How TAPinto sells local ads across 90 news sites

Mike Shapiro developed a range of ad products and all sorts of unique incentives that allow his network operators to collaborate on selling sponsorships.

Talk to just about anyone who works in local newspapers, and they’ll tell you it’s getting more and more difficult to convince local businesses to buy ads. Not only are these businesses able to build their own audiences on social media and email, but they also have access to super targeted ad products offered by platforms like Google and Facebook.

But Mike Shapiro hasn’t been daunted by the challenge of selling local ads. He’s the founder of TAPinto, a network of over 90 news websites spread out mostly in New Jersey. Over the past decade, he’s developed a range of ad products and all sorts of unique incentives that allow his network operators to collaborate on selling sponsorships.

In a recent interview, Mike walked through every aspect of his advertising ecosystem including all the different ad products he offers, why they’re superior to Google and Facebook, how his operators collaborate on selling sponsorships, and why every ad unit has a flat rate regardless of the site’s audience size:

We have a press release section. We have an events calendar. We have a classified section. We have a business directory. We have a real estate listing section, et cetera. So that's where that content populates. And when it goes live, well, first of all, it goes to the publisher for publication. So nothing goes live until someone, a human actually sees it and approves it. Once it goes live, it's on the site. It also goes out in the next day's morning newsletter. So the advertisers get email exposure from it and it ranks highly on search. So they get SEO benefits from doing this as well.

And so that's the first content marketing option. The second is where an advertiser can have a featured branded column, where they can write as often as they want about whatever they want to write about. They can actually submit it through that same DIY marketing platform, but only they have the right to submit their own column.

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Transcript

Hey, Mike, thanks for joining us.

Well, thanks so much for having me, Simon.

So I've had you on here before and you kind of told your entire story of how you launched TAPinto and how you grew it and how you expanded into franchises. And people who want to know that entire story, they should definitely go back and listen to that episode. But just to kind of just get people caught up to speed for the basics of your company. So you run this site or this company called TAPinto. It's like a network of local news outlets.When did you first launch your first site?

Well, I launched the first site in 2008 and then we started franchising in 2013.

So the first site was just you, like you were a former lawyer, you were staying home, I think taking care of your son or something like that. And you started just kind of basically started your own local news outlet in your own New Jersey town.

Yeah, that's correct.

And then you saw some success. When did you first start? I know you like experimented with a few things before you expanded or went into franchising. But like how long was it you were running it before you started expanding beyond that town?

Sure. So I started it in New Providence, New Jersey, in October 2008. And within a few weeks, people in our two neighboring towns, Berkeley Heights and Summit, reached out to me and said, hey,can you start this in our town? And I did. And at the time I was primarily doing the content and a little bit of sales. And then we had commissioned salespeople doing the other aspects of the sales. And my original vision was just to kind of grow those three sites, their traffic, their revenue, their content, and started doing that, built them to profitability, but we kept getting more and more requests from people to expand to their town, but we couldn't do any more local news sites ourselves.

So I was thinking, you know, how could we expand yet keep it really local? And it took me about five years, but eventually I came up with this idea of franchising local news and we started franchising at the end of 2013.

Yeah. And so what does it take to form a TAPinto franchise?

Well, there is a screening process where you have to apply. You have to meet with our prospective franchisee committee.Once you get approved to franchise, and we approve less than 50% of the people that apply to franchise. Once you get approved, you sign the franchise agreement, we start training. Once you're done with training, then we can launch your site.

And then once you launch your site, we're there every step of the way to assist you in terms of any questions that you might have, tech support, customer service support, et cetera. But the two main tasks of a franchisee are to provide original local news reporting for their community. It has to be objective. It has to follow the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics. And also develop relationships with the local businesses in town and help them with their marketing needs.

So those two items together is really what a TAPinto franchisee does. We basically do everything else. We do their billing, their credit card processing of their advertisers. We place the ads for them. We have a graphic designer to design the ads for them. We provide obviously all the technology. HubSpot is a customer relation management system, editable media kits, marketing materials, everything that they need. So they can focus on the news for their town and the advertising sales to the local businesses in town.

