Kelsey Update: Patricia Lee Smith of The Seattle Times
Seattle Times one of the last privately owned papers in the US.
7 online brands (listed here at top of page) covering 73% of the market online.
Seattle is most wired and wireless market in the nation.
Our challenge: How to add value in a craigslist culture? Social media and word or mouth are growing in dominance and aggregation is a commodity.
NWSource.com : a city guide designed to separate you from your money while having fun.
Pet owner look-alike contest launched to foster community. Here’s the winner.
They recently redesigned the site and used research to figure out their target audience. 27% of the market had an “Urban Sensibility”. They created personas to help target the service. I won’t go into detail of the personas but there’s some single women, lesbians, cool tech guys, etc.
They used Drupal to develop the new site using all the good web 2.0 stuff – tagging, social net, etc. They aggregate local blogs. Created neighborhood pages.
Click-through rates on NWSource are 3x the newspaper industry standard. Pretty good.
The effective CPM rate is 3x that of SeattleTimes.com but the traffic is much less than the newspaper sites so they need to get more traffic to this site. Need some SEO advice?
Local promotions like “new urban eats” increases traffic by 25% and gets them a lot of PR from radio, TV, etc.
TV ads here.