Torstar Corp., through its flagship Toronto Star daily, launched three new websites last week that focus on niche audiences.
The websites—ParentCentral.ca, HealthZone.ca and YourHome.ca—primarily reuse content from the Star and other traditional newspapers, but they also serve to entice specific target audiences that could be a boon for advertising dollars.
The concepts build on the success of the Wheels section of the Star, which made the leap to online with its own sister website, and brought along with it the interest of major car companies that bought ad space.
“Some of these brands began in the paper and took off on their own, but now we’re finding that because the Wheels example works so well… maybe we can replicate that success and create some new brands as well,” said Fred Kuntz, editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation daily.
Like newspapers across North America, the Star has faced declining revenues that are impacted by lower advertising dollars, due to falling readership, and weakening profits from its classified ad section. Readership at the daily fell 3% in 2007, while visits to the paper’s website hit 545,000 per week, an increase of 5.4% year over year.
Other newspapers, and their parent companies, have also been looking towards new ways to boost ad revenues.
Sun Media, owned by the Quebecor, has focused mainly on boosting its Canoe.ca brand with online video, interactive content and entertainment portal Canoe.tv.
Canwest, has beefed up its online presence with elaborate versions of its local newspapers’ classified sections. Specific sites deal with auto, real estate and job hunting themes.
Despite the effort to plug the leaking holes of advertising revenues, news companies are still feeling the pinch.
At Torstar, the new websites were unveiled during the same week that the media company cut 160 jobs in an effort to save $12 million in operating costs a year as it deals with a squeeze on revenues. The job cuts included buyouts and some layoffs.
The company has been reworking its operations, which included laying off a 10-person Internet production staff that primarily resized and reworked photographs posted to the web.
The online department layoffs do not directly affect the staff in the Toronto Star’s editorial website operations, but instead dissolve a legacy operation that existed since the formation of the website back in the 1990s.
Despite all of the attention being paid to the Internet, traditional newspapers shouldn’t be considered an outdated medium anytime soon, suggests one ad buyer.
“You’ll probably find newspapers bounce back in the next little while because they’ve finally figured out how to publish online editions that are not replica editions [of the newspaper],” said Robert Troutbeck, president of Toronto-based media buyer Troutbeck-Chernoff.
He said he still believes the print versions of newspapers will continue to be popular because their advertising is less invasive to readers—something he calls “permission marketing”—while online ads are often “an annoying interruption.”
