Advertising

Well, another issue is out. At least some of the copies. Around 17,000 will be mailed October 8th. The rest I'll be handing out around town and at events. There's a thread at AFP - where we actually have quite an active close-knit community.

After a long wait, I believe it's been rolled out to the public at large - Self Serve PPC Ads for Myspace. I'm sure the news will be spreading over the intrawebs over the next day or so.

Made a small breakthrough today. Someone in the car vertical jumped on board with the next print edition. It's the smallest ad (they seem to be testing waters), but the fact we got them to sign a check is good, I think. Other bigger advertisers are being courted. Again, it's going slower than I thought, but I have the fact that my product is brand new against me.

By Mark Choate
Orig. Posted to Online-News

There is a fundamental economic law at work here: more competition means lower profits. Less competition means higher profits. For many years, newspapers operated in what economists would call an environment of monopolistic competition. Monopolistic competition is defined as a market in which there are only a few providers of a particular good or service, and these providers offer highly differentiated versions of these products. This contrasts with pure competition, in which there are numerous providers of a good or service, all of whom offer more or less the very same thing. Like corn farmers, for example. If you have a lot of competitors all of whom offer the very same product or service as you do, then you are working in an industry that has been commoditized. Corn is a commodity. So are classified ads.

Well, I'm nearing the end of my first week out selling the second printed issue of Anderson Free Press. To be honest, I'm kinda shocked no one has blogged or picked up on this yet. (I did hear congrats from one other grassroots journalist...) Maybe I expect too much? Like it's not a big thing?

Three years ago, around this very same time, I sent out my declaration of independence from big media. I thought it was worth a smile, but I was also trying to send a serious message. Amidst the soaring newsprint prices and declining ad revenues, the media corporations have more to worry about.

Browsing the job sites today, I stumbled across hidden text on this Yahoo listing. At first I thought Yahoo was behind it, but giving it a minute and thinking about it, I bet it's the person who posted the ad who did it.

One of the threads on Poynter's Online-News mailing list over the last week or so was Frequency: Our Toughest Challenge. Greg Harmon of Belden Associates had some good thoughts I want to share here (with permission.)

Greg Harmon wrote:

I just became conscious of something - I tend to personally be less apt to delete or skip something in my email inbox than miss it via my RSS reader. I guess that's pretty basic, but it strikes me as important. How would you quantify (via advertising) that email newsletters are worth more than RSS feeds?

Got an email tonight that LinkShare is changing their terms. Affiliates will now get paid weekly. Minimum amount for payout is $1. Wow. Will the other national ad networks follow? If for nothing other than the weekly payment, I hope so.

Below is a link. Note that it does contain my affiliate code.