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Q&A: CMN’s Rusty Lewis and Jon Beck about new advertising options for College Publisher

January 19, 2011 in College Media, College Media News, College Publisher

collegepublisherEditor’s Note: As I mentioned last week, I asked Rusty Lewis at College Media Network to answer some questions related to the company’s announced new advertising option for college newspapers. These responses were supplied by Lewis and Jon Beck, who recently joined CMN on the business side.

When will these new options take effect?

It is a rolling process that took effect January 1, 2011.  We are honoring the contracts we have in place with our newspaper partners.  That said, beginning this month we are giving the requisite 90-day advance notice that we will not be renewing the contract in place with current terms.  We are making one-on-one phone calls with each newspaper outlining our new options, how they would specifically impact each newspaper and outlining the next steps.

The new advertising options are available right now – it is a matter of a few settings changes.

Is the “AdGear” platform currently in use, or is this a new technology that will be used for this new system?

AdGear is currently serving all the ads (both national across the network and local campaigns on CP5) – we made the switch from mish-mash of Atlas and Doubleclick we had under MTV.  We are almost complete with the newspaper access portal to upload ads in AdGear and will begin training newspapers on that system shortly.  AdGear is a huge step forward from both a traffic and flexibility perspective.

This system can be used with any publishing platform.  It comes off-the-shelf with College Publisher and we have ready-made plugins for the most popular open-source CMSs.  Obviously, the advantage of this system is the support and the year-over-year continuity that comes along with the tools.

How do these options differ from the way things were done in the past?

We view this change as a reboot, a chance to make things easier and more equitable for everyone.

Ten years ago, we created a CMS in exchange for advertising rights.  Later, we responded to feedback and developed an ad-deployment tool in the CMS so that a few newspapers with good ad sales teams could deploy local online ad campaigns.

When launching CP5, we contracted a leading vendor to manage the ad system and recreated the two-tiered system in the image of CP4.  As site designs evolved, ad sizes got bigger, and CPMs got smaller it became difficult to keep all parties happy.

This entire change is about making the management of the inventory easier.  The three options break down to:
- CMN sells the inventory (and cuts rev share checks)
- The newspaper sells the inventory (and cuts rev share checks)
- CMN and the newspaper share the inventory and keep their respective revenue

These options address the variety of needs and strengths that exist in the college media sphere.  Regardless of size, we found some newspapers small and large had very good local sales teams and could sell out the inventory.  Conversely (and more commonly), we found that the newspaper focused on content and had little interest or desire for advertising (which is a missed opportunity for everyone).  Obviously, there is a great number of papers in between.  These options address those different scenarios without over-complicating the issue.

Do these options apply equally to all of the CP standard plan participants, i.e. those who are paying the fee and those who are having the fee waived?

Yes.  They are also the same for any newspaper outside CMN that want to participate in our ad network or want access to these tools.

I am not exactly certain that I understand the logistics of the 70/30 plan. Could you explain it in a little more detail, especially as it relates to the higher ad positions on the page, and the way the percentages would work in selling local ads?

The inventory split is really quite simple.  Within AdGear we can set thresholds (by percentage) of available inventory.  We will apply a threshold for newspapers who select this option such that they only have access to 30 percent of the inventory on each ad position.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say a newspaper gets 100k page views per month on average.  That means in the old model, they had basically 300k impressions (3 ad units X 100k page views) to sell below the fold – which we were told were hard to sell.  Now, with this option, that same newspaper has 150k impressions to sell, but 60k of those can – and should – be sold at a much higher premium (because they are the top spots).

The real critical piece to this plan is that newspapers are committing to sell on a CPM basis when selecting to share the inventory.  This is a tough transition for some newspapers who have found success with the flat rate sponsorship method of online display advertising.  That said, we can share strategies we have seen work at other college newspapers.

One additional layer to this plan is that CMN will back fill any unsold impressions with remnant ad campaigns.  The newspaper will receive 20 percent of the revenue originating from these ads.

Does this preclude the plan participants from selling ads outside of those five positions?

The short answer is no.

The five ad positions are five different sets of ad tags deployed on the page.  The AdGear tools allow newspapers to use a variety of targeting methodologies and strategies to help advertisers get the most out of their placements.

If a newspaper is selling ads on a flat rate basis and their advertisers want full exposure on all pages served, well that is really a sponsorship opportunity and not advertisement.  We fully expect newspapers to offer these advertisers creative ways to have a presence on the site without using up ad impressions through the ad manager.

As to option C, is $7.50/cpm what the cpm is if CP sold the ads, or a percentage of that? if so, what percentage?

