Q&A With Fisher On Hyperlocal Ad Revenue

Last week at Borrell Associates' Local Online Advertising Conference in New York, Fisher Communications CEO Colleen Brown was honored as Innovator of the Year for the TV group's headlong plunge into hyperlocal online media.

Since last August, Fisher has launched more than 100 neighborhood sites in four of its TV station markets -- Seattle; Portland and Eugene, Ore.; Bakersfields, Calif.; and Boise, Idaho -- and brought more than 1,000 new advertisers into the fold.

With her top online executive, Troy McGuire, and a capable online platform built by DataSphere Technologies, Brown intends to keep expanding the service to Fisher's four other TV markets and hundreds of more neighborhoods.

In this interview with sister website TVNewsCheck, Brown talks Editor Harry A. Jessell about how Fisher hyperlocal got started, how it works and how nickels do add up. (See complete coverage of the Local Online Ad Conference from NetNewsCheck.com here)

An edited transcript:

Where did the idea for the hyperlocal sites come from and how long did it take to go from the idea to the marketplace?

It came out of our 2006 strategic plan. We identified that it would be hard to get bigger nationally, but that it would be easy for us to look inward and super-serve our markets. We didn't know what that meant yet. That was just an objective.

And how did you go from that objective to the launch last summer?

There were four riddles we needed to solve: The first was, how do we use more of the content that comes into the stations. We did a week's survey and we determined that approximately 80% of the material coming in couldn't be used because it was too narrow in scope. We were wasting a good portion of what we had.

In addition, we had all this long-tail stuff after 60-some years of TV broadcasting. We had a lot of information that we couldn't monetize.

The next point was how to use our existing staff to start moving into multiplatforming. So we had to change the mindset of most of our employees. You'd think it would be a big hurdle, but ultimately they've really embraced it and run with it. There has been a complete paradigm shift because they publish 24/7 now.

Then the last piece: In the past, we could not find a way to make these kinds of efforts monetizable, in part because the cost per sale was too great to dedicate any kind of real sales resources to it.

By working with DataSphere and its tele-sales operation, we've been able to solve these big riddles that were stumping us.

Tell me about DataSphere.

DataSphere is a three-year-old private company that developed technology for the global real estate market, for selling real estate through sites like LandWatch and ResortScape.

When I moved here, they asked me to be on their board and I joined to keep my Internet skills sharp. I wasn't in there very long before I realized their technology was a solution to our media problems. This is somebody that dealt with vast numbers of properties around the world just as we dealt with vast numbers of media stories from across our markets, not to mention across the years. They had found a way to bring order to it all in an affordable way, without a human touching it. So we just adapted their technology, applied it to media and we have been running with it ever since.

You mentioned that the advertising is sold through DataSphere's tele-marketing operation. How does that work?

They've got very informed sales people who are polished and respectful. They say they represent KOMO News and they're calling to talk to them about their Internet strategy and would they like to advertise on our neighborhood sites. The success rate in very high. Most of these advertisers don't even have a website. Many of these advertisers need help in developing their message.

It allows us to develop many advertisers who are clearly recognizing our brand, know we're not going anywhere and would like to do business with us.

You have more than 100 sites now. Are the sites profitable at this point? Altogether, it is profitable. Some become profitable right away; others take a little more time. The hard thing is to understand when you come from mass media is that this is about literally rolling up the nickels. This is really about selling very small advertisers at price points they can afford, multiplied by more than 100 multiplied by 12 months. It's that exponential mass that makes it become meaningful.

What are the total revenues?

I can't say because we're a public company and I have not released that yet. We are certainly in the zone of profitability with no issue there. The size is meaningful enough that we have decided we are going to invest a small amount in DataSphere and participate more heavily in guiding the development of the product.