Over the next few days, people who care deeply about the future of news and media will come together in Seattle for the Journalism That Matters Pacific Northwest Conference. We'll be there to collaborate and contribute -- and to show off the latest from our http://neighborlogs.com and http://instiads.com services.

Over on the JTM Google Group, the conversation on one important topic near and dear to our heart has already begun. One group participant asked the following:

I'd be really interested in hearing from people who have established viable local ad programs that local businesses can use to their benefit, and to pay the rent for local news sites. 

• What works and what doesn't, in your areas / sites?
• What are the must haves to attract local and regional advertisers?
• Salesmen or online DIY ads?

Here is what we've seen in our headquarters city of Seattle, WA.

• Ad types

Almost all activity that advertisers pay for on Seattle community news/hyperlocal news sites is standard display advertising -- banner ads, tile ads, etc.. There is some experimentation with affiliate stuff via Amazon, etc. but it's a waste of inventory usually at this relatively small scale. Another waste of space at this level is AdSense. There is also a slow growth of coupons but only one group of sites has made any headway there yet in a space where the bigger guys seem to have an advantage with their ability to sell larger entities like grocery chains. 

• Pricing

Most display activity in the area is flat rate and most is flat rate per month to cut down on overhead of managing shorter campaigns. Instivate has technology built into our services that allows us to sell CPM ads and shorter duration campaigns but we also find good success with flat rate approaches because it's easiest to explain to local businesses that might not be familiar with online advertising (though you should expect many to know exactly what you are talking about when you say CPM!)

• Sales

Sales strategies vary depending on resources. West Seattle Blog has a dedicated ad sales guy. Other groups of sites have rallied around a sales process so that they cross-sell/up-sell advertisers to their related sites but we haven't seen evidence of them putting a sales resource to work doing traditional things like cold-calling etc. We, however, have seen a lot of that behavior out of the resources the corporate hyperlocal news efforts in Seattle are trying to build. Their tactics are very traditional and the salespeople are far removed from the neighborhood businesses they are trying to sell to. You can imagine how that is working out for them. We have seen VERY LOW traction for this boiler room approach. As for us, we have an ad sales person dedicated to selling across a group of sites in the area using our http://instiads.com self-serve advertising. The goal here is to give sites a second ad revenue stream based on regional network sales. We're working at building a more robust revenue pipeline but the prospects look good. Regional advertisers are more and more attracted to truly local indies. Finding ways to pull them together to create single points of contact and finding technology efficiencies is really important to make this part of the business happen.

• Self-serve

Much of the effort in Seattle is manual creative and campaign management at this point. Sites using InstiAds and our ad services are enabled for an advertiser to use a credit card to pay for their ad online and also upload creative and manage the campaign with tools on the sites. This is not the panacea it might seem. Advertising on sites using our services still involves communication and involvement from the site owners but it's a different type of work and, we hope, easier for a 1 or 2 person operation to scale to compete with the corporate boiler rooms. So, self-serve is a euphemism -- but it has a lot of value and we think it can be a long-term game changer for indie media

• Innovation

Some of the most innovative elements in Seattle hyperlocal advertising are really simple. For example, WSB shows nearly EVERY SINGLE site advertiser's message on every page view. We have fun experiments with ads that are run off an advertiser's Twitter feed and one of the most successful innovations we've introduced are Logo + Text ads -- basically, a simple wizard that lets an advertiser build a good looking ad with only a logo graphic or picture and some text. Also a must have in the local space, we feel. Other innovation comes in the social space as sites use their Twitter accounts to broadcast select messages from advertisers and often introduce new advertisers in a post on the site. Most of this kind of activity isn't directly 'monetized' but is part of the package of being 'part of' these local news brands. This is probably also a really important element that will mature over time.