LIN Eyeing More Sites, More Mobile, OTT

Last April, LIN Television starting doing business as LIN Media, signaling to the world that it wanted to be seen as it had already begun to see itself -- as a multimedia company as interested in local online and mobile media as it has long been in local TV broadcasting.

Although LIN Media is now going beyond TV, its strategy springs from the 32 network-affiliated TV stations in 17 markets, ranging in size from Albuquerque, N.M. (DMA 44) to Toledo, Ohio (DMA 73).

In addition to the stations, LIN now operates three Web sites in many of those markets: a news-and-information site, an entertainment news site and a political news site under the banner of OnPolitix. Soon, they will introduce a fourth of local culture and lifestyles.

For the past four years, the man charged with executing the transformative strategy has been Robb Richter who joined LIN from ShopNBC, where he was VP of marketing and sales planning.

In this interview with NetNewsCheck, Richter says the proliferation of local sites and related mobile apps will continue, all built on the solid foundation of the TV stations and their newsrooms, and that such digital media will be an increasingly important element in the company’s financial growth and health.

Richter also hints that LIN will soon be jumping into OTT TV and says that, if it were up to him, the coming mobile DTV service from broadcasters would be subscription-supported.

An edited transcript:

As I understand it, at the end of the day, in a single market you could have a news-and-information site, an entertainment news site, a political site and a cultural/lifestyle site, all interconnected.

Yep. You could have four sites easily and I am not sure we’re stopping there. In fact, I know we’re not stopping there.

Well, what else do you have in mind?

I don’t know yet. I mean I do, but I am not going to share it yet. Like I said, I believe that you have to be able to show something before you can share it.

What is the new media contribution to LIN’s overall revenue these days?

Digital is about 15% now.

And where would you like to see it in three years?

Before it has been three years, I would like to see it in the twenties. I don’t want to wait three years to get there. If you asked [CEO] Vince Sandusky, he would say the same thing. We really are looking for this thing to be a good quarter of our business sooner than three years.

In the 3Q conference call with securities analysts TV [two weeks ago], Sadusky boasted that in three quarters of your markets, your sites rank No. 1 or No. 2 in unique visitors. What’s your secret?

Our goal when we started this was to be the No. 1 broadcast TV Web site in our markets. That quickly became to be the No. 1 [legacy] media Web site in our markets and we have accomplished that it a lot of places.

I believe it goes to a couple of things. It goes to building good technology and letting people dive deep into the sites, putting things where they belong, looking at your usability studies, looking at your v-map, seeing what people really want and talking to people, which never hurts.

The theory is you have got this solid core news property, news and weather, which is how we built our business. You get people coming to those sites, but only a certain amount of people in a market are still going to go to a newspaper or a television station Web site for news and weather. There are other things they want to do.

So we will build out an entertainment portal, we have built out this political portal. The big idea is now building up more of these niche places for people to go that ultimately tie back into our brand. The more sites we build that really make sense, the more things our sales people have in their tool box.

What’s happening on the mobile front?

We have had good success in the mobile world. We were the first in all of our markets with our mobile sites. We were the first in all of our markets with an iPhone app and the Android and the Blackberry. Last week we launched the second version of our iPad app, which is a little bit better than the first one. It’s much more optimized for the larger screen. It’s still not where I want it to be, but it’s a great app. We’re building out the third version, which is really going take advantage of the iPad’s [larger screen].

You rolled out a bunch of political sites about two or three years ago. Was that a failed experiment?