CMN underwrites the operation, support and training on the AdGear system with advertising revenue.  Option C, where newspapers pay a CPM to CMN, was designed to enable newspapers to take full control over their inventory.  The $7.50 figure represents the value of each page view if all the advertising positions were filled with ad network campaigns – which pay very modest CPMs.

In this option, the newspaper is essentially purchasing the inventory for a $7.50 CPM – which, when divided out between 5 ad units, is $1.50 CPM per unit.  We felt this was sufficiently low enough where newspapers had the opportunity to markup the CPMs as they sold the inventory.  They are then able to recoup their costs and create net profits.

Could you provide an example of how option C might work?

Using the example above, the newspaper with 100k monthly page views essentially would remit a payment to CMN of $750 per month and keep whatever they made over that.  Obviously, since this is a CPM, the payment would fluctuate with traffic.

If the newspaper is successful and has a sophisticated staff, they can command CPMs in the neighborhood of $5-10 across each individual ad position which more than covers the cost of the inventory.

For the opportunity to have free run of the ad inventory, we are asking the newspaper to assume the risk of selling it out.

How will the ad prices be set for the various ad placements? and will CP be sharing information re: advertising rates with CP5 customers?

The ad prices are set as high as the advertisers will bear.  I cannot publicly disclose specifics around this as it would jeopardize active negotiations with Access Network partners and potential advertisers.  Obviously, when sales close I can privately discuss figures with those newspapers with which we share revenue.

Would a college that opted to go with the WordPress option have the option to join this ad network plan?

The AdGear solution is compulsory with the CMN WordPress package.

Please keep in mind that we are offering the WP solution as an alternative to College Publisher CMS.  Similarly to CP5, we are providing a service to manage the environment and provide a full-service solution for a newspaper’s digital publishing needs.  The ad systems, email newsletter systems, traffic reporting systems, and other core services for content distribution remain the same between the WP and CP5.

To that end, the three ad options remain the same for CMN WordPress package.

What about the hosting option?

The hosting option is literally just a hosting option.  A newspaper has free reign to use whatever set of solutions/plugins/ad tags they prefer.  This hosting option is simply out there so newspapers know they have an option with CMN if they do not want CP5 and are priced out of our WP managed solution.

As a benefit of using this service for hosting (be them WP, Drupal, etc), the access to CMN plugins such as AdGear exists.  In those situations where a newspaper wanted to use AdGear while maintaining their own site, a setup fee would be assessed.  Again, all three options exist and come with training and support.

And, per Daniel Bachhuber’s comment the other day: Are those advertising options the same as what’s available to the lower-end Polopoly users or different? If different, what are they?

AdGear is the same 5 ad spots no matter what content management solution is used.

To be clear, these changes we are making to the CMN business separate the content management solution and the advertising system completely.  CMN is providing them as a package for CP5, but the ad software solution can be licensed as an a la carte option for any newspaper using any hosting facility on any CMS.

On a related note: How do these options affect advertising on mobile?

We have the capability to schedule and deploy mobile ads through AdGear.  This is part and parcel of the AdGear service.

Anything else you would like to add at this point?

Banner advertising is still a useful way to drive revenue for publishers, but its best days are in the rear view mirror.  Banner ads will never have the value they once did.

The vision for revenue at CMN looks for opportunities beyond traditional display advertising.  CMN, in sort of a newspaper holding company capacity, can enable sponsorship opportunities with major brands across the entire network that can be lucrative enough to share revenue with every network member.

We will be looking for beta testers for these revenue sharing programs.  When we have seen some success, we will share the data and begin applying these measures across the network at large.

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Q&A: Rusty Lewis on CMN’s new business model

January 3, 2011 in College Media News, College Publisher, Content Management Systems, Media Companies - College Related

collegepublisherUPDATE: Additional questions appended after publication.

Editor’s note: These are the responses I received from College Media Network’s Rusty Lewis in response to questions I e-mailed him about their new business model/fee structure.

Since the announcement says that papers with an average of 25,000 page views/mo. will not be charged a fee, how many of your papers do you expect would be charged? What percentage of the total client list is that?

Approximately 100 CMN news sites are above the 25k threshold; this is about 20 percent of our network. We attempted to create several lower cost options for the publications with traffic below this mark, as we know many of them have limited resources.

When it comes to paying fees, there’s never a great time to implement such a change or make this sort of announcement. We understand many student publications use the spring and early summer to budget for the upcoming school year, so the start of the calendar year was as ideal as any time. This announcement allows CMN a full semester to explain and educate the market about the new options with enough time for publications to understand what they need to budget for in the coming school year.

