News Pureplay Spawns Agency, Ad Network
For Sacramento Press, that means a house-made content management system, whose creation then launched an in-house digital media service company, Macer Media. That, in turn, begat a digital ad agency, Agency M. And a year and a half ago, Macer launched the Sacramento Local Online Digital Ad Network (SLOAN), which connects 63 area sites ranging from blogs to the local PBS and NPR affiliate sites for coordinated digital ad buys.
Macer’s roots are Latin for “lean,” and Ilfeld said, “We wanted to be lean ourselves and support lean, independent local operations like us.” On the news front, that has meant dedicating the small in-house editorial staff to core stories emanating out of Sacramento’s downtown “grid,” while building up a network of outside contributors to widen the site’s coverage geographically and subject-wise.
“You need to give your volunteers the tools to do what they do in the very best way they can,” Ilfeld said. “And giving people incentive and motivation is really the way you get them to write online, especially volunteers.”
The technology behind the badges, unsurprisingly, is Macer-made.
SLOAN, which is run through Cox Digital Media, is the one exception to Macer’s build-it-yourself posture. “We wanted an incremental source of revenue so that we could sell to some of the regional advertisers for whom Sacramento Press’ audience was just too small,” Ilfeld said.
Many of the sites participating in SLOAN also cross over to Sacramento Connect, a blog network formed by the Sacramento Bee, and the Press aims to help them capture an elusive monetization. Advertisers who buy into SLOAN see their ads trafficked across all 63 sites in the network. At the end of the month, impressions are tallied on every participating site with proportional checks sent out to the publishers.
For Ilfeld, it’s all part of a logical progression that stemmed from launching the Press. “Media is supposed to connect with community, and then we’re supposed to sell our ability to connect with advertisers,” he said. “We’ve been able to take a lot that we’ve learned about community building and then make it a revenue model.”
Launched: October 2008
Updates: Seven days weekly
Monthly unique visitors (average): 80,000
Mobile platform: Optimized mobile site
Content focus: Civic issues, city government. “Everything has to be local to the Sacramento region. We try not to cover issues that are being covered by local media outlets unless they’re huge.”
Geographic focus: The grid — the central section of Sacramento: “That’s where most of the action is that affects people regionally.”
Target demographic: “People who go to neighborhood organization meetings, people who show up at City Hall. Local entrepreneurs, business owners and home owners who really care what’s going on down the block.”
Editorial staff: 3 full-time, 1 part-time
Most popular features: Culture, people, business
Media partnerships: Joint workshops with the Sacramento Bee, weekly on air news roundup with Capital Public Radio (the local NPR affiliate)
Primary digital competition: Sacramento Bee, The Sacramento Business Journal
What distinguishes it from the digital competition: “We try not to cover what they cover. We just try to be a moving target. Our goal is to have the overall ecosystem cover more news, so if we cover something and then someone else picks it up, we’re not going to cover it with as much emphasis and we can move on to the next thing.”
What’s next: A new product called AdGlue: “I look at the ads on our site and I think they look like banner ads. They don’t look like content. Ads have to be content. They have to be really large and live alongside the content that you have in a way that’s harmonious. Let’s make them content.”
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