Image, Video & Audio Features

I publish a weekly newspaper in southern Austin County. Some of my readers were getting delayed deliveries to their home through USPS so I needed a way to keep their readership by delivering online paid subscriptions. Our Hometown offered different levels of websites and tweaked my new site to fit my needs. What I really like is that I’ve been with them for several years and my monthly rate has stayed the same. All I have to do is upload my pages each week to an ftp site and by Thursday morning early, the new material is on my website and my readers are happy. Customer service is awesome. I can reach them through email or call if needed and they are quick to respond. I highly recommend this company for helping to grow your readership and for building needed revenue through online advertising.

All we have to do is upload our page pdfs and pdfs for inserts (our grocery store, drug store and hardware store inserts are on the site). Revenue from our web ads, online subscriptions and 5% upsell on print ads made the sites profitable within six months or so.

Stories can be edited and published online either immediately or on a schedule. The edited story can then be exported right into InDesign for our print product,” explains Meg Norris, publisher of a group of weekly newspapers in Nassau County, New York. “It was intuitive for our graphic artists to learn and we build the website at the same time as we build the newspaper, without hiring additional staff.

After various attempts at websites, we went with our-hometown.com in 2013. Our websites (for two weeklies) have paywalls and e-commerce features. People can subscribe, renew subscriptions and place and pay for classifieds ads. All of our display ads appear on the site for the time they run in the paper, and display classifieds for housing and employment have special links as do our classifieds.

...we added Internet Display Ads and increased ad rates 15%. We lost no advertisers.

We sent out notices to our advertisers and the only feedback we received back was positive. 3% of print ad cost with a minimum of $1.

Two years ago we were going to do a 3% general price increase but decided on a 7% increase using the display ads. We consider the decision a success and have received no complaints from our advertisers."

...it was scary to hand off a big chunk of that work to another company, but Our Hometown came through with flying colors. My stock & trade is the content that I produce. Our Hometown's paywall protects that content. Our Hometown knows the small newspaper business inside & out; they understand the issues & concerns publishers have....

Up-selling the ads was a no-brainer

We added 5% to our regular annual 2% increase