What kind of feedback have you received since announcing the licensing fee?

While it feels like a sudden change, many of the publications or individuals we have reached out to expressed that this change makes sense In an industry full of semester- and year-based turnover, CMN’s success is largely due to the continuity our staff and services provide college media. We wanted to remain in existence, and so far our partners understand that desire.

That said, we have received a some very positive feedback in our efforts to provide multiple options/packages.

Today is actually the second wave of social activity. A CP partner tweeted the initial post within 12 hours of posting it to our site, and we saw an initial buzz for a few hours after that. Overall, though, a surprising amount of the conversation we’ve seen has taken place between people beyond the college media circuit.

Why the difference between the standard CMN/College Publisher package ($1995/yr) and the WordPress package ($4500/yr)?

College Publisher software relies on already existent infrastructure designed to share resources and provide streamlined support. This allows us to spread costs across the entire network. Our WP option is an individualized installation enabling the newspaper staff to customize their site (through themes and plug-ins) in ways network-based software can’t do as easily.

Will you charge $150/hour to support WordPress, and what sort of support is offered in the yearly plan?

The $4,500 annual license fee covers support related to CMN services related to server environment operation, DNS services and integration of CMN plug-ins. Many of the CMN plug-ins –advertising system, traffic reporting, city guide publisher, e-mail newsletter – power the core functions for a news site.

This support package does not include CMN digging into the custom code web editors write. If the site is experiencing failures, we will make sure that CMN plug-ins are not causing the error and then roll back to previous versions in order to isolate what is wrong.

CMN will be responsible for deploying WP core updates, which can be frequent, but are essential to assuring security and stability of the site. Compatibility development post-update for themes and plug-ins (non-CMN plug-ins) is solely the responsibility of the newspaper.

Any supplemental charges for support (at $150/hr) would be discussed and approved in writing in advance of any work being done. These charges would be limited to requests for review of custom code, design work or staff training.

Is there a cost associated with moving to WordPress on the CMN network? (i.e., from CP5 to WP on your system)

Data migration projects can vary from publication to publication so we are not setting a policy on costs for archives. CMN will tackle these requests on a case-by-case basis.

Will you assist in the site design for WordPress as a part of the yearly fee?

No. Our design services are available for our core platform, CP5.

What would be the advantage to having CPPro? ($8995/yr)

This system has dedicated resources (from a hardware, software and personnel standpoint.) A publication choosing this option can expect a high level of customization for any convergence type of project or newsroom work-flow situation. All customization would be unique to this instance (as opposed to CP5) and tailored to the specific needs of the news organization(s) on an ongoing basis.

Why was this announced Dec. 20, when most college media are on holiday break?

It was really simply an unfortunate byproduct of the way the calendar fell with regard to the new ownership of CMN. It took almost three months to fix, assess, plan and announce. The Access Network Co. felt it was the most responsible thing to announce plans for the CMN business as soon as they were finalized (as we would look to start implementing these changes early in 2011.)

The posting of this policy change on our site served as a reference point. In contacting our partners via phone and e-mail, we have somewhere to refer folks to dig into the details. When considering the alternative – “sitting” on the story until the New Year – we hope the news hounds out there understand the decision to post the information as soon as it was ready.

Beyond the business model, what is the overall vision here?

CMN is a collection of niche sites serving the college community. When we started, there was a great need for getting online quickly. We filled that need the best we could. In the previous decade, needs changed and spread to reflect the diversity that exists in college media.

This change is long overdue. College media is unique in that all of our partners serve the same purpose in their local markets, but they do it in a variety of ways. We needed to offer options and customization.

In order to provide college media with more services and more distribution channels, we needed to make tweaks to the business that allowed for client customization. Now, college newspapers can be a member of CMN and use one or all of our products.

This major change in our business model was always an internal discussion point, but only until the most recent change in ownership has the capability from an accounting perspective existed to make this adjustment possible. The Access Network Co. is a technology provider to publishers and brands – they have the infrastructure to help CMN navigate this change.

Innovation is essential to college media’s survival, and ultimately ours, too.

Our goal is allowing students and faculty to focus on storytelling and information dissemination. This doesn’t have to exclude the handful of students who have a passion for custom development. While this is a growing number of students, it’s not nearly a critical mass. We are looking to create an ecosystem that allows publications to experiment with that minority of student developers and easily transition to something else when those students move on.

Anything else you’d like to add that I haven’t asked about?

