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I recently had the opportunity to attend the annual convention of the North Dakota Newspaper Association (NDNA) in Crosby, ND. It was Our Hometown’s first NDNA convention and my first time setting foot in the state. The adventure was prompted by an invite from Allan Burke, the publisher emeritus of the Emmons County Record. Since he became a customer in 2013, Allan and I have worked together on several projects […]

Facebook will be releasing their Instant Articles publishing platform to all publishers April 2016.  With this release, publishers get to make a decision and trade-off with Facebook – they can host full content on Facebook for a cut of shared Facebook advertising revenue, or if they sell their own advertising, they can take 100% of the profit. This in many ways goes against the content battle publishers have been fighting […]

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, […]