22 May 2009

The Canberra Times Wonders Why Advertising Revenue Is Down

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If the Canberra Times ever really scratches its head and wonders why ad revenue is down here is some food for their thoughts.

Take a guess as to what a small, 3 line ad in the Births/Death/Marriages costs for a Saturday? This is a simple ad, no banners, pics or anything ornate.

Take a guess…

$56.80

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They printed an add for my business out of focus by not matching the resolution from the submitted artwork despite several assurances from their salesperson that they would correct it.

Their response was rude & dismissive when questioned on why they did this.

This occured in 2004 and I refused to use CT for any advertising since which is just as well because I had a huge response from my Yellow Pages adds.

That’s outrageous.

jake555 said :

‘Ad’ is short for advertisement and ‘Add’ is short for addition. Come on people.

Anyway, are the contents of Births, Deaths and Marriages ads or notices?

‘Ad’ is short for advertisement and ‘Add’ is short for addition. Come on people.

I used to advertise in the Chronical, part of the CT group, but gave up when the delivery system changed to throwing them out of a car window into the gutter instead of delivering them properly! I am now in yellow pages and that works great!

Nambucco Deliria said :

Maybe you could get the government to help you out in your time of financial distress.

That’s the best you’ve got?

Well I like the Canberra Times and have been reading it for 30 years. Sometimes I even check Saturdays Births Deaths and Marriages. I assume few people have to pay the $56.80 too often to make a public announcement that is reproduced 60000 times and possibly read by twice that number. And I bet you still placed the add which unless you have misled us about your circumstances is but a pittance.

And whenever a story is posted here there are numerous gloats about how CT’s circulation is falling and the paper is lousy and it’s death rattle wouldn’t be a bother.

So why bother commenting if the paper is totally irrelevant to you. You wouldn’t buy it regardless of the quality.

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy2:40 pm 22 May 09

I like to polish my shoes over the broadsheet pages, and the Canberra Times is good for this. In fact, I just signed up for their deal of 5 weeks delivered for 10 bucks, so I can have some paper to line the cats litter box and start my backyard chiminea.

It’s a shame it’s so expensive as reading the births, deaths and marriages is about the only thing the Canberra Times is good for (apart from nice wide sheets good as kitty-litter tray liner). Surely if they dropped the price more people could advertise then more people related, or friends, with the people being born, married or passed away would buy the paper to read the ad? For $56.80 there are SO many other things I’d rather buy especially when, these days, you just send out a group email with as many banners and pictures as you want letting people know of lifes events and it’s free.

Last time the business I work for put an ad in the Canberra Times, I don’t think it was worth it. Full page, full colour for around $11,000 in the Saturday edition. To put this in perspective, a television campaign over a weekend sets a business with a long term account back around $30,000 plus production costs. The ad though didn’t seem to do much, there was no apparent increase in through traffic of phone enquiries and the customers who did come in didn’t seem to be aware of our specials.
When we put catalogues though in the paper, that definitely increase both customer awareness and traffic to the store. Problem for the Canberra Times and other media outlets is they charge far less for inserts than printed ads.

Ko. said :

Maybe they charge you more for starting every word with a capital letter..

chuckle.

And I bet the CT doesn’t wonder anything of the sort, they know damn well their advertising is expensive. Always has been. Back in the olden days when the CT was a primary source of info and they had a monopoly, it was a serious annoyance. Now with lots of alternatives, it’s less-so.

Hence the reduced need to spend $ on the CT.

Agree with OP that $56.80 for a three-line ad in BDM doesn’t seem to be a business model that has much time left in this world.

I might also point out that, love it or hate it, the CT is the source for a number of RA posts.

I find that RA, plus local press releases (ALP/Libs/Greens) give me more than the CT most of the time. For the local/national gap, there’s radio. For international, there’s some good OS news websites that more than meet any news cravings.

What’s more, it isn’t tossed into the only puddle in the street every time it rains.

Yes, what a joke!

I was charged over $70 to place a similar ad announcing the birth of our child, and thinking that the lady at the other end of the crackly line said ’17’, I thought, thats fairly reasonable.

Since then, unannounced by said telephone operator, we’ve had a card from CT arrive congratulating us on the birth of our child with the tiny ad printed out and stuck inside, they’ve sent us a copy of the Canberra Baby Guide and all of a sudden we’re receiving the paper every week day (yey, not, if I wanted to read outdated stories credited to ‘New York Times’ and ‘Reuters’ I’d probably consult a new fan-dangled invention called ‘the internet’).

To conclude, thanks but no thanks CT to your unwanted FREE extras (worth, hmmm close to 68 dollars I’d say) that nobody told me about that I’ve received and paid for as part of placing a 5 line ad. I’d suggest if you legitimately want to get your readership numbers up, and yes we all know that that’s your ‘strategy’ here, make The Canberra Times a newspaper that is actually worth reading!

Rant over.

Revenue is probably down because the newspaper is shite.

Seems to me the only reason to advertise in the Crimes is if you are trying to specifically reach a demographic who are not regular users of the interwebz. Otherwise you’d just advertise on RA.

The CT has improved of late I think. But the classifieds are so expensive they are pricing themselves out of the market.

I had a CT subscription for about a year. (Interestingly enough, about the time I got married), but at the same time I didn’t have an internet connection at home.

I’d never subscribe to the CT now, and at the price to advertise in it in a way where your ad may be noticed you’d need a lot of money behind you.

Being of the age where I’ve been around a bunch of marriages and births recently, it seems that nobody of “my generation” seems to even think of putting ads about such things in the paper these days. And at that price, I’m hardly surprised.

And why would we? I don’t know anyone my age with a newspaper subscription (especially not with the Canberra Times). We have this little thing called “the internet” which seems to do the job nicely.

Nambucco Deliria8:16 am 22 May 09

Maybe you could get the government to help you out in your time of financial distress.

Maybe they charge you more for starting every word with a capital letter..

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