Welcome to another issue of Miles 33's eBulletin.
We'll take a look at various ways that publishers are benefiting from Miles 33 solutions. Although centralized datacenters, bucking the trend in advertising revenue and taking advantage of localized solutions appear to have nothing in common, they all show how publishers can grow their business using Miles 33 technology.
When Gatehouse acquired Utica (NY), Norwich (CT), Rockford (IL) and Peoria (IL), it faced a tough challenge on the technology front - "how to efficiently wean these newspapers off the technology they were using at their previous owners". Gatehouse selected Miles 33. Thanks to the strong track record for supporting multiple weeklies and dailies in a single datacenter which had already been proven in the Gatehouse New England cluster of 140 papers. This datacenter had been using Miles 33 software since 2005 and the success there made Miles 33 the logical choice for this new undertaking.
Early on in the process, Gatehouse elected to build a datacenter in Rochester, New York to support all of the newspapers involved. Today the datacenter sits in a 3rd party hosting facility, hundreds of miles from the participating newspapers supporting various applications including classified and retail sales, ad tracking, classified pagination, ad layout, and accounts receivable. The databases for all papers reside in Rochester, and each newspaper site acts as a production center where finished ads are routed for page make-up, keeping bandwidth usage on the WAN to a minimum.
Peoria was the most recent site to go live (August of 2009), and it is now a very impressive setup with all four Gatehouse properties working remotely from the Rochester datacenter. Soon after the project started Gatehouse negotiated a Preferred Partner agreement with Miles 33 for advertising, ad tracking and A/R systems moving forward. The architecture of the datacenter will accommodate these applications for additional properties as and when required.
Miles 33 would like to extend its gratitude to the Gatehouse teams who helped make this project a big success for both companies.
In today's challenging advertising climate, boosting your online revenue is more critical than ever. But with capital budgets on hold, how does one go about increasing online revenue?
Bullivant Media (BM) in the UK is bucking the general downward advertising trend after implementing a series of ad strategies and using the Miles 33 Intelligent Internet Advertising Modules to manage the process.
The main premise of their successful strategies is to "add extra value and advertising reach to trade advertisers".
One such strategy, that fits perfectly in an industry that prides itself in putting consumers in touch with local businesses, is the creation of an Online Business Directory.
BM considered this a great revenue opportunity waiting to be grabbed hold of. Thanks to their daily and weekly publishing cycles, they felt they were better positioned to offer relevant and up-to-date directory information than the directory companies themselves. So they implemented a searchable directory on their website, listing active advertisers with links to their existing ads and a "home page" with self-serve access for these advertisers to post valuable contact information on. Their advertisers are loving it!
The whole process is automatic, with the Miles 33 module extracting account and ad information directly from the advertising system. BM is offering this ONLY to advertisers with current ads, ensuring on the one hand that the directory is populated with active businesses and on the other hand, providing real incentives for these advertisers to keep their print ad running.
A nice additional touch is the "Business Bid" where readers can leave a "request for quote" electronically which gets emailed to trade advertisers with active ads. If the business interests them, they can respond. Readers love this as it takes the hassle out of calling multiple numbers to get a variety of quotes. Advertisers like it too as their advertising packages are working harder for them.
In addition to the online facilities, BM used these online applications to extend exclusive smartphone services to their advertisers.
The Miles 33 Mobile Service module automatically creates a smartphone version of the business directory allowing readers to use the newspaper's website offerings without a PC. Advertisers now enjoy greater advertiser reach as they find smartphones being used by a different audience.
This service can be extended for current advertisers, who can opt to subscribe to text message requests, providing BM with a new revenue stream.
Like many papers, BM was running Google's AdWords alongside their newspaper content. They then asked themselves "why use that space to earn pennies, when we can rotate customer ads and charge pounds"? So they implemented another "value add" solution to their advertising offerings. Advertisers can pay an additional fee and have their ad rotated on the website. Just like AdWords, but the newspaper receives a higher yield per ad, the website benefits from truly localized advertising while the advertisers get great extra exposure for a small incremental fee. Truly a win-win.
To round it all off, the Miles 33 Intelligent Internet Advertising suite offers your paper a complete breakdown of the digital advertising package. Now, you can report on how often your customer’s ads were displayed on your web sites, how many times their details are clicked on, how many times a reader followed a link or e-mail address from your site to your advertiser’s site and the number of 'businessbids' they received.
All this is available weekly, monthly or as an overall total.
These modules not only run with any of the Miles 33 advertising systems, they can be deployed in conjunction with ANY advertising system. For more information, contact Miles 33 on any of the numbers listed on the left or send an email inquiry to info@miles33.com.
Brazil has one of the few economies in the world that has been growing steadily these past few years. Its free market and export-oriented economy makes it the second largest economy in the Americas (after the US) and eighth largest in the world. It has sophisticated technology and is a pioneer in many fields.
With ever increasing educational achievements, it is no surprise their appetite for news and information is on the rise and that is good news for the Brazilian newspaper industry, which is enjoying significant growth - and many publishers are managing that growth with technology from Miles 33.
In the past 12 months alone, A Noticia, Pioneiro, Diario Catarinense, Folha de Londrina and Hora de Santa Catarina have all gone live with ad solutions from Miles 33. Other papers, already using Miles 33 technology include some of the leading papers in Brazil, such as O DIA, Zero Hora, Estado de Minas, Correio Braziliense, Meia Hora, Jornal de Commercio and Diario de Pernambuco.
Thanks to a local Miles 33 office and solutions that have undergone extensive localization, the Miles 33 publishing systems are well suited to the Brazilian way of doing business. Brazil has many business rules that are unique to the country, especially for revenue related functionality as present in advertising systems.
Having already completed this localization is a huge benefit to Brazilian publishers as installations go in faster and less time is spent specifying and developing functionality needed for the Brazil way of doing business.
Today, Miles 33 continues to roll out advanced publishing solutions such as Content Management applications, cloud-based computing solutions, archive solutions, online applications with selfserve portals and, of course, revenue enhancing advertising management solutions.
