Online Audience Building Initiatives

Introduction

This series of case studies showcases both operational excellence and initiatives that have successfully increase audience for newspaper Web sites.

Introduction

‘DataUniverse’ at the Asbury Park Press

IndyMoms Draws Busy Parents with Discussion, Niche Content

Online Community at the Racine Journal Times

About the Author

Audience Building Initiative: “Spotted” at Morris Communications Newspapers

By Rich Gordon

Morris Communications has rolled out its “Spotted” product – a site featuring photographs taken by the newspaper and by citizens – in all its 25 newspaper markets. “It’s a page view machine,” says Ed Coyle, director of audience growth and development for Morris. In October, it generated almost one-eighth of all page views on the company’s newspaper Web sites. And the cost of generating that traffic is modest.

History of this initiative

So the Augusta team decided to develop their own technology, deploying it in 2005 on Augusta.com. “Once we proved it was successful, the Morris DigitalWorks technology team took it in house and re-engineered it to make it deployable and supportable throughout the company,” Coyle said. Spotted has now been launched in all Morris newspaper markets.

What the data show

And each visitor to Spotted generates an average of 27 page views per month, compared to 5.5 page views per month for each visitor to Morris’ online news sites, Coyle said.

Morris does not have the ability to say definitively whether Spotted attracts people who are not already newspaper site users or if Spotted drives traffic to other parts of the newspapers’ Web sites, but Coyle is confident “we’re doing a significant amount of new traffic.” His confidence stems from the fact that Spotted photographers often cover events (such as high school football games and nightclub festivities) that appeal to audiences not known to be heavy users of newspapers or their Web sites.

How it works

About 70 percent of the traffic to Spotted comes from the “We Spotted” photographs taken by the newspaper. The site’s key traffic driver is the small “You’ve Been Spotted” cards handed out by photographers as they take pictures. So the main focus in local markets is to find good events to photograph and line up people to take the pictures. “There is a direct correlation between how many photos you shoot, how many cards you hand out and how much traffic you generate,” Coyle said.

User-generated photos generate the remaining page views. Users contribute about as many galleries as the newspaper does, but traffic is greater to the newspaper photos, presumably becaue of the distribution of the “You’ve Been Spotted” cards, Coyle said.

Who takes the “We Spotted” pictures is different in different Morris markets. In Augusta, for instance, the newspaper uses interns or recruits volunteers – often high school or college students, sometimes retirees. The paper provides digital cameras, but doesn’t pay Spotted photographers a dime. The photographers can earn a little money if photos they took are sold through the Augusta Spotted site. Photographers get half of all photo sales revenue, which is “not a lot,” said Jonathan Dozier, online director for the Chronicle. Sometimes a high school or college student is able to earn academic credit for working on Spotted, Dozier said.

In Augusta, Spotted generated more than 2 million page views per month in October, according to Morris data. Overseeing Spotted is now a full-time job in Augusta, Dozier said.

The Spotted coordinator in Augusta “recruits interns, looks for events to cover, coordinates with event organizers to get permission to cover the events, and makes sure, especially on the weekend, that we have every big event covered and a lot of small events,” Dozier said. “We’re constantly looking for different kinds of events so we’re not just covering nightlife or sporting events.”

By contrast, at the Yankton (S.D.) Press & Dakotan (circulation 8,000), just about everyone on the staff shoots for Spotted, said Beth Rye, the paper’s new media director. “Twenty-five or 30 members of the staff have done it,” Rye said. “On a staff of 40 people, that’s pretty amazing.”

In a market as small as Yankton, Spotted has been a strong community builder, Rye said. In October, 31 percent of the paper’s page views came from Yankton’s Spotted pages.

“We have a huge following on Spotted for photos from high school sports,” said Rye, in Yankton. “Our sports editor does a great job of taking a lot of photos and handing out the cards. He gives them to the coaches, who give them to the players, who give them to their family and friends.”

Photographers are instructed to take as many pictures as possible, and to focus on people. “We ask them to take 80 percent of the pictures of the crowd, 20 percent of the event,” Coyle said. “This is not photojournalism. It’s getting pictures of as many people as possible gathered together looking at the camera.”

Promotion

“It was amazing to hear people along the river say, ‘I love that Web site. I go to it every day,’” Rye recalled

Connections to print

“The newspaper reverse-publishing has been the thing that has really pushed our traffic this year,” Dozier said.

In Yankton, the paper hasn’t yet done much print publishing of Spotted photos, Rye said. But the paper does feature a strip ad for Spotted on the bottom of the newspaper’s front page, and it often mentions a specific recent event, Rye said, “keeping it fresh.”

Lessons from Morris’ experience

1. It starts at the top. Successful digital initiatives need buy-in from top executives. “Our publisher really, really believes in Spotted and that makes a huge impact,” Rye said.
2. Take advantage of societal trends. Spotted took off, in part, because it arrived just as digital photography was taking hold in the average American household, Coyle said. This year Spotted will add video, which Coyle hopes is similarly timely in 2007.
3. Trust your users. Some print executives were concerned about letting users upload photos without pre-screening, but “we’ve seen absolutely no cases of abuse,” Coyle said. The Spotted software allows a newspaper to require approval before user-generated photos go live, but only one newspaper has activated that capability. “A lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re the newspaper and there’s a little less anonymity than MySpace or Flickr,” Coyle said.
4. Spotted-type photos click with younger audiences. The most successful Spotted galleries are from high school sports and entertainment events. “Always go to high school games, proms and parades, and leave out job fairs and the senior citizens council if you have to,” Coyle said. “It works well no matter who you target, but those are the kids with the digital cameras and they’re more online-savvy.”
5. Connect with colleges. College students are a major source for Spotted photographers. In Jacksonville, Rich Ray teaches a community college class from which he recruits photographers for the site. In Yankton, Rye is planning to connect with students at Mount Marty College.

About the technology

“All you need is a photo gallery system to get this going,” Coyle said. “The program works regardless of the technology.”

About revenue

And there are other ways to make money on Spotted. The card that photographers hand out at events is blank on the back, a space that can be sold as a sponsorship or as a redeemable coupon, Coyle said. The company is also starting to sell sponsored “before and after” photo galleries. Customers can include landscaping contractors, remodelers, cosmetic surgeons and orthodontists. Each could upload before-and-after photos to promote themselves.

In Yankton, a “sales blitz” to sell Spotted “before and after” ads was “a pretty good success,” Rye said. “It was way over what we budgeted for the year.”

What’s next

In local markets, Rye and Dozier want to work on increasing the number of “You Spotted” photos from users. “It’s hard to get them to upload,” Rye said. “We haven’t mastered that.”

Dozier said the technology to support user-generated photo uploads needs to be improved. “We’re proud of what we built, but it needs to be a lot easier and a lot more fun to manage your photos and share them,” Dozier said. “We’re competing with Flickr. You have to have a pretty good reason to put photos on our site instead.”

For further growth, Dozier said, user-generated photos need to be connected to other locally focused content such as blogs and community information.

“We’re looking at bringing all those things together,” Dozier said. “We want to tie Spotted in to natural groups and communities in our local coverage area, your school or your church or your civic club or your family. If all your school information or church information can be accessed on our site, it can be much more useful and much more local.”

Relevant links

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