By: Carl Sullivan Newspaper Sites Try Streaming Music and Audio Ads
Wanna' hear Jennifer Lopez or Shania Twain while perusing today's headlines? These crooners could soon become standard background music on newspaper Web sites.
In another example of convergence, a Cleveland-based startup is offering streaming music to daily online newspapers. The first two clients, McClatchy's The Nando Times and Knight Ridder's Ohio.com, went live with the service two weeks ago. Publishers will eventually be able to offer news audio through the service.
'We're targeting newspapers,' said Blake Squires, vice president of business development at Everstream. 'Our product needs to be locally based' in order to attract local advertisers.
Newspaper partners will sell the audio spots, which will be synchronized with rotating banner ads that run on the Web page as the audio plays. Revenues will be split between Everstream and publishers.
Beyond audio-enhanced banner ads, Everstream believes newspapers can sell sponsorships of the online tuner or of the various channels. Everstream currently offers alternative, country, Top 40, heavy rock, and urban channels, which can include a dozen or so 20- to 30-second commercials every hour. The music is programmed in advance; live disc jockeys aren't used.
There's an e-commerce component as well. As users listen to songs, album art is displayed. When a user clicks on the album cover, she is taken to an online store (currently CDNow). Squires says the links can be customized to send users to vendors that newspapers already have relationships with.
At Ohio.com, the first audio advertiser is a Cleveland theater that will play music clips from stage productions. While the site currently offers introductory rates, Director Mike Needs says he will eventually upsell the audio ads.
News audio is the next step for Everstream. 'We want to create daily news updates, either between music tracks or on a separate news channel,' said Fraser Van Asch, vice president of sales and marketing at Nando Media in Raleigh, N.C. Everstream says it will soon be able to produce audio for newspaper headlines or other copy fed to the company's headquarters from publishers.
Everstream can also produce live Webcasts. 'President Clinton was here recently for a town hall meeting on race relations,' Ohio.com's Needs said. 'I would have loved to have offered that on our Web site.'
Needs says other Web sites in Knight Ridder's Real Cities network are watching to see how the Everstream program works at Ohio.com. And Van Asch expects a wide deployment of the audio program throughout McClatchy newspapers.
This isn't the first audio application for newspaper Web sites. Some news sites offer audio digests of their editorial content through services such as Audible.com. Others are experimenting with audio classifieds.
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Carl Sullivan (carls@mediainfo.com) is editor of Editor & Publisher Interactive.
(c) Copyright 1999, Editor & Publisher
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