Score one more advantage for local online newspapers

Posted by John Burke on July 13, 2006 at 9:29 AM

A new survey of 7,500 university students found that they would like to see more local advertising on their campus' newspaper websites. 64% would appreciate more local restaurant ads, 51% more entertainment, and 50% more ads from local stores.

This comes as no surprise as colleges are a boon to local businesses. What is surprising is that local advertisers haven't picked up on the priceless medium of a local college's newspaper website yet. It just seems too obvious.

This is exactly the strategy that Rob Curley, presently New Media Director at Naples News in Florida, invoked in Lawrence Kansas, which is often hailed as the best form of local media convergence in America. He made lawrence.com "indispensable" to the local 30-some-odd-thousand college community by attracting local advertisers, listing all local events, sports stats, not to mention reporting the latest local news.

One finding of the survey that is a bit shocking is that under half of the students visit a news website at least once a month. 49% browse CNN.com, 37 MSNBC.com and 35 take a peek at nytimes.com once every moon cycle. Those numbers aren't very high. Perhaps what would make them look even worse is if we knew the percentage of these students that read a newspaper on daily basis.

The survey also found that small text ads on websites are much more effective than banner or pop-up ads.

Source: MediaPost

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