July, 2015 -

Our Hometown Inc has provided newspapers with a full production and engineering service for 18 years. Lead by Paul Kozma, recently appointed CEO, the company looks to reinvent itself by expanding its traditional web services, as well as innovate products for newspapers to engage with readers online. Matt Larson, director of business development, was recently interviewed regarding Points Mentioned, the company’s latest product designed to drive engagement and pageviews for […]

Many newspaper publishers have left their websites free and open to the public with the expectation that advertising would eventually be used to monetize their efforts. To a large degree, website advertising has not readily followed and has not been as financially rewarding for the newspaper industry as first thought. Our experience as a technology and services supplier focused on the weekly community newspaper sector has confirmed this. Generally publishers […]

There are two methods for pricing online advertising, CPM (cost per thousand exposures) and CPC (cost per click). This paper assumes only display ads from the print edition are run on the website; banner and tile ads can also be run but their value is excluded from this analysis. CPM Valuation To calculate the CPM value of your website you need to know how many exposures you have available. The […]

On January 17, 2005, the Gaffney Ledger of Gaffney, South Carolina, a 3x weekly newspaper with a print circulation of 8,500, implemented our unique subsciption model and gained 41 online subscribers by March 20, 2005 using our recommended pricing which values the online edition as much as the print edition. Traffic to the website showed only a slowing of the rate of growth durning implementation. 11/29/2006 update: the number of […]

Update: this report was prepared 7/26/2004 and things have improved. See here and here for more information. The Our Hometown online subscription model is unique in the market place today in its selection of which pages are available to online subscribers only and which pages are available to the public. Many newspaper websites make the archives available to subscribers only and grant access to the recent news to the public, […]

Everyone in the community newspaper industry knows their readers skew older, so it was no surprise when a study of the ages of digital subscribers to the Times Record showed a considerable number were above age 50. This study was the subject of an article featured in: The report compares user age demographics before implementing a paywall and the digital subscribers to the website after thepaywall went up.

This study: Projecting Community Newspaper Paywall Revenues, characterizes the surge in digital subscription revenue seen during the first year at the Oil City (PA) Derrick. The website generated 50% of first year revenue after two months with a hard paywall. The data suggests this surge pattern can be used to predict any newspaper’s first year paywall revenue as early as sixty days post-paywall.