How The Star filled up its dance card.
Kansascity.com http://www.kansascity.com
is a formal alliance of Web sites in the Kansas City area. Owned and operated
by The Kansas City Star, it provides links to19 sites in the region, including
The Star (which operates http://www.kcstar.com),
all of the local TV stations, two radio stations, sports teams and cultural
and civic organizations. Affiliates sign a contract with kansascity.com
agreeing to co-promote the kansascity.com url whenever they promote their
own url and agreeing not to cooperate with any other content aggregator.
The Star sells advertising on both kansascity.com and kcstar.com.
Many of the affiliate sites were built and continue to be maintained
by kansascity.com as part of the newspaper's Web site development business.
Many are hosted by kansascity.com on The Star's servers.
...And why:
Actually, kansascity.com evolved quickly after The Star started working
on kcstar.com, the newspaper's Web site. The business plan for kcstar.com
had the site supported with advertising revenue. To get the ads, the site
developers realized they would need a lot of traffic -- critical mass,
fast. The task force overseeing development of The Star's Web presence
wanted it to be the one Web site to visit in the Kansas City area. It quickly
became clear that the newspaper alone couldn't do that. There were too
many kinds of content not in the paper.
Early on, The Star began augmenting the newspaper site with other non-newspaper
sites: shopping guides, kid sites, etc. For example, the paper developed
and built a local interactive yellow pages product (http://www.zip2.com).
But there was a perceived need for an umbrella domain for this other material
that was not newspaper-related.
Meanwhile, the paper learned that other aggregate sites -- CitySearch
and AOL's Digital Cities -- had targeted Kansas City. Because of concerns
about protecting the paper's online classified, stopping competitors became
an additional goal. One way to do that was to tie up all available content
in the region, leaving other content aggregators empty-handed. That was
the real genesis of kansascity.com.
At the same time The Star was reaching these conclusions, the explosion
of urls was starting. Users were being asked to remember scores of addresses,
not all of them intuitive. How much easier it would be if one easy-to-remember
url were linked to all the important sites in the Kansas City area.
By formally requiring 19 other entities to promote the kansascity.com
url when they promoted their own Web sites, kansascity.com tapped into
millions in unpaid promotion. Kansascity.com was mentioned at the end of
every newscast in Kansas City. The logo and url were on library cards,
zoo programs and on signs at the stadiums.
Pluses and minuses.
The co-promotion was extremely effective in establishing kansascity.com
in the area. Less than six months after kansascity.com debuted, market
research done by The Star indicated 60% name recognition of kansascity.com
in the Kansas City area.
The Star was also successful competitively. Several months into kansascity.com,
CitySearch made an exploratory foray into the market and retired from the
field. AOL's Digital Cities has still not entered the market. In fact,
after two years, kansascity.com really has no viable competitor as an aggregator
in Kansas City.
As a result, traffic grew rapidly. At their inception, kcstar.com and
kansascity.com together were lucky to get 15,000 page accesses a day. Now,
the number is routinely 120,000 a day, more on big news days (popular links
are to the Royals -- http://www.kcroyals.com -- and to the TV station affiliates).
Also, in a recent Knight Ridder survey, 30 percent of users in the Kansas
City area said they use kansascity.com. That puts their usage on a par
with Yahoo in the market.
Marriage is a fulltime job.
But keeping 19 affiliate sites happy is not an easy task. As a result,
kansascity.com had to hire an affiliate relations specialist, basically
someone to do PR with the affiliate partners. Jealousies have developed
from time to time. Someone wants better visibility for his Web site or
worries that a competitive TV station is getting a better deal.
Many affiliates had neither the budget nor the technical expertise to
launch and maintain a Web site. The Star contributed many hours of work
and technical expertise. It is easy to underestimate the time and effort
it takes to service affiliate sites. Especially in the beginning, keeping
the aggregation together was so important from a competitive standpoint
that Star personnel were forced to go the extra mile for an affiliate,
even it it produced no revenue and increased expenses.
Early on, The Star, like many other Web site developers, underestimated
the selling cycle for Internet advertising. It took extra time just to
explain the medium to clients and then the clients took a long time to
make up their minds. So early sales lagged, although that has picked up
in the last six months. The two sites now have 102 advertisers.
Questions the experience poses for other papers.
As a defensive strategy, this kind of alliance works if you get there
first and wrap up all the content. In markets where there are already several
players, this wouldn't make sense. Also, the sophistication of the general
marketplace has changed in the past two years.
Bob Ingle, president of Knight Ridder New Media notes, "It's probably
too late in most major markets, in part because now all the networks are
moving (albeit haltingly). It's still possible in medium and small markets
in some cases, and we're working on some. I think part of the answer is
that a newspaper now would have to offer more tempting bait than was offered
in Kansas City."
Is there a down side to this kind of umbrella approach? Ingle thinks
not. "If somebody out there had a site with millions of hits a day, I'd
be wary. But that doesn't happen often," he said.
One thing to remember if you are contemplating this approach: It takes
people and time to deal with affiliates, build and maintain affiliate and
advertiser sites and handle the public relations part of the job. And resources
mean costs.
-- Jane Amari
