Everyone’s talking about selling subscriptions via auto-renew, but just yesterday I heard a new spin on this: selling online ads via auto-renew. The publisher (who asked not to be named here, lest his/her competitors get any ideas) told me they used to try for a three month sale. Now they try for a month-to-month sale, with a three month minimum tostart. “You can cancel at any time,” the reps tell advertising prospects, “it’s so easy.” Then the publisher sits back and relies on the “power of inertia” to keep revenues streaming in. According to the publisher in question, his/her ad revenues are up nearly 100% since the auto- ad-renew program began a few months ago.
Naturally this only works for ad deals in which the amount is small enough to be charged on a credit card, and the marketplace is one, such as small biz, where the credit card in question is often a company leader’s. My suggestion is to try it if you have an online or emailed directory that vendors can put paid listings into. It’s enough of a lead-gen placement that they won’t cancel ads as quickly as they would branding spots in these economic times.
Overture does this, to some extent, as once you open an Overture account for paid search engine listings they automatically charge your card $20 a month, plus listings fees, until you cancel the account.
Speaking of which, if you’d like to make some money selling paid search listings from your site, I’ve heard Search123 is offering this as a co-branded service. It would be perfect if the search were primarily searching your own site’s pages so you could sell search ads against your own content, but I suspect it simply takes visitors off to other places, which probably isn’t your goal.
R.I.P.eNews. The site was a (mainly) US consumer magazine subscription shop, with at one time, more than 10,000 affiliates.
Congratulations to Adam R Cohen, who’s recently published his Seventh Anniversary Issue of Media Professional Newsletter which used to be known as the newsletter for the “young professionals” division of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, but I guess we’re all getting to be grey hairs now. It’s a free monthly, that I especially recommend to circulation managers at ABC-audited magazines.
http://www.mediaprofessional.info/
Adam also won a Circulation Management Magazines silver medal for an online circulation campaign his former team at the Atlantic Monthly conducted last year to sell print subscriptions. Instead of waltzing about the office covered in glory, he chose to resign to live the good life as an independent online publisher focusing on the aforementioned newsletter and his other publication “Poetry Contest Insider.” To learn more about The Insider, here’s a link.
http://www.winningwriters.com/
Cool link if you’re interested in how the Internet’s affected customer relations and expectations. CEO Express just released the results of a survey of 1,000 CEOs with fascinating results to questions such as how is the Internet affecting customers’ savvyness about pricing? One scary result, about 10% of CEOs said they “were not sure” if customer loyalty is important for their business. If more CEOs came from a marketing background that answer would have been a 100% “Darn Yes!”
Bethesda List Center just called to say they’re looking for a paid intern to start right away to help produce marketing materials. “We need someone 25-30 hours week who is experienced in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator, Word, Excel and Microsoft Access to keep our website well fed with new data cards, updates and other materials. “
The office is in Bethesda MD near the metro stop. Casual dress. Pay is $10/hour Contact:
Cathy@bethesda-list.com or Fax 301 907-4870
Kudos to the EU for showing some regulatory self-restraint. European lawmakers reversed a trend begun in 1973 (when they decided to regulate of the curvature of bananas that could be imported), when they decided today NOT to impose opt-in standards on cookies. The legislation they were considering would have required every Web site that wanted to plant any cookie; in order to put items in the shopping cart and permit check-out, in order to provide personalization, or in order to spare people from having to sign in every time; to get affirmative consent from a visitor before planting the cookie, presumably via a(n annoying) pop-up box; lawmakers have decided to let the industry regulate itself. One can only imagine the havoc this would have wrought on e-commerce world-wide. Most HTML newsletters plant cookies these days. Almost all Web sites do (in part, to track repeat visitors).
The banana-curvature rules, by the way, were overturned just yesterday. Let freedom ring.
Just learned that Jupiter Research/events was sold to INT Media (A.K.A. Internet.com; the folks who bought ClickZ for $16 mill in mid-2000, albiet the majority of that was now-very-differently-valued-stock) for $.25 million. Which is a pretentious way of saying “$250,000,” which in my neighborhood would buy you a nice one-bedroom condo. Of course if you decided to go for the ailing research firm option instead of the condo option, you also end up with 90 employee mouths to feed. Personally, I’d prefer something maybe with a balcony.
Got two emails from very different sources today both recommending I check out Cluelessmailers.org which reveals the experiences of one guy, Bob, who gets a lot of spam. The cool thing is that Bob has done some heavy research to show the supply chain of how the poor email marketer ended up renting Bob’s name from a spammer, whilst being under the impression that it was an opt-in, permission-based name. As Bob notes, he’s not trying to run a blacklist, but rather trying to educate email marketers. While you’re there, be sure to check out his Spamdemic Map ™ — it’s even more fun than The Story of Nadine!
I’m always whining about the lousy press contacts that most company’s sites have, so it’s nice to report when somebody does it right. ActiveBuddy’s press contacts are available both from their online press room and from their Contact Us page, both of which are on the main nav bar and just one click away from the home page.
Wait, there’s more. ActiveBuddy gives three different press contacts: One in New York for East Coast time zone reporters, one in Silicon Valley for West Coast time zone reporters, and one in marketing as a back-up. And if I don’t feel like calling any of these direct line phone numbers, I can email their PR address or use their handy online form. I went for the form just to see what it was like (too many questions and it didn’t ask what my deadline or time zone was).
Here’s the best part: After I submitted the form, instead of sending me a routine “thanks, we’ll get back to you” form letter via email, the form email letter ActiveBuddy sent started out by saying “If you’re on deadline, here are phone numbers for quick response” and then reiterated those phone contacts on both coasts again.
Very well done. Now, if only they would stop stripping out press contacts from releases when they post them on their site; everybody does that and it drives me crazy! If I print out or copy and paste a release from your site to my notes, there’s zero contact info if I have questions. Why? why? why is this the standard set-up? Ok, so I’ve lapsed into whining again. 🙂
How long do you think people look at your banner for? According to results from Stanford/Poynter research, just one second. That’s it. If your banner’s creative takes longer than a second to run, you should test shorter-running creative.
Stanford and The Poynter Institute; both non-profits which have nothing to gain from the online ad industry – teamed up to measure how consumers use online news in 1997, and have been improving the study ever since then. At first they videotaped people surfing, now subjects are hooked up with a head harness that tracks their eyeball movements (no joke, see photo here).
Eyeball tracking studies of this sort were used in the cataloguing industry in the 1980s to determine how catalog shoppers browse. One of their biggest findings at the time was that people look at big pictures first (especially of people) and then their glance goes to the right (unless they are Israelis reading a language that goes in the other direction). This is why to this day catalog layouts generally have the biggest photos at the left and the copy to the right of the page, instead of vice versa.
