The Spartanburg Free Ad Initiative

After reading a recent post on TechCrunch about why online advertising is failing, I’ve starting thinking about what purpose the advertising on Spark actually serves. Yes, it does give the charitable few of you who click on the ads a chance to support the project, but beyond that, how useful are they really?

After all, I’m not really in the business of providing an audience to a potential pool of advertisers. That’s a print-model idea, not a website-model one. I’m in the business of trying to help weave together our community by providing a place where people can exchange ideas.

Selling advertisements is a distraction from that, and from the community point-of-view, it doesn’t really serve us. Don’t get me wrong, Google Ads are fine, but they don’t really help create community in any meaningful way.

But the thing is, local businesses are part of the community. Some are even have missions comparable to the Spark‘s, where the goal isn’t so much to make money as to provide a service and not go broke doing so. Those are businesses I think the community at large can, and should support, particularly in tough times.

So what can I do to create some kind of synergy here? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself today, and I think I’ve come up with an answer.

I’m going to give away advertising on the Spark.

If you are a business owned and operated on Spartanburg County, I’ll give you a free ad on the Spark. See that ad in the upper-right hand side next to our logo? Right there.

It sounds a little wonky to give away ads, I know, but allow me to explain. The Spark gets about 150 visits a day right now, which is good for a local blog, but not so great from an advertiser’s point of view. Even if I charged a single dollar for each ad, it would be hard to justify that anyone was actually getting much in the way of actual value.

So, instead of bothering with all that, I’d rather offer local businesses — many of whom are too strapped for cash to think about advertising in any context — a place to reach out to the Spark‘s ever-growing and locally focused reader base.

Surely, there has to be a catch, right? Not really. But there are conditions.

• No chain stores are allowed. If you’re doing well enough to have multiple locations, you don’t need a free ad. (If you are a locally owned chain and do want to advertise here, e-mail me and we’ll talk about other options.)
• You have to provide the ad, and they have to be to my specs. These are simple: 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high, with a file size of no more than 11 kilobytes. It can be in either .jpg or .gif file formats, and .gifs may be animated, assuming they are under the file-size limit.
• There can be no “call to action” in the ad, meaning you can’t make any statement telling anyone to do anything. Likewise, it can’t be comparative, meaning you can’t say anything like “Bud’s General Store is better than Wal-Mart, ’cause it’s local.” And messages must be directly relating to the business. If you’re looking for a good model, think about the sponsorship messages you hear on NPR or see on PBS.
• You get what you pay for. This is a free ad in rotation with other free ads as a community service, with no inherent guarantees of any kind. And one ad per business.
• Those businesses or groups I feel violate the basic goal of this program or of the Spark‘s mission may be excluded from consideration based solely on my judgment, and at any time.
• For the purposes of this program, local artists, bands, writers and anyone else trying to make a go of their work are considered businesses. Local non-profits and small businesses without retail locations are also encouraged to use this program, as are bloggers under the terms of the Big Banner Swap Meet.
• Having something to link the ad to, preferably a website, would make things easier for me. Even a Facebook or MySpace page would help, so please provide this if you have it. If not, please consider creating one before you send the ad, so that the ad is clickable and provides a potential customer with more information.
• This is an experiment, and the offer only stands through August 1. After that, I may renew the program or I may drop it.

That’s it. If you wish to participate, e-mail the ad to me at publisher@spartanburgspark.com. If you have specific questions about the ads, feel free to e-mail those as well.