HoustonBelief: Non-denominational religion site sells out
Site: HoustonBelief.com
Traffic: 564,000 page views
Company: Hearst Newspapers and Hearst Media Services
Key executives: Stephen Weis, Vice President of Interactive; Samuel Brown, Vice President Regional Advertising and Digital Services
Quick overview: "HoustonBelief.com ", whose slogn is "Believe outloud," is one of the most successful of Houston's five niche sites: composed of a passionate community, rich in controversial topics - and sold out. The site's numerous bloggers provide a lively exchange of nuanced conversation on moral and ethical issues. The brand has been so successful that Houston Chronicle scrapped its religion section and now reverse publishes HoustonBelief as a weekly tabloid.
The challenge: Two years ago when the Houston Chronicle decided to build four niche sites (mom’s, gardening, religion and pets), religion was seen as one of the "hobby sites:" a niche the newspaper could develop from its Religion section. The company launched a cross-department team including the religion editor, marketing, a designer and two sales people, who were collectively charged with using a template to develop a complete business plan. The plan included the site logo, mock-ups of site pages, database of churches in the area, and estimating the general revenue potential.
Something from nothing: The team originally envisioned the site as a “kind of Facebook for churches,” but the actual site quickly morphed into a community of believers. The editor, who had deep contacts in the religious community and was able to attract well known religious leaders to blog, and they in turn attracted their following, and more bloggers. Online conversations drove the sites growth to 500,000 pages views within a couple of months.
Today HoustonBelief is more than a web site about religion. The community is not unified by a belief system, but rather unified by an interest in the conversation about belief with people they may never otherwise meet offline. Hindus talk to Babtists on nuances of their ideas; atheists weigh in on the moral dilemna (can atheists be good?). The result is a grassroots, all American approach to sharing differences and similarities in belief; one that counteracts the tendencies for religious polarization.
Ironically, the level of the thoughtfulness and conversational respect is also higher and more reasoned than the typical chat thread, a welcome relief from the daily shouting matches the mainstream media. "Its a fascinating site, no matter what religion you are, " says Brown, who added that in spite of the apparently opposing viewspoint on the site, everyone typically "plays nice." the site requires the least policing of its comments threads of any of Chron.com's nich sites. Of the niche sites we've seen this is also the most fun.
Basic components: HoustonBelief, like MomHouston.'s is designed to facilitate community discussions and posts rather than around repurposed editorial from the newspaper. The home page is dominated by the leading blogs, forum threads and galleries. Ironically, the religious site has some decidedly racey components (see below). "We can actually push things further on this site than we can in print."
•Faith leader blogs
Twenty local blogs from religious leaders are featured on the site, from Lutheran and Pentecostal to Jewish and Muslim, who tackle any number of charged and contemporary subjects ("To those against the Quran burning, you're doing it wrong" and "Facebook and your soul: Pastor speculates that social networking spurs narcissism and shallow thinking.")
•Blogs from the pews
About ten more blogs on religious issues come from civilians like the Emaus Road ("Do Virgins need help?"), Ramadan Diary (Working too much) and the Bayou Bhuddist ("A Bhuddist take on the Park 51 project.") and of course, Brother Jesse (African American Muslims respond to the NY Mosque contreversy). Blog names (see list attached on the right) range from "Views from a Jew" to "Believe it or Not".
• Forums
More issues are discussed directly in the forum A scan picked out "Can atheists be good? " (Yes of course but what about advertisinging on buses?) and "Is God still a Father?"
• Faith News
Photos and videos on the site deserve special mention. The day we looked at the site we could choose from galleries that included "Preachers Kids Gone Wild" (actually Hollywood stars whose parents were preachers of some kind, including the Jonas Brothers and Alice Cooper, Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliff, ) and "Hot Atheists and Agnostics," which include, apparently, Brad Pitt Jody Foster and Antonio Banderas.
• Reverse publishing
HousonBelief.com is one of three Chron.com sites that are now reversed published into print sections. The old religion section has been redeveloped as the Houston Belief tabloid, incorporating blogs cand comment.
Revenue results
Like all of Chron.com properties there are only two ad positions, the 200 x 250 righthand rectangle and the 170 by 728 top leaderboard. Most Chron.com niche sites are sold into packages for various demographics. Houston Belief is an exception, in that it also has a special advertising market of churches who only buy on the niche site. Sold separately, the rates are much higher, in the $20 CPM range and at any given moment about ten to 15 churches run on the site. Revenues run $12,000 to $15,000 a month. Staffing includes one employee; most of the content being generated by users.
Large scale advertisers include the Houston Astros' Faith and Family night, and the Four Season group dining packages. “The great thing about the church-going audience that you can market is that.. (it) tends to be a Lexis, Affinity crowd with family buying power.” Advertisers who have had big success on the site include auto dealers selling family vans, Chick Filet and nonprofits like United Way. A Flyerboard also resides on the site (as it does on all Chron.com properties) which serves the same function as “a church bulletin board.”
“With FlyerBoard you can go as granular as a church bake sale. When you take into account church fairs, festivals, holiday services there are a lot of things to advertise and not a lot of places to do it.”
Lessons learned:
A religion site has a lot of strong favorables, serving the community good being must one of them. Here are some insights from HoustonBelief:
· Religion attracts good bloggers
Like most blog-driven sites, bloggers are tricky to find at the beginning, but "once you get started they are easier to recruit or they come to you."
• Reverse publishing adds new revenue
“It uses the web to reinvigorate some of the print that had gotten a bit stale.”
• Field cross-department development teams
Launch strategy for HoustonBelief – like their other sites – meant creating a cross department team to come up with a business plan. There was not one “expert” in charge of answering all the questions, but cross-polination from sales, marketing,design and editorial, given a templated list of questions to research and answer together.
• Build communities, don’t just publish stories
Above all Houston Belief is a community site. The largest and most successful sites produced by Chron.com are populated by user-generated blogs, galleries, forums and comment threads. The site design reflects this, elevating the most popular bloggers, both religious leaders and amateur writers.
• Use Flyerboard for the hyperlocal advertising space
The church-going crowd is an attractive demographic, but also yields a new group of niche advertisers with “few alternate opportunities” to target their local audience. One way to collect small advertisers is a "Flyerboard" ad.
Conclusion
The religion site is still about one third the traffic of Mom's; however the Mom's niche is crowded (in addition to momhouston.com, there is also HoustonMoms.com and Houstonmom.com). In terms of traffic and revenue, Belief still fares better than gardening or pets niche sites in Houston, so while not a gage of all markets, it does serve as a snapshot of the opportunity. We like the unique advertiser base, and unmet community need that a Belief site provides.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
Keywords
houstonbelief.com, niche sites, religion, new content, weis, chron, chron.com, hearst
