The Washington Post is becoming an expert at picking off smaller local verticals in the face of huge national competitors: First they built ServiceAlley to compete with Angie's List, and now they've carved Capital Dish out of Living Social monopolization of group deals in their area. Here's how Tim Condon, Director of New Ventures, Digital, developed the site in partnership with TeachStreet.
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Alisa Cromer
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2/7/11
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The Cocktail Compass, developed by The Stranger in Seattle, is a great example of an mobile app developed for a specific niche - in this case the bars and club franchise. Here's how it works.
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Alisa Cromer
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2/2/11
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SeniorChecked, a directory of certified home service providers, demonstrates how local directories are evolving to serve different kinds of marketplaces. After the original business strategy faltered, a team of executives at AOL left to turn-around the start-up. Here's their plan, led by CEO Chris Spanos, to solidify the business model and take a run at the Better Business Bureau.
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Alisa Cromer
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1/19/11
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Sun Media Corp. is Canada's largest publisher of tabloids and community publications. In two years, it increased its sell-through rate of display advertising for four top websites to more than 80 percent, and increased prices from below $5 to $22 CPM. Here is an a breakdown of how the effort, led by Michael Christensen, ramped up digital sales.
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Alisa Cromer
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11/23/10
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This sales drive at Journal Register is enterprising in its shere simplicity: $94 a week packages generated $740,000 over a period of one month across multiple markets. Here is the anatomy of how the packages were structured the sales drive put together by Blinder Group. Update: This drive has now yielded more than $1 million in new contract revenues.
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Alisa Cromer
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10/17/10
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In the past year, Valpak.com, owned by Cox Enterprises in Atlanta, has entered the mobile coupon market in force. A pop-up window collects SMS opt-ins from every digital visitor.
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Alisa Cromer
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10/17/10
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Inn 2010, Freedom Interactive was chosen by Borrell & Associates as one of the "best of the best" newspaper adoptions of mobile technology. But this was not always the case. Doug Bennett, president of Freedom Interactive, says that two years ago Freedom was "in the back of the pack" of newspapers developing digital and mobile products. The sharp decline in revenues in 2008 motivated the company to be more aggressive. This case study outlines their plan and results so far.
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Alisa Cromer
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10/11/10
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When Harvard academic Clark Gilbert helped create the Newspaper Next project, making recommendations on how newspapers should deal with disruptive change, not many media companies took his advice.
But in 2009, he left Harvard to take a job as CEO of Deseret Media and put his theories to work. Since then KSL Mobile has become the fourth largest media site in the state and digital revenues have increased 60% year over year. Here's a break down of his strategy.
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Alisa Cromer
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10/5/10
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Gannett-owned Fort Myers News-Press.com has not just been proactive in building digital revenues; it doubled online revenues in the last year. Their key advantage is a full blown training program including classroom style corporate university. Here are ten key sales force strategies that yielded great results, from Brian Hellman, Digital Advertising Manager, News-press Media Group.
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Reverse publishing from web to print is good way to reinvigorate brands that have gone stale – and take on competitors. A case in point is Houston Chronicle's 29-95.com, a sleek web site that captured the indie music scene in Houston. The site itself has doubled its visitors in just five weeks since reverse publishing 29-95 as a full run Thursday tabloid in the main paper. Here's how the effort, led by Stephen Weis, Vice President of Interactive and Samuel Brown, Vice President Regional Advertising and Digital Services, was executed.
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Alisa Cromer
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9/25/10
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