the competing newspaper website in the area.

I had done this for a few towns before but this time I did so on a larger scale, I cannot say I looked at every newspaper site but enough where I could spot trends in data enough where I felt comfortable making certain assumptions.

Well, a couple things were made real clear:

• Sites that had RSS feeds and were open to syndication had more traffic than those that did not, this makes sense to me but knowing how the media industry feels about that it does not surprise me that many do not offer RSS feeds.
• In the cases that it was evident they were doing other things to promote the site (i.e .promoting it in their own paper...) there was more traffic.

Without a doubt as rural broadband stimulus pushed broadband deeper into the rural areas these newspaper companies are going to falter fast, right now the rural papers are the only ones holding steady but from talking to small businesses the desperation is even starting to be felt in the small areas.

To give you an idea of how low the traffic stats are, a really large portion of the sites had Alexa rankings of 20 million to 10 million, the next larger amount was between 7 to 5 million. VERY few had Alexa rankings below 1 million. The ones that did were major cities.

To be honest I am not a fan of Alexa rankings since I have enough sites to see how the data can be skewed, but in a case like this where the user base is pretty non-tech savvy the rankings cannot be gamed, makes for a cleaner set of data, but still not perfect, but fine for this test.

Now, what may not be clear is that many of these newspapers cover more than one county, so it is not like the customer base is only 5 thousand people.

One thing I did find is the sites that have taken the time to form community/social interactions on the site are fairing much better.

If these sites cannot figure out how to bring more than a few visitors to their site a day they will not be able to keep advertisers, it is obvious they are fighting the battle to keep the status quo and if they do not figure something out quick they may be gone faster than we expected.

It may sound like I look forward to that, I do not, as much as I am building a business to take advantage of the shift it is actually a bit sad to see an industry fall apart because they refused to innovate and I do think their will be some quality journalism that suffers because of this.

One interesting note is I found one local newspaper in a town of less than 9000 that had an Alexa below 300K but then one in a town of over 30K that had an Alexa around 7 million. Seems if you have a plan and the community gets behind it you can get traction. Small town or not people are online and broadband is coming fast.

Yellow Pages 90 Percent Discount, Really?

Just a quick post to show you how the beginning of the year is going for the Yellow Page print business. So far in the first half of January I have had 3 customers tell me they have pulled their complete PRINT Yellow Page budget and a few more tell me that if they were in multiple Yellow Page (i.e. Yellowbook, etc) they have brought it down to one.

Well, today one of our really great customers came by to tell us something a bit interesting and I am sure if any of you have current Yellow Page spend and have not committed one way or the other for this years budget you will have happening soon, he got a call from his account manager stating they are offering a 90 PERCENT DISCOUNT for this year if he commits now.

He still said no.

I am not sure what different regions are being offered this type of discount or what level of customer, but WOW.  Aggressive.

Do you have any similar stories?

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

Local Search Review From 2009

As someone who spends the majority of his time thinking about local search and all things that pertain to small businesses taking advantage of all that the web has to offer I was absolutely overwhelmed by all the information linked to and provided in this great 2009 year in review post at SearchEngineLand.com:

SearchEngineLand.com Local Search Review

There is so much information linked to in that one article you could spend a week reading and analyzing it. We all know that geo domains are primed for success after the failure of newspapers and legacy media and Google is becoming the default "Yellow Pages" of today. 2009 will go down as the year the shift started full bore.

I highly recommend reading the story in the link and taking your time to read a good portion of the links within it.

The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web

OK, so The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web has been something landing people on my blog lately, several times actually, but the post they were landing on did not really outline the reasons so I thought I would do a quick 5 bullet point list of why. By no means is this the full list but here are several, feel free to add more in the comments section:

• Their customers are using the web, since the mid 90s people have had an option for where to get their news and this shift is happening faster than ever. The Internet is not just for the tech-savvy crowd and as people look to cut costs why pay for news when there are 1000 different options online for free.
• People do not want to wait until tomorrow, there is no need too. Newspapers have to print stories  on physical paper and then deliver them, their deadlines are typically early in the morning that day which means that you are waiting at least a day before you get a news story to the doorstep. People are use to instant gratification these days. Real time news is here , no more need to wait and with Twitter and Facebook it is only getting worse for the legacy news industry.
• Based on the two reasons above it becomes about money, even though the newspapers, almost as a whole, have failed to find a way to be successful online it is where the money is. Online ad revenues, although weak and shrinking in some aspects, have been stronger than offline revenues during the downturn. The money is online, newspapers have to figure out how to work online. Most have not.
• The old model has a much higher cost then the new model, bandwidth and servers are cheap compared to printing newspapers and delivering them. The newspaper industry had to see this but kept holding on hoping it would not catch up with them. It has.
• People have more options now, when the only news sources were TV, Newspapers, and Radio there was not as much competition. You only had a few voices to choose from when it came to opinion or real news. Well with the Internet, love it or hate it, you have thousands, millions even. People want to find someone more like them. Community would be the word.

To my normal readers sorry for the repetitive post, I know I have hit on this before but I wanted to give people coming in from search something.

There are many thoughts on why the newspapers are dying as well. Feel free to give your opinion.