Podcast: Real-Time Ads seek to harness immediacy of social media

MinnPost publisher Joel Kramer is aiming to bring the same immediacy and frequency of social media to advertising with a new ad format, dubbed Real-Time Ads.

Kramer noticed that local businesses in Minnesota were using Twitter, blogs and other social networks to get their messages out to people, and Kramer wanted to tap into this market. Real-Time Ads don’t even require additional effort on the part of advertisers either. All an advertisers has to do is submit an RSS feed of content that they are already creating (like a Twitter feed or feed from a blog), and MinnPost will display headlines or brief summaries of these existing messages that link back to the full message on an advertiser’s Web site.

Real-Time Ads look like a cross between traditional classified ads and Twitter updates. And like a Twitter stream, Real Time Ads are listed in chronological order. Advertisers are required to update their messages frequently, and if an advertiser doesn’t update for awhile, their message will be at the bottom.

MinnPost is currently vetting advertisers for this program in order to ensure a high quality experience. A lot of advertisers are interested in Real-Time Ads, but many don’t have an RSS feed of a frequently updated message. If an advertiser isn’t already harnessing the immediacy and frequency of social media and blogs, they probably aren’t a good fit for Real-Time Ads.

“If you’re only creating a message once a week, then this thing is not for you,” Kramer said. “Beyond that, we do want the space to be a value to our readers. So, we might say only certain kinds of products and services could be in there.”

Kramer strives to keep MinnPost’s ads high quality because high quality ads provide a better user experience and bring in more money. MinnPost only displays banner ads to Minnesota residents, guaranteeing advertisers that their ads are reaching the people they want to reach. This targeting of ads is why MinnPost enjoys a robust $15 CPM.

Real-Time Ads enjoy one significant benefit over other, more traditional ads like banner ads: they’re self serve. MinnPost is not involved in the ad creation process, and advertisers sign themselves up and provide their own RSS feeds. All MinnPost does is vet potential advertisers.

This new ad format is meant to be another piece of the puzzle for MinnPost, not a panacea. The site has banner ads, large sponsorships, small sponsorships, a jobs board and now, frequently updated, small ads. Banner ads are designed weeks or months in advance and are for longer-term campaigns.

A Real-Time Ad could be advertising a lunch special for two hours. A restaurant, for example, might notice that business is slow and then update their status with a new special to try to entice dinners to come in. Real-Time Ads are designed for the now.

“For readers, it’s a kind of marketplace of the latest marketing messages,” Kramer said.

The service is currently in beta and free to advertisers testing it out. A final price for the ads hasn’t been settled on, but Kramer said the ads will be less than $100 a week. Kramer said MinnPost is considering charging different rates for different placement. A Real-Time Ad that is placed on all pages would cost more than one that just showed up an ad-only page.

MinnPost is also considering charging different rates based on how often ads are rotated into a particular spot. Kramer also said it’s possible that Real-Time Ads will be targeted. For instance, a local sports store would be able to choose to have their Real-Time Ads only show up on sports content.

“There could be many, many combinations, with different prices on them,” Kramer said about Real-Time Ads.

Kramer views Real-Time Ads as a form of content that enhance a user’s experience, and ideally, MinnPost users would find Real-Time Ads valuable, instead of distracting like most online ads. Kramer is considering having a dedicated page of just Real-Time Ads. A business directory could logically follow as well.

The format is about a week old, and Kramer said more time is needed to gather feedback before making any major judgements. Advertisers seem intrigued by the idea. Only time will tell, however, if users find the new ads valuable.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.

MinnPost lessons on building traffic and reporting on the Web

The Nieman Lab has a fantastic post on Joel Kramer, the founder of MinnPost.com.

The parts that really stand out to me are the parts about building traffic and creating content on the Web. In general, Kramer recommends more, shorter posts. The days of piecing together several pieces of information into one summary may be over:

Even for our serious audience, we’ve learned that $600 spent on one long story produces a lot less traffic than $600 spent generating six to 12 shorter items. We still do longer stories every day, including many that combine in-depth reporting and analysis with personal voice.

But a careful reader of our site over the past year will note that we have a great many more short, quick hits, published all day long. So while we are spending less on news today than a year ago, our traffic has more than doubled during that time. On a three-month rolling average, we now have more than 200,000 unique monthly visitors and more than 700,000 page views — and in mid-February we enjoyed our first 31-day period with more than one million page views.

We are confident we can keep this number growing and keep quality high. Even short-form work can involve outstanding reporting and analysis — for evidence, check out David Brauer’s Braublog any day. But it does mean that we do a lot fewer ambitious investigative reports than I would like us to publish.

Tony Pierce gave us similar advice a few weeks ago. He recommends:

• He recommends posting more than once daily. If you post once a day or less, people usually don’t come to your site daily. They’ll just come once or twice a week to catch up. Not only do you want people coming to your site daily, you want them coming multiple times a day. Having someone come to your Web site twice daily is a big difference over twice weekly.
• Pierce also recommends group blogs, based around topics. Having multiple authors on one blog helps to ensure that there is a consistent stream of content. That consistent stream is vital to building traffic.

Kramer also talks about the delicate balance between generating page views and just producing content to get page views. Kramer and MinnPost.com seek to maximize page views by tracking what people like, while always keeping their mission in mind:

Google Analytics tells us exactly how many times each item we publish gets read. This has a powerful effect. It makes us want to do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn’t, while remaining true to our mission.

What does this mean? A glance at MinnPost lets a visitor know that it’s for serious newsreaders. Our brochure proudly declares, “NO Britney. NO Paris. NO Lindsay.” MinnPost is not a place to visit for stories about entertainment celebrities, or sex, crime, and advice for the lovelorn — even though we know that such content would bulk up our page views.

Back to Pierce for a second here. Pierce has a very simple formula for success:

Consistent content + links to the blog from other sources + SEO = increased page views.

I would combine that advice with what Kramer said, and you’ll be able to start building traffic in no time.