So that was kind of my next question was like, what are the benefits of being a TAPinto franchisee versus just starting your own WordPress site and going alone? And it seems like the main benefit is like you can just focus on the business side or the editorial and business side as a franchise owner. And everything else, like the tech, a lot of the marketing, all that kind of back-end stuff, that's kind of centralized and TAPinto takes care of that so you don't have to learn all that from the ground up.

Yeah, so when I was doing the sites myself, I was spending like 60% of my time doing all those kinds of things. And so when we created the franchise model, I was looking at what could we take off the plates of a publisher to be able to provide them, one, a better quality of life, two,

be able to enable them to focus on the reporting and the advertising. And that's what we did with the franchise model. But the other important thing about our network is that we're in effect a network of independent publishers, but we're all on the same platform.

So our franchisees can seamlessly share content with each other and they can sell advertising into each other, which makes it scalable both on the content side and the advertising side and drives more revenue to all the publishers in the network.

Yeah. So like the, the benefit is there's a TAPinto site in one town, probably businesses in the next town want to, you know, advertise on that site because you know, there are going to be people who are going to get in their cars and drive to the next town.

So someone from that TAPinto site can sell ads to the local businesses that they're already working with into your TAPinto site. And then you both kind of benefit from that synergy.

Correct. And particularly in New Jersey, where we have, you know, over 90 TAPinto sites, there are regional and statewide businesses that are now advertising on 10, 20, 30, 40 TAPinto sites. And the franchisees get the revenue from that, which, you know, as a person who had a WordPress site, you know, you wouldn't be attracting regional or statewide businesses to advertise. So you wouldn't have that revenue stream, which our franchisees do have because they're part of this network.

And also, as you kind of hinted to, is that a story about a town that's nearby might be relevant to you because it's the town that you commute to to work to or something like that. So there's some synergies in terms of being able to share traffic and stuff like that as well.

Yeah, particularly for things like high school sports where two towns are playing each other. Or say the governor comes and makes an announcement in Westfield, New Jersey. Westfield will cover that story. But any of the sites in New Jersey in the network can put that story on their New Jersey news section, for example. And so, you know, the way that I think about it is, is that we're kind of like the ultimate collaboration of publishers, both on the content side and the advertising sides of the business

And how many TAPinto sites are there now?

Ninety nine.

And where are they? They're largely located in New Jersey, right?

Most are in New Jersey, but we have three in Florida. We have two in New York and we have one in Pennsylvania.

So what can you tell me about the overall audience size of TAPinto?

Yeah, so I mean, our sites typically are in smaller towns, populations of 20,000, 30,000 people. We can obviously do a TAPinto site in a larger community. But across our network, like last month, we had 2.6 million absolute unique users come to the site. We have about 220,000 people get our morning newsletter online.

We have about 330,000 people that follow us across Facebook. And our sites are free to read. There's no paywall. There's no membership. It's free to get the newsletter. And we actually just about a week and a half ago, we launched an app which is free for people to download as well.

Okay. So I feel like those were all kind of the basics to just get everybody caught up to speed on what you are and what you offer. So let's start drilling down into the advertising. If you're a TAPinto franchise owner, what are the various advertising products that I can sell to a local business? 

So one of the things that, as you know, is one of the hottest things in terms of digital marketing is content marketing. And so we pair content marketing with our advertising options. And so, for example, we have a DIY marketing platform, which actually just won first place from the local media association for innovation this year.

And basically that DIY marketing platform enables businesses and nonprofits, even governmental entities, to be able to submit press releases, events for the calendar, classifieds, if you're a realtor, real estate listings, if you're a funeral home, obituaries. And if you're an advertiser, you can use that platform in any towns in which you're advertising.

You can submit your content and it will go to those sites for publication. If you choose a town you're not advertising in, up will come a payment screen and you need to pay for that content to be published by that TAPinto site. If you're not an advertiser, you can use that same DIY marketing platform and you can choose what towns you want to focus on for your press release or your calendar event listing. You pay per site and those payments split out to those franchisees.

So just to translate. So this is a self service product where they don't have to talk to any humans. An advertiser can just go to that TAPinto site. And they can click on a button and they could upload their payment information, upload their ad copy. And then that appears on the site without having to talk to a single human being.

For content marketing, yes. Not for actual like ads on the site, which we'll talk about.

And when you say content marketing, those are like native ads on the site. Like it's content. It's like content that appears like in the newsfeed or on specific verticals, like the events page or something like that. Almost like a... almost like a classifieds type system.

Correct. And it's all labeled as sponsored content. But we have a press release section. We have an events calendar. We have a classified section. We have a business directory. We have a real estate listing section, et cetera. So that's where that content populates. And when it goes live, well, first of all, it goes to the publisher for publication. So nothing goes live until someone, a human actually sees it and approves it. Once it goes live, it's on the site. It also goes out in the next day's morning newsletter. So the advertisers get email exposure from it and it ranks highly on search. So they get SEO benefits from doing this as well.

And so that's the first content marketing option. The second is where an advertiser can have a featured branded column, where they can write as often as they want about whatever they want to write about. They can actually submit it through that same DIY marketing platform, but only they have the right to submit their own column.

So they have special credentials for that. Like their own login. 

Correct.

So is that self-service as well, or does that have to be sold through a human being?

Yeah, so that is sold through a human being because it's part of an advertising package. But once it's sold, then they have access through the DIY marketing platform to be able to submit their content.

And are they limited in the amount of content that they could, like, is it, is it time-based or is it article based? Like, do they pay per article or they're saying for one month time, you can post as many times as you want.

Right. For the column, it's monthly. So they can post as many times as they want per, you know, per month. It's their own space. So it's really nice because it's dedicated space for them. It's visible on the town homepage 24/7. So they're not in with everybody else's content. And so it's a really cool marketing opportunity for them. 

The third content marketing option is where a TAPinto site can do a featured advertorial news story about the business, which is labeled as sponsored content. Obviously, humans are involved with that in terms of setting up the interview and taking photos and all that kind of stuff. So that can't be done through the DIY system. But basically, once the advertiser chooses what content marketing option they want to do, then we pair that content marketing option with advertising options. Those advertising options include, for example, three different sizes of banner ads on the site, an exclusive video ad on the site that plays on the site itself, it's visible 24-7, exclusive sponsorship of any aspect of the site, whether it's a section on the site, whether it is the weather, whether it's the business directory, whether it's the calendar, every single item on the site can be exclusively sponsored, which includes the business's logo and click-through. And if it's on a section, like a news section, it's also on all the articles in that section. Third marketing option or fourth marketing option is they can have advertising in the daily newsletter, the weekend newsletter, or breaking news alerts. Fifth is they can buy the exclusive sponsorships in the daily newsletter, the weekend newsletter, or breaking news alerts. And then last, the franchisees can sell dedicated email blasts for advertisers to the subscribers of particular TAPinto sites. As we talked about before, TAPinto is free, but when you sign up for the newsletter, which is also free, you agree to receive these promotional emails.

Those emails, we only send a max of one per week per site. So our readers are not inundated with them and they have a very high open rate, a high click-through rate, et cetera. And so those are really the marketing options that our franchisees are able to provide with one other add-on, which is social media. So if an advertiser wants a post to be placed on Facebook or they want to boost a post, the franchisees are able to sell those as well.

Let's say you're a real estate agent in a town. And you want to advertise that you have a new house that you're selling. you go to the real estate section of TAPinto, and there's some kind of widget that says, you know, you can place your real estate listing here. And then you go through that, you upload your credit card information and put in your copy and stuff like that and hit publish. And once the human has approved it, then your listing appears in the real estate section. And also I'm guessing there's a daily newsletter that has a real estate section to it and it'll be included there.

Pretty much. The only difference is there's a submit content button on the site that's very prominent. That's the button everybody presses. And once you do that, if you already have an account, great, and you log in. If you don't have an account, it prompts you to create an account.

And then once you do that, you click on submit content and up comes the menu of options. So you click on real estate listing if you want to post a real estate listing, event listing if you want to post an event listing, et cetera. That same platform, by the way, is also used by our readers.

to submit letters to the editor and also something called milestones, which is like, for example, if someone wants to announce their wedding. Letters to the editor and milestones are free, and it's a kind of a service to the community. Obviously, letters to the editor would always be free,

but milestones are a service to the community to kind of help our community members kind of celebrate their milestones in their lives.

Do you charge flat rates or is anything performance-based?

It's flat rates for everything, the content, for the advertising, etc. And those rates are actually in our media kit. So we believe in being very transparent. So our media kit includes not only our rates for everything, but also all of our sites, all of the traffic numbers per site, the newsletter subscribers per site, Facebook followers per site, etc., So an advertiser can can knowledgeably choose what they want to do and know who they're reaching, et cetera.

So every site has like a landing page somewhere that's like a public facing media kit.

We don't have it on the site itself. So what happens is that, typically a business will either reach out to the local franchisee or the local franchisee will meet with the business, and then go through the different options that are available, and then send them the media kit so they have all the pricing, et cetera.

And do you have like various calls to action throughout the content and the site that's like nudging local businesses to reach out to the TAPinto franchise owner?

Yeah. So we have a button on every site about marketing on TAPinto, we have promotional ads that run on sites to kind of get marketing leads. And then the other thing is we've developed in  our CMS a feature so franchisees can create these promotional footers and create templates that they can run under content with a click of a button. So like one of the templates we encourage them to create is one about marketing that they can then attach to particular articles. Like for example, it's really a good idea to attach that one to any business stories that they do, like business grand openings, things like that. And so they're able to create those promotional footers to include with a link to take them to the marketing website, et cetera.

And I know you can pay to have the site write like an advertorial about you, but other than that  are they responsible for most of the copy of the creative assets or is most of that just supplied by the advertiser?

Yeah, so I mean, 80% of the advertisers supply their own ad, but we have a graphic designer on staff who can design an ad for the advertiser at no cost to the advertiser or the franchisee. So he does about 20% of the ads where the advertiser needs their ad designed. And he'll do as many revisions until they're happy with it. You know, one of the things we haven't talked about is our new license platform where we can offer the same platform we provide to our franchisees, to other publishers, branded for them. And we offer all the back office services that we provide to our franchisees a la carte. So whether it's a one off hyperlocal website or a family owned like print newspaper or radio station, if they either don't have an online site or don't have a good online site or they want our features, they can be part of our platform yet keep their branding. 

They have the DIY marketing platform as part of the platform. It includes newsletters and things like that. But the back office services like the graphic design is provided a la carte at like

a third of what it would cost them to buy those services in the open market. And that way for those publishers, a lot of them, they don't necessarily need us to do their billing, their credit card processing of their advertisers, et cetera. And so if they do, they can choose that and pay for it. But if they don't, obviously they don't need it and don't need to pay for it.

And to be clear, that graphic designer, that's someone who works at your centralized headquarters. 

Correct. 

And what kind of metrics do you report back to advertisers?

Well, we report back to them traffic to their content. We show them screenshots from Google showing how high that content ranks on Google. And obviously for their advertising, we also provide them with their impressions and their clicks and things like that for their ads. For their email blasts, we provide open rates, click through rates, et cetera.

Is that a dashboard they can log into or is that someone's like job to like manually compile all that and send it to the advertiser?

Yeah, so right now it's one of the jobs of our customer service staff that provides that to the franchisee who can then provide that to the advertiser. But we have plans for 2025 to build that into the dashboard. So advertisers will be able to check their own statistics and also franchisees will be able to check the statistics for their advertisers. We've started to do that for the franchisees regarding sponsorships, as well as advertising in the newsletter, as well as email blasts. So the franchisees can check those statistics in the CMS. They can download reports from the CMS, but we still need to integrate GAM into the CMS in terms of the banner ad reporting. And then once we do that, we need to create the advertiser portal to give them access to those statistics.

So I know that you, as part of onboarding your franchisees, there's some kind of training process involved. And probably a lot of franchisees do things differently based on their own skill sets. But in terms of direct sales, especially when you're training them, How do your franchise owners usually approach direct selling?

Like I used to work in local newspapers and we had a salesperson who was literally like walking into businesses, introducing themselves, just like part of her job was just driving around that area and just constantly being part of the community. How do your franchise owners usually approach it? Is it like a face-to-face type of thing? Is it just sending out cold emails, phone calls? Like what's the kind of process there? 

Yeah. I still, to this day, I do all the sales training for our franchisees. And with my background, as you know, Simon, I had no sales background before I started TAPinto. And one of the reasons I really love to do the sales training is, one, it keeps me obviously close to all of our franchisees and to what's going on in terms of the advertising market. But the second thing is, that it kind of, for a number of our franchisees who don't necessarily have sales backgrounds,

It shows them that, you know, somebody without a sales background can do this and can do it well. I mean, last year I sold almost a million dollars in regional advertising with, you know, no sales background. But I've learned it by doing it. And so I impart that knowledge to all of our franchisees during our sales training.

But. in terms of how they do sales. So when it comes to sales, we really believe in the in-person approach, whether that be in person, like physically in person or via Zoom like this, because that human connection is really important. And to us, it's about relationships. It's about building relationships where they don't yet exist and making them stronger where they already do exist. As you know, like one of the critical issues in terms of advertising is building trust and credibility, because so many of these businesses have been burned in the past by other advertising vehicles and bad customer service. So to us, it's about developing that relationship and also providing really good customer service and also setting expectations correctly and always under-promise and over-deliver in everything that we do. And that goes through to everything, from being early for the sales appointment to getting a proposal before the time you told them you would get them a sales proposal. And then once they become an advertiser, providing really good customer service.

But the main way that our franchisees create these relationships with advertisers. They go to chamber meetings. They go to business networking events. They go to business grand openings. They cover business grand openings because that's news anyway. And they develop relationships with all the businesses that come to those events. They cover business news in their community.

During the summer when there's not as much traffic or in our shore towns during the winter when there's not as much traffic, they'll actually go door to door and they'll meet business owners, just introduce themselves and things like that. We don't really believe in cold calling and things like that because the success rate is really low and you're not really able to develop a relationship like this. But so it's really much more in person or via Zoom that these relationships form. They get stronger and whether it's soon or it takes a while, eventually those businesses come on board as advertisers. There's some of our advertisers, I mean, I had one that I've been working on literally for five years come on about a month ago. It took five years, even though I'm like the CEO of TAPinto, because it took that long to develop that kind of relationship where they're like, yeah, we're gonna take money from our budget and we're gonna put it towards TAPinto.

Thankfully, most of the advertisers come on a lot more quickly than that. But persistence without being annoying is really a key aspect of sales. It used to be where you needed to get in front of someone and kind of stay on their radar a couple of times before they became an advertiser.

Now it takes eight or nine reach outs just to get an appointment. And then it takes multiple reach outs after that to stay in touch with them. But you don't want to reach out to them like every day or necessarily every week. You want to reach out to them in a way that's persistent without being annoying.

And the ideal way to do it  I have found is ask them when they want you to reach out and then reach out at that exact day and that exact time and in the exact manner that they suggested you reach out. So that's a question I always tell our franchisees to ask when they finish their

initial sales meeting is, hey, when might be a good time for me to reach back out to you? And what time do you prefer email or call? Would you like to do another meeting? And then reach out exactly the way that that business requested it.

Yeah, and you touched on a lot of things. Most towns have some kind of local chamber of commerce, which is almost like a local trade association for businesses that that allows businesses to network with each other, but then also it's kind of like a political force in the town trying to make sure that the local government isn't... you know pushing through any kind of like anti-business legislation or anything like that and they will have like regular networking events so like you know becoming a member of that chamber of commerce gets you kind of into basically all the local businesses and being able to show up all these events that they're at so you can you can naturally be around them and network and stuff like that.

Yeah, and one of the things that really sets us apart, which I'm still shocked to this day that other media companies don't do – most media companies, they just send their salesperson to these meetings, right? With us, we cover those meetings because they're newsworthy, right? And so that helps to either, one, further develop the relationship, not only with the chamber, but the people there. And they also see that you're not there just to get their advertising. You actually care about them and their organization. And, you know, with our franchisees, they need original local news coverage anyway. So they're there anyway. Why not do a story about that speaker that came to the chamber meeting or that networking event of the business owners that took place?

Yeah. And then for the franchise owners, I'm guessing like selling one off ads probably isn't super lucrative. So how much of their role is trying to put together packages to, you know, whether it's like a 12 month package or or whatever? Like, is that like a huge part of what they're doing?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we really recommend that they always go out with a 12 month package. And it's not because we want that business to advertise for the 12 months. It's because, particularly for content marketing, you know, you need to do content marketing over a continual period of time to see results from it. Particularly if you're looking for SEO results from content marketing, you really need to do it on an ongoing basis. So if someone comes to us and they want a one-month package, we will sell them a one-month package, but we're upfront with them. If the content marketing aspect, the SEO aspect of this is what's really appealing to you or is a major factor in your deciding whether to advertise, We don't want to take your money because you're not going to be successful doing one press release on the site and expect your website rankings to increase significantly and things like that. That's not going to happen.

And how do they sell ads across different franchises? Do they have to negotiate the rates across or are there set rates that make it more automated? How difficult is it for you to sell ads across several TAPinto sites?

Yeah, I mean, it's really easy to do it because the rates are the same for every site. 

Oh, really? Regardless of size of town or anything like that?

Correct. And so that's one of the things like when we're educating our potential advertisers is to say to them, like, kind of like, who are you looking to reach? And here are the statistics for those sites, because, you know, in some cases, the advertiser doesn't care about the statistics. They just want to reach people in particular towns.

In other cases, they want to reach particular towns, but they also want to get the most bang for their buck. So then they're going to kind of pull that list to the ones that both they want to reach and have the highest site traffic or have the largest email list or whatever it is.

And then for the franchisees that are selling, when they're cross selling into other TAPinto sites, they either have to follow the rates that we provide or they have to get the franchisees’ permission to go lower. That way they don't underprice someone else's inventory without their permission to do so. But our franchisees are very collaborative.

And so if it will land the deal, franchisees tend to be flexible in terms of giving a little bit of a discount. But one of the things that we do in terms of sales training, or I do, is most businesses, when they ask for a discount, they really don't want a discount. What they're looking for is more value. So there's a lot of things that we can provide to a business to provide them additional value without discounting. And so when we do our sales training and when our franchisees go out and speak with businesses, the first course of action is to provide more value to them to help close the sale rather than to discount. Because the additional value that they can provide is far more valuable than 10% off the advertising package. And so that's what we tend to do and it works very well.

And all the franchise owners are incentivized to sell beyond their franchise because they get a cut of the revenue of whatever they sell in another franchise.

Correct. And it works the same way with the license platform, too. So, you know, how it works is the selling publisher gets 45 percent, the receiving publisher gets 45 percent of the share of that ad. And we get 10% on these cross sales. So if a franchisee sells to a business onto their own site, they get 90%. We get 10%. If they also sell that same business onto someone else's TAPinto site on that part of the sale, they get 45. The other franchisee or other publisher gets 45. We get 10%.

So obviously, like one of the reasons local newspapers have struggled is because, you know, Facebook and Google have built out these incredible self-service ad products that in some ways are far superior than what you get on a lot of local newspaper websites and even print ads. When you're talking to local app advertisers, what value does TAPinto offer in the advertising that differentiates it from a Facebook or Google? How do you outcompete Facebook and Google?

Yeah, I mean, it's the content marketing and the SEO benefits. You know, those are the two key things. And also the customer service, you know, the handholding and the additional value we can provide as a marketing consultant. You know, we will provide feedback to our advertisers like, hey, here's a better way to write the headline on that press release. It'll be more SEO friendly. Hey, you know, I saw this article about being a chiropractor that I thought you might be interested in because you're a chiropractor. We really want to help these businesses whether it's helping them with their marketing or just making them aware, hey, there's a new technique out there that you might want to know about. Do you know about this? You know, you might want to look at this. But that extra value is really valuable. And that's something that really, to my knowledge, most media companies do not provide. And certainly social media does not provide any of that. But at the end of the day, it's really the content marketing and the SEO benefits that we provide that no social media company provides that really sets us apart.

So to just kind of translate what you're saying is like when you buy a Google ad, the very second that your budget runs out, that Google ad is poof, gone, versus they buy a press release or a column or something like that on your site, which ranks really well within Google, especially for those individual locations, people living in those locations, that's going to continue paying dividends potentially for years. 

Yeah. Correct. Yeah. For years. Yeah. The content doesn't go down. It stays on the site forever. And they can also use it in all their marketing. Like if you have a Google ad, like you can't really use that in any of your own marketing. Right. But with us, I mean, you can take that story and put it out on your Facebook page. You can put that press release out in a newsletter or whatever you do as a business in your other forms of marketing. And you can do that on an ongoing basis. It's evergreen. So it provides real value on an ongoing basis, really forever for these businesses.

When you kind of look at like a pie chart of the types of local businesses that advertise with you most often, what are they?

Service businesses. So it would be realtors, financial advisors, medical facilities, law firms, accounting firms, HVAC companies, funeral homes, and then high-end retail like jewelry stores, car dealerships, et cetera. What's the commonality amongst all of those? They are... low volume, high price businesses. Businesses that one, spend money in marketing, two,

understand content marketing or will understand it once it's explained to them well. And third, will use content marketing if they purchase it. And then fourth, if they get a couple of clients during the course of the year, it well more than pays for their marketing campaign and they're very happy.

We do offer the DIY marketing platform particularly for other kinds of businesses like your nail salon that has $10 off manicures on Thursday. They can put that on the calendar. They can spend 25 bucks to do that. And they can get a return on investment with that. But going to a nail salon and selling them an advertising package on the site really doesn't make sense because they don't have content. They don't know content marketing. And they have to do an awful lot of manicures to pay the cost of an ad on the site, you know?

And that kind of leads to my next question is like, what kind of local businesses are least likely to advertise? Like I've heard that, you know, talking to some local news people is like, they barely bother with restaurants because restaurants are so low margin that they just don't, they just don't have marketing budgets.

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. It's the high volume, low price businesses that we don't solicit. Like if they reach out to us, by all means, we'll try to help them in whatever way we can. But that's exactly right. It's those kinds of businesses for whom I mean –  the classic story was when I was running the New Providence site back in the day, we had a local Friendly’s. And I didn't have this knowledge at the time, obviously. And I sold them at that point, which was our largest ad, which obviously is more expensive today. But our largest ad, that's what they wanted.

It was $350 for the month. Click through to a coupon that people could redeem. I sell that ad to them, and they took a three month package in the first month. They got 50 zero coupons. People submitted 50 coupons and they canceled their advertising.

And I said, like, why would you cancel your advertising? Like you got 50 coupons from your ad. You told me yourself, and they said, oh no, we needed at least 200. If we didn't get 200, it wasn't worth our time. So that kind of gives you an idea of what you're dealing with, with those kinds of businesses.

So that kind of business today, I would say to them, hey, why don't you put up a press release and a Facebook post for your coupon that you want to offer? It's $125. They'll get a bunch of redemptions from that and they'll be happy with it. Or, hey, why don't you put that same sale that you're having on the events calendar for $25 and you can include your coupon there or your QR code and redeem that and they're happy with that.