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In our small city we have 3 weekly newspapers, plus a free weekly, plus we advert in 3 other weeklies: 7 papers and we buy ads in them all. They are all poular and usually with everyone: everybody buys all the papers! We're thinking of dropping at least 2-4 to save + 5,000.00 per year. What do you think?

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Michael Hurley
Impresario

Yeah I would just advertise in one daily and one weekly paper. If you are saying there all as popular as the next seems like a waste to advertise in them all.
Plus your website gets a lot of attention!

Small towns = pass trades for us.

Trade passes for the value of the advertising ... people love the movies ... works almost every time. Even the one paper that tried to play "hardball" with us came around after a month's worth of angry calls from the general public of not publishing our showtimes as content. Do they charge the television stations for running their listings? Showtimes should be considered content, a service the paper provides to their reader....

We maintain a small directory ad in our local daily... much less than what was being run when I bought the place in '86. This year, we got almost no comment about the ad, one way or the other. However, by purchasing even this small space, I can expect a certain level of performance from the paper... namely, that they'll manage to publish the PDF file I send them each week.

The free "trades" listing really leaves you with little to gripe about if they get something wrong... it was free, after all.

I do agree about the increasing value of the web over newspapers. We're even seeing less usage of our telephone system as daily hits on our web site go up. I think that's good, since I pay almost 3 times for one business phone line than what my web host charges.

If all of your papers are universally popular, I'd pick the one that is your county's "official" paper. By publishing the local legals, that paper might attract a few more of the readers who actually look at the content.

Otherwise, to keep the peace (if they really care), you might consider some form of annual rotation.

things to think about,
hows the competion/what are they doing
are theater sales up or down
how good is your web site
do you post your times on the marquee

-do not rotate papers -pick and stick with what you think is the best.....

I would suggest putting a coupon with your ads. Perhaps one free small popcorn with a purchase of a ticket. That way, you can see how many ads come in and you can determine which ones you get the most of. If you get a lot of ads from certain newspapers, it could be safe to assume that those are the newspapers at your customers read the most.

The coupon is a great idea to decide which ones to keep.

Newspaper ads are a necessary evil in our minds. Its very hard to judge what they do anymore, and they keep raising the price. From most comments I feel the internet and phone are top sellers.

Internet and phone are the top sellers. Especially with the younger age groups.

Newspaper circulation in our area has dropped from 61% of households to 44% since 2000. Costs more and more and coverage is less and less.