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.
Watch our discussion in the interview embedded below: