Scoop Advertising – All You Need To Know

Wednesday, 30 October 2002, 5:48 pm
Press Release: Alastair Thompson

SCOOP ADVERTISING – ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW

Contents:
General Information – Audience Statistics
- The Scoop Market
- More Information – Who Reads Scoop & How Often?
- Scoop’s CIRCULATION
Why Advertise On Scoop?
Types Of Advertising:
- Tile Adverts
- Sky Scrapers
- Banner Adverts
- Email Adverts
- Front Page Profile
Suggested Campaign Formats

General Information – Audience Statistics

Scoop is New Zealand’s leading independent online news provider. Our readership levels of 10,000 visitors a day provide advertisers with a credible – and extremely cost effective - alternative to advertising in the business newspapers (NBR, the Independent), and niche magazines like Unlimited.

- The Scoop Market

Scoop sponsor/advertising programmes provide marketing managers and communicators with affordable branding solutions that target a unique, informed, and powerful audience.

If you are looking for a sponsor/branding campaign that hits a select, powerful, and well-informed domestic audience, then Scoop Media is the medium that ensures you get exposure and receive an excellent return on your investment.

Scoop Media has available a range of sponsor/branding programmes which can be used to target your specific audience. Scoops tools include niche focussed media wire sponsorship, front page tile adverts, banner adverts, feature campaign pages and combination campaigns combining these elements with email alerts.

- More Information – Who Reads Scoop & How Often?

CAPTION: Graph showing the growth in average daily number of unique hosts (computers or proxy servers) requesting information from the Scoop Server.

Scoop’s New Zealand domestic audience accesses our information from domains hosted by large organizations. It is largely made up of people who view our service from work or their place of study. Our domestic audience tends to view our content during the working day.

Scoop readers include a high percentage of lawyers, bankers, politicians, public relations executives, directors, CEOs, teachers, researchers, lecturers, civil servants, journalists, editors, students and people who are active in our society.

Feedback and surveys suggest the Scoop Market is outward-looking and is interested in what goes on around them. The Scoop audience contains people who:

1. are IT and internet literate;
2. make decisions;
3. provide solutions;
4. travel often;
5. participate in their society.

Scoop is:

1. one of the top five rating general news sites in NZ (source: hitwise.co.nz)
2. New Zealand’s top rating political news site (source: hitwise.co.nz)
3. Ranked the 24,656th most read website in the world by Alexa.com (compared to netguide.co.nz = 123,006, searchnz.co.nz = 27,720, searchnow.co.nz = 203,262th, idg.net.nz - 137,168 & newsroom.co.nz = 356,289th)

Meanwhile scoop has around 4400 subscribed news-by-email subscribers who receive 250,000 emails each month and rising.

This means Scoop presents an attractive branding medium with an online audience on par with established newspapers like New Zealand’s The Independent Newspaper.

- Scoop’s CIRCULATION

CAPTION: Graph showing the growth in average monthly page views since Scoop’s launch in June 1999.

Scoop Media receives:

1. 2.5 – 3.6 million hits per month –
2. 1.2-1.8 million pages accessed per month
3. 80,000 unique visitors a month (readers)
4. 180,000+ user sessions a month (visits)
5. 25,000 – 45,000 pages accessed, and 6000+ user sessions daily
6. 4400 news-by-email subscribers receiving in excess of 250,000 emails a month.

Scoop presently serves on average 1.3 million pages per month containing stories and press releases detailing daily news, parliament, politics, business, and foreign affairs. These are served to readers in 44 countries daily with around 70% of the audience in New Zealand.

Why Advertise On Scoop?

There are a range of reasons why people might wish to advertise on Scoop. Here are just a few…

Branding
Scoop offers brand advertisers a cost effective alternative to other forms of brand advertising. For a monthly starting at the cost of a single display advertisement in a newspaper a brand advertiser can buy a presence on Scoop for a whole month!

Scoop offers branding advertisers very positive associations with qualities such as:
- excellence ( Scoop has been a consistent online media award winner since inception.)
- freedom and independence (Scoop is quite obviously a fiercely independent media – clearly differentiating it from the other online news providers which are all associated with corporate media giants.)
- consistency (Scoop has been serving its online readership for three years with a consistent product that they rely on to provide them with
- uniqueness (Scoop is the only place on the internet to find most of the material it publishes. This differs from the other news sites Nzoom publishes reuters and other wire service copy, Stuff publishes newspaper stories, Extra publishes Radio news copy.)
- loyalty (Scoop’s audience like – and some love - Scoop, voting in online internet awards confirms this)
- select/youthful/vibrant (Scoop is the favoured online news media among leading youth/media fashion arbiters such as Mikey Havoc, Russell Brown & Finlay MacDonald.)

(For more information see… Tiles, Banners And Skyscrapers)

Announcement – Product Launches

Scoop’s modus operandi, “raw news fast”, says it all. Scoops readers include opinion leaders journalists, politicians and PR professionals. A more receptive (and valuable) audience for new product launch information could not be found.

(For more information see… Banners & Front Page Profile)

Online Services

All online service providers and e-tailers know the difficulties associated with generating online traffic to their product offerings. The only guaranteed way to keep increasing your online traffic is to keep your brand in front of your online customers.

Scoop can provide numerous opportunities for online service providers to keep their service just one click away from a niche audience. And the pricing for such opportunities starts at the spectacularly low level of just $200 a month.

(For more information see… Tiles, Banners & Skyscrapers)

Types Of Advertising & Pricing

Scoop’s advertising comes in a range of sizes, shapes and positions each of which are suitable for different purposes. The following is a guide to what is available. Scoop is also willing to consider special requests from advertisers for other forms of advertising.

Tile Adverts

IMAGE: Example of the a tile advert on the front page at the top of the “Parliament” wire.

Tile adverts on Scoop are 200x30 pixels and can be either animated or static. The file size limit is 5kb.

Each tile advert is associated with a Scoop Wire of which there are 11 - Scoops, Parliament, