Online Gets Healthy Despite Slow Economy

Still reeling from the housing bubble burst, Bakersfield, Calif.’s legacy media players -- one newspaper and three TV network affiliates -- are staking their claims in the market’s online future, honing sites to include niche and hyperlocal elements.

“If the community wants something that’s related to Bakersfield we want to be there for them, whether it’s news or advertising or a community square,” says Logan Molen, the Bakersfield Californian’s senior vice president and chief operating officer, who oversees the paper’s Web site.

“If they think Bakersfield, we want them to think Bakersfield.com,” he said.

With nearly 822,000 residents, Bakersfield is the 11^th largest city in California and the 125^th DMA in the country.

Bakersfield’s largest ethnic group is Hispanic, which makes up more than 43% of its population. Nearly 40% of the population there is white.

Oil and agriculture are the backbones of the economy, which is still suffering from the mortgage crisis of 2008. As of April 2010, the unemployment rate was 11.7%.

Still, it’s a market whose population has tripled over the last 30 years -- and continues to grow, albeit more slowly. Companies and individuals are being lured by Bakersfield’s relatively cheap living, especially when compared to its neighbor about 100 miles to the south, Los Angeles.

In turn, the outlook for local online ad spending shows growth too.

According to research company Borrell Associates, local online advertising spending in the Bakersfield market is expected to grow from $16.7 million this year to $32.8 million in 2015 -- a jump of 96.2%.

That dramatic rise is part of Borrell’s predicted overall 31% increase in local ad spending on new and traditional media over the same period of time. It is forecasted to rise from $123.9 million this year to $184.2 million in 2015.

So far, the Californian’s plan to capture that growing local interest in the Internet seems to be working.

Garnering 4 million to 4.5 million page views a month, according to Molen, Bakersfield.com is by far the big online winner in the market -- the result of an aggressive and innovative foray into digital space over the last five years, he said.

The second most popular local portal is the video-centric kget.com, a product of Newport Television’s NBC affiliate, KGET. The site draws about 1.7 million page views a month, according to the site’s webmaster Scott Herrick.

Turnto23.com, the site of McGraw-Hill-owned ABC affiliate KERO, averages more than 1 million page views a month, drawing users with content broken down by smaller regions throughout the larger Kern County area and highlighting particular interests, like high school sports coverage, said Crosby Shaterian, the site’s managing editor.

Executives at KBAK, the CBS affiliate owned by Fisher Communications, would not discuss their local portal, Bakersfieldnow.com. That site, which offers traditional news, weather, sports and traffic, is also trying to create community hubs, offering news broken down by neighborhood and also seeking individuals interested in reporting it.

With traditional media properties hurting, the folks behind the online ventures say they are committed to expanding them, but at a pace they can handle given current financial constraints and nature of Bakersfield’s population.

“It took the community a while to get going on [using the Internet],” Herrick said.

“Only after the last five or six years does it seem to be growing with people coming from larger markets like L.A. and San Francisco and bringing with them the more Web-savvy user base.”

The Californian’s Bakersfield.com now comprises more than 15 sub-sites, ranging from bakersfielddrive.com for cars, bakersfieldhomehunter.com for real estate, Bakersfieldbuyandsell.com for classifieds and kernevents.com for entertainment.

But the paper is in the process of unbundling those sites so that they stand on their own platforms with their own brands, with Bakersfield.com acting more as a hub for all things local, Molen said.

Within that strategy, not only will Bakersfield.com link users to sites owned by The Californian, but to competitors’ sites as well, he said.

“We want them to come to us and if it means we send them off to a competing site because they have what they need then we’ll be happy to do that,” he said.

The way Herrick sees it, kget.com’s best bet for increasing its share is by doing what a TV station does best: video.

Created first and foremost as a news site, kget.com is trying to make the most of the video talent that a newspaper site, even a large one like Bakersfield.com, doesn’t have, he said.

“While we don’t have nearly as large a writing and reporting staff, we try to bring something different to the market,” he said.

Herrick said he believes that his station’s best bet for digital success is to hone its expertise rather than stray off course into areas like e-commerce and niche sites.

“With our staffing it would be better for us to concentrate on a few things rather than get our fingers into a lot of diff areas,” he said. “That way we can do one thing well instead of a lot of different things a little bit.”