State of Local

CBS owned-and-operated television stations have taken the wraps off of their rumored “CBS Local Ad Network,” which offers selected region-focused blogs the opportunity to pull in extra cash by embedding a local CBS news widget onto their site.

On Monday, the program launched in the five largest CBS regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. The program will roll out in other markets serviced by CBS O&O stations within weeks.

Blogs that are approved by their respective local CBS stations will be offered up several different widgets they can embed into their site. The widgets typically include a small window of links to stories and/or video, with an accompanying ad.

While this is a new idea for local TV stations, it’s an idea that other news organizations have experimented with in recent months. Pulse360 (which also helps administer this program) is currently offering similar widgets for MSNBC politics and NBC’s “The Today Show.”

It’s not clear what the blogs participating in the CBS Local Ad Network can expect to generate in new revenue. But on the two participating sites I was able to check, the widget had a modest news window attached to a skyscraper ad. It’s a large footprint commitment for blogs, and my hunch is that some of the most successful ones won’t have the extra space to spare. While it appears that you can embed a smaller widget (with a smaller embedded ad), the result is still a healthy commitment from the blogger.

According to this TV Week article, the CBS digital media group estimates they can sell the banner ads in the widget at about a $5 to $10 CPM. Reportedly, participating blogs would receive about 40 percent of the net CPM amount, although that seems to still be a bit unclear.

While it’s smart for the CBS Digital Group to open up another market for their ad sales force, it’s not at all certain that it’s a great deal for the bloggers (or the advertisers).

Aaron Radin, senior VP of sales and business development for CBS Television Stations digital media group told TV Week that “Most of these sites don’t have an ad sales staff, so this gives them the opportunity to sell page views at a higher rate.”

But many successful independent sites are already generating CPM’s in the $2-3 range, which is what this widget seems to be poised to pay out. While embedding the widget isn’t a terrible idea, it’s not a slam dunk decision, either. The web sites that are the most attractive to advertisers—the mainstream, already successful ones—have plenty of ad options already, whether or not they have a sales staff. The challenge for the CBS Digital Group is to make the embedded widget proposition an attractive option for those high-end local blogs.

From the advertising side, selling a flat CPM rate is easier for the sales force, but isn’t necessarily the most effective way to get your message across on a variety of web sites and blogs. A click-per-action rate makes more sense for advertisers, since its easier to track the campaign’s effectiveness. But it’s for those reasons that online sales forces hate the idea. That having been said, Internet Broadcasting has had a lot of success with pay-per-click campaigns, and if you have an audience that is engaged  and interested, it can be a win-win for both advertisers and the web sites.

This CBS idea would be a lot more innovative if it offered a smaller news widget, with several Adsense-type text ads (or one smaller display ad) included. My hunch is that advertisers are going to ultimately want that option, although they don’t seem to be in any hurry to demand accountability.

All that having been said, widgetizing content is something that every local news operation should examine. There are substantial challenges to overcome, but it’s yet another way to uncouple your content from your core web site and get it out into a larger online world.