Out With A Bang

On the basis that openness and transparency are all the rage at King’s Place these days; and that collaboration isn’t far behind… perhaps it is high time we re-visited our own, tiny collaborative project with Guardian Media Group.

For the last six months or so, we have been running Addiply on the three Guardian ‘Local’ sites – those in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

Just two, little text boxes. Tenner a week stuff.

Simples.

Place your ad here – in the window of your local GMG ‘Post Office’.

I, clearly, have no idea what the comparable Google AdSense returns might have been for those specific pages. And, of course, I recognise that we enjoy placement ‘above the fold’ unlike my AdSense peers.

GMG – you’d hope – might also start to recognise that they are no longer beholden on anyone clicking on those ads to earn…. they’re getting their tenner a week, whatever. Sorted.

And, in the spirit of transparency, let’s be frank… www.guardian.co.uk/cardiff/ and www.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh/ haven’t quite hit the heights of www.guardian.co.uk/leeds/

But those two, tenner-a-week text ads on that Leeds site had – at 11.50am this morning – earned GMG the princely sum of £208.57 – and that’s the reason for this post, in fairness.

Breaking that £200 barrier.

For a media group currently losing eye-watering sums in its bid to be the left-leaning, liberal news platform of choice that comes to the market-place without a PayWall to its name, £200 is peanuts. A tiny, tiny drop in the ocean.

I wouldn’t claim otherwise.

But, to my mind, there’s some interesting sums you could do on the back of the nearest fag packet… given that we can offer some average weekly page views numbers for that Leeds site.

It is, after all, part of the proposition to potential advertisers… what, exactly, am I getting for my tenner a week, Rick? Or, potentially, £15 a week now that the bid model is ready to kick in.

So, we can see… http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=8

That’s what you’re getting.

30,000 views a week; give or take. With an estimated CPM of 31p. For two, text ads that GMG did nothing to source and secure. ‘Live Or Work in Leeds?’ and ‘Leeds 2030: The Debate’ ’found’ that Leeds site themselves… figured it was a decent ‘audience’ with decent traffic and placed that ad themselves.

Simples. They took out the complexity inherent to getting a text ad from West Yorkshire to California and back again via an algorithm.

I presume they figure it is a decent audience and decent traffic; both have been in that spot for a good couple of months now; time and enough to disappear if it wasn’t working for them.

So, to return, to our fag packet, 2 x £10/week ads for a month is £80. Off 4 x 30,000 page views a month… 120,000.

Now this needs to go to some number-crunchers buried deep within the bowels of Kings Place.

And, yes, of course this is a *hugely* inexact science.

But if this is any rough guide… http://www.abc.org.uk/Certificates/16961131.pdf …then for the month of September, 2010, Guardian.co.uk delivered 279,000,000 million page impressions…

Do your own sums; make your own judgements. And I’m hugely biased as I sit here in a coffee shop in Norwich.

But in one, tiny, tiny corner of Alan Rusbridger’s empire, Addiply is delivering. Off two, tiny text ads.

And we have a whole richer media suite sat there; waiting for someone within King’s Place to take the next small, step and open that Leeds-facing, ‘top-down’ banner ad to something more appropriate to that local community than a networked HotPoint ad… or a EuroStar ad… etc etc…

The answer, as ever, remains from the bottom up; those on the streets of Leeds ‘get’ this.

In the streets of Islington and the ad agencies of Soho, you sometimes wonder whether this particular penny has yet to drop….