The ethical journalist’s guide to selling ads on a website: Part one

by robert niles: the retaliation to my piece two weeks ago illustrates that the intimation of a reporter selling ads on his or her website remains a troubling one for many would-be online publishers. so i indisputable to present a step-by-progress b increase counsellor describing how a journalist can sell ads without compromising his or her ability to report accurately.

Step 1) Commit to learning about ad sales with same dedication you brought to learning about reporting.

When you start your own website, you no longer are merely a reporter. You’ve become a publisher, with all the additional duties that this position requires. In the highly competitive marketplace of online publishing, you must succeed in each of those areas if you site is to be successful. (Relevant cliche: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”) So you must commit to learning about your content management system, cultivating and inspiring your readership, recording and managing your expenses… and earning money from your site.

Sea cruise

As I have thought about my experience with my personal websites, I kept coming back to my experience working at Walt Disney World. As an undergraduate at Northwestern, I worked at Disney during my school breaks, running rides at the Magic Kingdom theme park. (Yes, that’s how I got into running a theme park website.) Disney trained its employees that, even though they had specific assigned responsibilities for their position, their job was to ensure that the park’s guests were comfortably enjoying their visit.

That meant you were supposed to do whatever you needed to do, not only to fulfill your assigned responsibilities, but to support the overall “show” at the park and to help the guests in your area. If you saw trash on the ground, you’d clean it up. If a guest was lost, you walked them toward their destination and directed them the rest of the way. If someone looked grumpy, you’d make eye contact, smile, and gently try to engage them in friendly conversation.

That’s the attitude you need to bring to online publishing: Do whatever you need to do to make your site succeed, however you choose to define success. Now, at Disney, we couldn’t abandon our core responsibilities to float around the park as a roving concierge. I still had to drive a raft across a river, load a Pirate boat or push the button to start the singing bears - whatever my shift was at the moment. Nor can you abandon your core responsibility to report accurately and honestly on your chosen beat. You’ve got to find a way to do it all.

Fortunately, you are not the first journalist to face this challenge. Many others have started websites with great content and are earning money doing it.

Step 2) Learn about the market.

So your first assignment (and, yes, I’m assigning homework here), is to find five ad-supported websites you admire and learn how they handle their advertising. Get their rate cards and ad order forms. Find their readership profiles. Learn about how they manage ads, both now and when they first started publishing.

Maybe you can find that information online by clicking around their websites. Maybe you’ll have to send some e-mails and make some calls. Either way, you need to see the specifics of how other sites are soliciting and processing ads to help you understand how it is done.

Here’s what I want you to look for: What, exactly, are these sites selling? What ad sizes, positions and packages are available? How much do they charge? What restrictions do they place upon what can be bought, not just technical restrictions (e.g. no “pop-up” ads) but market restrictions as well (e.g. no “adult” ads, etc.)

Unfortunately (IMO), some sites do sell content, writing laudatory blog posts for payment, selling unmarked text links within articles, and the like. But you can find many solid websites that don’t engage in such un-journalistic behavior, and sell only access to their readers through assigned advertising blocks on their pages.

Ultimately, that is what the ethical ad-supported news publication sells to its advertisers: the opportunity to reach the publication’s readers through ad space on a page (or ad time during a broadcast). You’re selling your readers, not your content. But to do that effectively, you need to know what you are selling: You need to know about your readers.

Step 3) Learn about your readers.

If you haven’t done so already, go get the Google Analytics tracking code, as well as the code from Quantcast, and install them on your website’s templates. These services will track your site’s readership and give you loads of great data about the number of readers you’re attracting, from where they are coming to you, and what they are doing on your site. Quantcast also will tell you where your site ranks relative …

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