'S.D. Union-Tribune' Pulled Home Page Ads For Two Days -- And Launched Free E-Edition to Serve Readers in Fire

By: Joe Strupp After two days of pulling all home page Web advertising to free up space for fire coverage, the San Diego Union-Tribune is planning to return those Web ads again today, according to Chris Jennewein, vice president of Internet operations.

But if your worried the paper is losing ad revenue from the temporary lack of some ads, Jennewein says the record 10 million page views on Tuesday, plus expected future high-traffic days, will more than make up for it.

"We took them off to improve performance," Jennewein said about the paper's site, SignOnSanDiego.com, which gets about 10% of ad revenue from the home page. "We will put up some smaller ones today, mostly non-profits. We took them down because ads are handled through ad servers that can slow down things during times of high volume."

The Web site also launched a long-planned electronic edition of the newspaper early, and at no charge, Wednesday. The E-edition, which is powered by Pressmart, has been in the works for six months, and was set to launch sometime later this year, Jennewein said. But with the fire limiting reader access to the print paper in some places, he said editors chose to make it available early and at no cost.

"It was a desire to serve the community," he said.

SignOnSanDiego.com's high volume began Sunday when the site was getting triple the usual web traffic, jumping to 10 times normal on Monday, a day that ended with 6.7 million page views, far exceeding any previous day. After Tuesday's numbers surpassed 10 million, Jennewein believes it could climb even higher today.

But after increasing the number of servers on the site, from the usual two to 10, he believes it can handle some advertising along with the high traffic volume. "Today has been flawless," he said of the site performance. "I think we are in a good position from here on."

Jennewein also stressed that the record traffic will allow the site to recoup the lost ad revenue in coming days. "I will venture we will gain some," he said of the revenue. "If traffic goes up by a factor of 10, even if you remove ads, when you put them back, and traffic is still up by a factor of two or three, you come out ahead."