All of the prices and packages came from competitive analysis of various providers to the college market. When it came to pricing CP5 and CP Pro, we really took a look at the costs we are incurring to support and develop these systems to determine the price tag. We need to cover costs.

Our focus in 2011 is generating revenue, not just for us, but for our partners. The Access Network Co. is looking to create new revenue programs and hopefully get more digital advertising dollars to college media.

We thrive on feedback and sincerely want partners to let us know if they have any concerns or questions about this model change, our services or anything else related to our goals for 2011.

——— ADDITIONAL Q&A ———–

When did CMN begin looking at charging for the product?

This has been an idea kicked around for years going back to Y2M days. The issue was we never really had the infrastructure to execute this type of business model and client tracking. Investment was put off at several points in the past for a variety of reasons, but the economy definitely made our budgets lean (at least in recent history.)

How soon will this begin affecting existing customers?

We are contacting some newspapers now.

As stated in our communications, we are honoring all existing contracts. Our process involves giving 90 days advance notice to our partners that we are not renewing the existing agreements under the current terms. We have only just begun the process, but under the new set of options, we feel that newspapers will be getting more than they were under our older agreements.

How do you plan to get the word out to your partner news outlets?

We are using all the means at our disposal.

Collegepublisher.com is the hub of info newspapers can use for research and information gathering. We are beginning outreach via email and phone this week and will continue to do this all through the semester, prioritizing newspapers by the renewal date of their contract.

We definitely appreciate CICM for covering the story as it helps clear up any confusion. However, if a newspaper has any questions, we are available through email (support@collegepublisher.com) , phone (866.733.9231) and twitter (@collegepublish).

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Pacemaker CMS stats

November 2, 2010 in Content Management Systems, contests, Media Companies - College Related, Websites

I like following the CMS (Content Management System) changes in college media, and keeping track of who’s using what, so here’s some CMS trivia related to the ACP Online Pacemaker winners, announced this past weekend in Louisville.

Among the winners, CMS used:

*The College Heights Herald recently moved to TownNews, but their site was on WordPress when they were judged, so they count as a WordPress site for statistical purposes.

Other notes: Two of the Drupal sites are from the same college news organization (the Daily Illini and the217.com), and both of Swarthmore’s winners were homegrown, but different organizations. The HTML hand-coded site was from Spokane Falls Community College.

I would encourage people not to read too much into the numbers. Good journalism is not CMS-dependent, as I’ve said before.

Below the fold is a screen shot with the CMS noted above each site. I added the CMS name – it’s not on the ACP web site.

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College Publisher and ad content filtering

October 13, 2010 in College Media News, College Publisher, Media Companies - College Related

collegepublisher

Unless there is major news forthcoming, this will be the last I will post about the recent sale of College Media Network by Viacom/MTVu (see below for links to our previous coverage). However, the issue that was raised in the comments to my interview with Rusty Lewis is worthy of front page treatment.

As background, the College Publisher content management system is used by a number of private school student media outlets (we used it when I worked at North Greenville College/University). Some of these private universities have more stringent standards regarding what they consider acceptable advertising content on their sites.

This has been something that College Publisher has been sensitive to, filtering ads to specific student media outlets that might have a problem with particularly racy content, for example. In my time at NGU, I was tasked with asking CMN to remove a couple of ads from our student newspaper site, and they had no qualms in doing so.

So, reader Yada123 asked in the comments:

I’m concerned about the “guides” Access Network keeps referring to in its press releases and your podcast interview with CP5 staff.  Blackbook, one of Access Network’s guides, has some racy content about sleazy clubs such as Voyeur, and the stories and links blend content with boosterism, including for Voyeur.  Will these racy guides be forced upon college newspapers?  Will college newspapers’ existing advertising screens be maintained now that CP5 is with Access Network?

I asked Rusty Lewis of College Media Network to respond to the comment, which he did, and I’m reprinting his response in full here for wider dissemination.

Our contracts are not going to change.  The advertising policy that governs those agreements will be honored and continue with The Access Network’s representation of the national ad units across CMN.

The guides we have discussed are going to be a separate product that the newspapers will power.  We don’t have definite product details that will outline the functionalities of the tools yet, but [should the newspapers contract this service] the newspapers will have full control over what to feature in the city guides.

If there is an appetite to feature content from Black Book, it will be made available.  As a software solution, the City Guide Publisher will be a tool for the newspapers to feature listings of businesses and restaurants in the area with reviews.  The tool could be re-purposed for housing guides or any type of guides that are relevant to the college audience.  What you see in the blackbook guides speaks to their audience.  We don’t assume to know better than you on what your audience is looking for – that is why we are putting the tools in your hands.

