Cox Is Biggest Fish In Atlanta's Online Sea

When you talk about new media in Atlanta, you have to talk about Cox.

Cox Enterprises owns the most popular newspaper Web site here -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s AJC.com -- as well as The Media Audit’s top-ranked TV site, WSBTV.com, which is visited by more than a quarter of Atlanta’s adults. That’s in addition to Cox’s radio station sites and the corporation’s more purely commercial ventures, such as AutoTrader.com.

The $15 billion communications behemoth “dominates” the market, said Gordon Borrell, CEO and founder of the media consulting firm, Borrell Associates. And it is a giant that has reorganized its corporate structure to focus its considerable media expertise on digital, Borrell added.

AJC.com, attracts 33.6% of local adults during a given month, according to The Media Audit of Houston. As is typical, a trio of TV sites are the next strongest contenders, with WSBTV.com leading the TV pack at 26.9%, followed by 11Alive.com, Gannett’s NBC affiliate, at 23.8%. MyFoxAtlanta.com rounds out the trio in the audit’s report, with 20.2% of area adults checking in.

The Cox Media Group is busy overhauling its sites here and across the nation, rolling out a company-designed and hosted content management system that will make it easy for its 100-plus newspapers and TV and radio stations to share stories, WSB-TV Web manager Bryan Leavoy said. A new open application programming interface, or API, being added will simplify the posting of content from outside sources, he said.

In addition to this flurry of Cox activity, Patch has moved its hyperlocal sites into Atlanta’s market of 6.6 million people spread over more than 50 North Georgia counties.

And a handful of small startup sites are targeting not neighborhoods, but narrow news topics, such as health or juvenile justice.

There is almost $2.4 billion in local ad dollars to go around here -- a number expected to grow almost glacially over the next five years, reaching $2.7 billion by 2016, according to Borrell. Online local advertising makes up 20% of the local total, and Borrell projects it to grow at the same slow pace as offline advertising.

Atlanta’s large construction industry was hit hard during the recession, AJC senior director of digital products Nunzio Michael Lupo said. The newspaper suffered its own blows, but has stabilized with a lower cost structure, he said.

At the Web site under Lupo’s charge, page views actually dropped this year, with comScore Inc. reporting a decline from 69 million in July 2010 to 66 million this July, according to data released by the paper. Part of the reason, Lupo said, was the site’s move away from using photo galleries, a sleight of hand that gooses page views but doesn’t address what he says is the more important issue of revenue.

Unique visitors to the site did edge up -- rising from 3.45 million to just a shade under 3.5 million this July, according to the AJC-provided comScore numbers.

“There’s not a lot of news happening on the Web site front,” Lupo said. “It has been what it has been for almost everybody for some time. And it has not been a very profitable business.”

The decline in AJC.com’s page views doesn’t seem to worry him much, because it’s no longer his main focus.

AJC.com pulls in about 3.5 million uniques per month.

“The whole industry’s approach was: ‘Build the page views and they will come,’” Lupo said. “Well, that didn’t happen.”

Instead, sites are selling their remnant ads for as little as 83 cents per CPM, versus the $15 and up advertisers fork over for the choicest spots on a site, he said.

“It becomes less a factor of how many page views can you generate, than how can you create opportunities for [ad] customers who are willing to pay for premium,” Lupo said. So, instead of working to increase page views, AJC is focusing on creating clever, desirable ads and tempting ad spaces, he said.

Click on AJC.com, and the first thing you see will likely be a large sliding billboard ad splashed across the top of the homepage. Lupo won’t say how much the site charges for such an ad but, “Obviously, that does command a premium.”

As for creativity, last football season AJC.com created a landing page for one advertiser that allowed visitors to put their own photo on a football or cheerleader, he said.

The site has even sold those photo galleries to advertisers, Lupo said.

This more creative focus is cropping up at a number of sites, Borrell said. “Before, they were just throwing up these rectangular banner ads and charging silly [low] rates.”

Mobile traffic is a happier tale. While Lupo declined to give specifics, he said “mobile has grown considerably” at the AJC.

As it becomes more important, the AJC is rolling out more apps. By the end of this year, the site will launch an HTML5 app that will work on an array of tablets, Lupo said.