A Daily Dose of the World of Newspaper Advertising

The change in conventional newspaper revenue has encouraged many different media companies to develop new business models--but what about the small businesses that have always relied on local newspapers for advertising? Do their businesses suffer from the inability to have local advertising space, or is the difference virtually undetectable?

While the best approach to answer these questions would likely involve speaking with the business owners themselves, a crippling weekly schedule and a recent messy tumble in the snow, have led me to remain home for the duration of my weekly research. This limited me to an interview with Yvonne Louis-Prescott, an account executive in the advertising section of the Michigan Daily-- although student-run, the only remaining daily print newspaper in the city. The Michigan Daily offers advertising space, and generates significant revenue from this model. Louis-Prescott offered me some insight to the state of their ad pages climate and the changes she has seen over the past three years of employment with the department.

Louis-Prescott claims that the advertising climate is better than ever, with a monthly revenue of $100,000 in the classified section alone. When asked what she attributed the success rates to, she couldn't say definitively, but noted that a large number of advertisements are dedicated to local realty. "As more houses become available, maybe because people can't afford them or need to rent the space they have, we have been getting an influx of people who want to advertise with us, she said. Advertising in the paper isn't so cheap, so it seems that retailers and local businesses still see value in the circulation of a print advertisement. According to Louis-Prescott, a line ad costs $4.30 per line for the first day and then $2.15 per line for each consecutive day it runs. Display ads run for a higher price at $16.74 per inch per day. She mentioned, surprisingly, that in her three year work experience at the Daily, the prices have increased 20% in the past four years. With these prices, it seems that the value of an advertisement in this format has not decreased, in the mind of local business owners-- or perhaps the value of online advertising seems too small.

The closing of the Ann Arbor News has not affected the revenue or volume of advertisements at the Daily, a fact that Louis-Prescott attributes to the difference in market and demographic readership for the two papers. She told me, "There are several clients that complain to me about online advertisements. They find them ineffective and are reluctant to change from print that has worked for them for so long." She does speculate, however, that there is a large number of people who used to advertise in the Ann Arbor News, and are comfortable with the Internet, have started to gradually move to online, and therefore are likely not feeling painful results of a lack of advertising space and content.

So it seems the advertising changes have not penetrated deeply into the community. Perhaps online marketplaces have enabled the kind of selling that traditional newspaper classified sections were once best used for. If large page advertisements in print publications have lost their ability to drive business back to the organization advertised, then it would seem the world of advertising must be reinvented, before journalism entities can utilize it properly. As for Ann Arbor, until local businesses begin to lose significant amounts of business, as a result of lack of proper advertising, then there is seemingly no reason to feel (maize or) blue.