Ryan McFarland

A newspaper like the Petersburg Pilot serves an isolated community with a very small population (3,200 or so). If one half of the population buys a newspaper at $1 the sales only bring in $1,500 per week. Let’s assume for a minute that the Pilot has a readership of 3,000 people per week. People share their papers or buy one for the family. We know that the revenue from subscriptions and sales is not substantial and that the real money in the business is from advertising. A small display ad can cost hundreds of dollars and a two page ad like the grocery store has every week probably costs over $1,000. If we assume that this small weekly paper makes $3,000 a week from advertising revenue then for every reader of the paper the newspaper is making $1. Now take a look at the traffic zieak.com received in the past week.

7,954 page visits in a week. See where i’m going with this? I certainly don’t expect to make $1 for every view my site gets. If i ran a website featuring news for Petersburg and my stats were similar i think a very powerful argument could be made for a switch. Advertisers could pay much less than they do for print ads and potentially reach a much larger audience. People talk about internet users having “ad blindness” and that might be used as an argument against online advertisements. But i read the newspaper every week and don’t pay attention to the ads at all. It isn’t until the second or third time that i sit down with the paper in front of me (often with a bowl of cereal under my chin) that i start to look through the ads. People use devices like Tivo to eliminate the ads from their shows or buy the series on DVD. The ad filtering programs available for web browsers also are a deterrent. However, i think that with online ads the potential to reach the reader is actually greater than in print. A weekly newspaper could easily have a website with daily updates drawing the public to view their site (and ads) a few times a week. Ads can be graphics, sounds, videos, or in the text of articles. Ads can be targeted. A story about sport fishing regulations could be coupled with ads for boats or the hardware store. A mistake in the newspaper lasts until the next week when a correction is printed. A mistake online could be fixed immediately. It is time for businesses even on an island in Alaska to realize the the huge potential for online advertising.