First, sorry it's been so long since I've been on the site.  Best of intentions; worst of execution.  I just started a part-time job and my wife is battling a health issue that consumes a lot of my extra time.

Here's where we are, two months into a fully redesigned website:

Readership is solid.  Format changes often bring reader disruption.  Not this time.  Numbers stayed steady.  We do between 12 and 17,000 visits a day between the two main publictions, fultondailynews.com and oswegodailynews.com.

The redesign gave us the opportunity to allow commenting.  It's taking off like a rocket.  But you'll never guess where most comments go.  Give up?  Obituaries.  They become guestbooks for the grieving.  It's wonderful.  We approve all comments before posting and have had to delete very few.  We get spam comments, but WordPress's wonderful Akismet filter picks up every. single. one.  Awesome.

Adding video and photo galleries has been great.  A user sent in video of a burned out building collapsing when the city took it down.  The video got 1300 plays in two days.

Revenue is trending up, slightly.  The ability to use video ads and to broadcast live sporting events is helping.  It also helped -- immensely -- to finally fill the second sales position. (We have a paid staff of 5.5 -- 2 sales, 2 news, 1 webmaster, .5 sports)  We're spending December in a full audit of all of our products with an eye towards killing what doesn't work and improving what does.

Here's our product mix, for those interested:

• Banner and box ads.  Visit our homepages and you'll see lots of ads.  We have standard size leaderboard ads on top, but everything below that is non-standard.  The smaller box ads are designed to fit our format.  You'll often see a big-honking-piece-of-advertising in the middle of the home page.  We call that a Home Page Big.  It's a premium product and our advertisers line up for it.
• Video ads.  You'll see the player on the home page and on every page.  It's a run-of-site product and commands a premium price.  Usage so far has been moderate.  Right now, we're using dead time to run military greetings from servicemen abroad, provided by the Army and Air Force.
• Content sponsorships.  Exclusive placement in sections like obituaries, health and money for highest-dollar advertisers.  They get home page mention and link, and ads on each page of the section they sponsor.
• Google ads.  They help pay the server bill.  At present, they're at page bottom.
• Fastclick popunders.  These, too, pay the server bill.  Google and Fastclick (now Valueclick Media) pay on time every time.  Some folks don't like popunders and complained at first, but there weren't many of them and when we explained that it's how we offset the fact that they get our hard work for free, the complaints stopped.  Fastclick has a variety of in-page ad formats, too.  We're not using them at present.
• Printed coupons.  Small town advertisers still prefer print.  So we've just begun a coupon product, which we'll print in house and place around town and online.  Very fast acceptance here, at a decent price point per month.
• Audio ads during live broadcasts.  Live reads generally, though we're figuring out how to prerecord them and play them back live. 
• Business Directory.  Single-page websites we host for advertisers without a web presence or who need a specific type of presence outside of their full website.  We sell the page on a yearly contract along with a package of changes/updates to the page.
• Website design and development.  Local advertisers need someplace for their click to go.  We've built more than 100 websites in nearly 10 years and derive ongoing revenue from hosting about 55 websites.

Products, in order of profitability:

• Content sponsorships (far and away)
• Video ads
• Home Page Big
• Website design and development
• Live reads during live broadcasts
• Coupons
• ...the rest...

And there are other small things we do during the year, such as contesting, to bring in a few bucks.

All of this has not been enough.  We're going into our ninth year in a couple of months and we're still at break-even (and note the owners' need to work outside the business).  The open sales position drained our reserves. 

There is no one to cut.  Any cut would cause a resulting loss of revenue.

So, we dig in and try to make a lot of things happen at once.  Fortunately, we're coming up on our best season, the first quarter, when annual renewals happen.  But it'll take 31 days and two payrolls to get there.

My plan is to blog here heavily for the next month to provide a real-life view of how to push a business forward, or not.  Your comments and ideas (especially if you're doing something that works) are greatly appreciated.

I would add only one thing:  This is pretty much the same kind of struggle you will face as you try to build a hyperlocal news company.  The details will change, but the overall issues will be about the same.

Technorati Tags: revenue sales