Printcasting: the advertising implications

Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting initiative, for which he and the Bakersfield Californian got a Knight Foundation grant to fund for a 2-year development cycle, is worth paying attention to if you’re in the classifieds business. While not a classifieds project, per se, Printcasting does have some implications for classifieds, which I learned when I asked Pacheco about it recently.

Here’s his description of the project:

“Printcasting will allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication. The Printcasting model then will guide users through placing articles, photos and ads onto a template that either could be delivered by e-mail or printed at home and distributed. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.”

Pacheco says that he and his team are still thinking through the advertising components of Printcasting now, but he describes their thought process thus far as building “sort of a hybrid between self-serve classifieds and larger print display ad system.”

So how this might work for, say, a local auto repair shop, is that it would be able to create its own publication, and choose to include feeds of automotive news. Ads that others want targeted to the auto sector would show up in the shop’s little publication — along with many other Printcasting-powered publications on the topic of autos. (Publishers of these micro-publications receive a share of the ad revenues.)

The auto shop would get a widget to put on its website, which would feature new content posted to the shop’s blog. (That content can be included in the publication.) The widget would be the way that website viewers print out the auto shop’s publication or view it on-screen (PDF format).

Next, the auto shop owner could add “Advertiser” to his profile, which would allow him to create simple ads, which could be inserted not only into his own publication (possibly), but other auto-related publications by other Printcasting users, according to Pacheco.

Such ads are expected to be a good deal for advertisers. “We’re ultimately planning on tying the ad pricing to the number of downloads of the PDFs (download being a proxy for circulation),” Pacheco explains. “So the store-publisher’s ad cost would be proportional to how big their real distribution is.

“Advertisers will do this because it will be so damned easy and affordable since they only pay for a target audience. In this way, we hope the ‘long tail’ businesses who can never afford to buy ads in the daily newspaper that reach the 100 people who want their stuff along with the 70,000 who don’t want it will be able to advertise in some fashion. Today they basically check out unless there’s a niche publication we produce that matches their target.”

While what was just described may not sound like a traditional “classified ad,” Pacheco asks: “What’s the real difference between what I just described and a classified? And what’s the real difference between that and a display ad? It’s a hybrid of both, but way better because of the targeted delivery.”

Pacheco also thinks that RSS feeds for classifieds may be able to be incorporated into this model, but he won’t guarantee at this point that this will make it into the Printcasting launch. And he points out that this could be a nice upsell to a newspaper classifieds customer; they’d pay to additionally get their ad in a large number of Printcasting-powered niche publications. For example: “I’ve placed my ad for my car, sofa, rental, whatever and I’m told that for $20 I can have my ad show up in 5 other niche publications that have the kind of people I think may want my stuff.”

Because the Printcasting initiative is foundation-funded, the outcome at the end of the 2-year development cycle will be open source. The development process also is transparent, so other publishers can learn from what Pacheco and team are doing.

Keep an eye on it. Printcasting looks to be a promising model for advertising to the Long Tail.

Tags: bakersfield californian, dan pacheo, printcasting