Gannett Eyes Knight Ridder, MFP Grows

Submitted by kpaul.mallasch on Wed, 03/01/2006 - 8:12pm.

I was going to write up a normal blog post about this Gannett news at Romenesko's blog over at Poynter, but I have some other things I want to talk about as well. So here we are with another personal blog post with a little bit of information about the state of affairs for Muncie Free Press. We almost hit 5,000 unique viewers in February, with around 8,400 visits and 70,000 page views. Not bad for virtually no advertising. (I was using Adwords, but 'Star Press' related keywords are now going for $1 a click or thereabouts for some reason *wink*wink*nod*nod* - Seven months after launching the domain, though, I'm starting to feel a little Google Juice Love, which is nice. ;)

The revenue is coming in now as well, from several areas -

National Ad Networks - I'm using Google Adsense a very little, Commission Junction a little more and Fastclick the most at the moment. I'll say the CPM is on average more than $1 and less than $10. ;) This is just one segment, though.
Local Banners / Advertorials - This may be the biggest source of income for a while longer. I'm charging very little to get on board and working closely with the advertisers. As the site grows, hopefully I'll be able to get more per ad. I'm happy with the money for now, though. (I really need to find a salesperson, though. And quick...)
Classifieds - This is taking forever to catch on, but it's working, dripping a few drops of revenue into the bucket each month. As traffic grows, I can see it being used a lot more. At $8/month I think people will continue to pay for it.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the community is growing. There's not someone logged in at the site every hour of the day (yet), but there are peak hours each day with more than one user logged in at the same time. Some are adding blog content too.

(Although I think the TSP is about to launch blogs of some sort. I can add a watch for them just like the TSP Forum watch I'm doing...)

Overall, it's going slow, but as a friend at the TSP recently reminded me, this way there's less chance to crash and burn. I like that.

Anyway, just a little update on Muncie Free Press. For some reason we usually are forgotten in large newspaper CitJ pieces that mention BackFence, etc. ;)

Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to mention I'll be speaking at New Media World / America East later this month about Community Journalism. More details coming on that...