local media insider
Case study:

Selling paid profiles: How Fisher Communications monetized its hyper-local network

Alisa Cromer
Posted
The front of Komonews.com looks like a typical broadcast site until visitors click on "community".
The first jump asks visitors to pick their neighborhood.
Like Ballard, a favorite neighborhood in Seattle, local communities get an individualized, rosey-colored micro-site with hyper-local press releases and business profiles.
Not fussy about church and state: Paid profiles rotate through the main newshole.
Photo

Summary: Borrell Associates' 2010 Innovator of the year, Fisher Communications developed and monetized a network hyper-local sites inside its city sites across properties in Seattle; Portland and Eugene, Ore.; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Boise, Idaho.


Challenge: By 2006, Fisher Communications began to realize that new national dollars were not forth-coming and that it would need to begin focusing on local content and sales. According to an interview with CEO, Colleen Brown, in NetNewsCheck, the group identified four core challenges:

*Use and monetize all of the material already coming in to the station. Because of the narrow focus of television 80% of the incoming information is unused, in addition to long-tail video from 60 years of television broadcasting.

*Convert the staff to a 24/7 multi-media company.

*Overcome "cost-per-sale" issues that prevent smaller local advertisers from being profitable accounts for the company and its outside sales force.

The solution: According to Troy McGuire, Head of interactive, Fisher Communications decided on a new general strategy of developing hyper-local sites using the massive amounts of news releases and content already "on the cutting room floor", and to service and sell a new market of smaller local advertisers.

A key to the strategy was partnering with Datasphere, a Seattle-based real estate software company with deep experience in search and telemarketing. Here is how it works, taking Seattle as an example:

-43 neighborhood sites were built as sub-urls to the main site, KOMO.com.

-The front of the Komo is simple: a proprietary video and a YouNews import, plus about fifty news links. But when visitors click on "community" in the nav bar, they are immediately asked to pick their neighborhood where they find deep local content. Bellevue, for example, yields, links to a city council story, a story about a high school lock-down, and a "sweet deal for pet adoption." The main site then geo-targets the news for their area on the home page when visitors return.

-The front of the site is on a platform called Clickability; however, the neighborhoods section is on a platform built by Datasphere, on Druple. It was originally designed for real estate advertisers, so integrates paid profiles with the other content, a key to getting better performance for smaller advertisers.

-Neighborhood sub-sites were populated by calling local associations such as chambers for event materials, and as well as press releases and other news already available. "Everything gets aggregated to these neighborhood sites. We’ll take information from everywhere and make these sites fresh." (There is still very little UG content is on the site).

-Advertisers are featured on the right with an image and text which links to mini-profiles. These rotate to the front position of the neighborhood site. "Because of the strength of our URL, (the business profile) appears ahead of their own url in the search results".

-All assets, including employees were leveraged to support the online initiative. “We have 100 employees, that is people armed with i-phones, posted sooner to the sites. Broadcast has a huge megaphone” gets words out, positions brand, lets us talk to millions of people on a daily basis.

-Datasphere is also the sales arm for the neighborhood sites, using soft-sell telemarketing. Legacy Komo reps sell across the whole site, and maintain a "do not call' list.

Results:  Across all properties the initiative is already profitable and has gained 1000 new advertisers that "the stations never had". Brown says Fisher is so high on Datasphere, it is investing $1.5 million of the next $10 million round of Datasphere funding. The Seattle site now has 400,000 UV's and sees traffic growth monthly. The co-mingling of paid profiles with news on neighborhood sites has been  highly effective.

Alisa Cromer

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.