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It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS

August 18, 2010 in College Media News, Content Management Systems

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently about college newspapers abandoning “template-driven” College Media Network for open-source content management systems (CMS): For College Newspapers, Prepackaged Online Versions are Yesterday’s News.

The article quotes the editor of the Daily Texan about how they now have so much more control over the presentation of the material on their web site:

The site made its debut this past spring semester. The editors can now position stories and headlines where they want them, depending on the flow of the news, and showcase different kinds of media. They couldn’t do that before.

Ms. Winchester said the freedom is invaluable. “Students are working on our Web site, and students are deciding how the Web site will look,” she said.

However, I have to make the point that I have been making for several years: It’s not the CMS. It’s the journalism. A CMS is a tool, just like a hammer, or fire, or whatever other analogy you’d like to throw in there. It doesn’t necessarily help or hinder your ability to tell stories. As Madison McCord, a student, wrote for us a while back, even a hand-coded html site can produce good content and design.

But what use is a shiny new CMS if you’re still producing stale, shovelware-esque content?

For instance, the day the Chronicle story came out, the Daily Texan has a story about downtown parking, and yet there is no link to the City of Austin Transportation Department web page, which I found in a 2-second search of teh Google.

Or, take this breezy summer story about desserts with alcohol in them. The story mentions two specific local establishments that serve these cold refreshments, and yet doesn’t provide a link to the web page of either 219 West or Dolce Vita’s Facebook page, both of which – again – I found via teh Google.

In short, it’s Shovelware (you can read the same story in the PDF of the issue here).

And then there is the issue of site design. When vast numbers of site visitors enter your site through individual story pages (via Google searches or through social network links via Twitter or Facebook), that shiny front page positioning thing misses them completely.

I’m mainly writing this to reinforce something I said in 2007: It’s not the CMS – it’s the journalism. Period.

Web-first means thinking about alternate ways to tell stories. To think about video, to think about audio, to think about maps, to think about alternate ways to illustrate information to grab people’s attention. It means to think about how to create a community around your web site. To eschew traditional journalistic “journalism as lecture” mindset and think about “news as conversation”.

If nothing else, get your students to check out this checklist of things they could be doing online (for free!). If they aren’t doing those things, what difference is a different content management system going to make?

I’m sure there will be more migration to open-source CMS’s in the next year, and new hosting options. But let’s keep the main thing the main thing.

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Redesigns: Maine, Wartburg

September 2, 2009 in College Media, Websites

Reminder: If your college media outlet redesigned its web site this summer, e-mail me at scmurley -at-gmail.com, or drop a comment below to be included in this series. (Previous posts here, here, here, and here)

mainenew

The Maine Campus redesigned on a WordPress CMS, moving from College Publisher v. 4.

Editor William Davis writes:

I designed the new template from scratch and am also working on several plugins to help news orgs use WordPress. One plugin I just released is Courier, which handles e-mail editions (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/courier/). I also wrote a custom classifieds management program (http://classifieds.mainecampus.com), and am working on a program to integrate WordPress and InDesign. I’ve been talking with CoPress a lot, who have helped me promote Courier, and our redesign was featured in the ‘This Week in CoPress’ podcast.

With the new site, we’re looking to take The Campus web-first. The program I’m developing will allow us to use WordPress as a pagination tool for our print edition. Writers will post drafts to the site and we will be able to approve the article for immediate online publication if it’s a news articles or drag it into our print edition if it’s an article we hold, such as a feature or an opinion article.
The new site will allow us to dramatically expand our multimedia offerings — we’re already planning live streams of health care forums we’re sponsoring, for example — and we’re launching a new feature called Campus Currents that is akin to The New York Times’ Times Topics. The new site also features a mobile version.

circuitnew

The Circuit at Wartburg College redesigned earlier this year using dotnetnuke (a product I had not heard of previously). This semester, they are working on expanding the site. Circuit Manager Spencer Albers mentioned in a comment:

Last year we started The Circuit (www.wartburgcircuit.org) and became the online home of the schools newspaper, the Trumpet.  We worked hard to build a good following online for the newspaper.  In January we launched a redesign of the site to offer weekly webcasts and webisodes on multiple topics.  We also become the home site of many projects around campus and hosted varied content like student senate election coverage and a special reporting on a campus wide protest.

This year we are moving forward and becoming a more converged media website.  We are working on incorporating the radio station KWAR and our TV statioin WTV8 into a single web platform.  Each media will have their own personalized site within The Circuit.  The Circuit’s main goal now is to act as a portal to all of this information and become a starting point for students on the web.

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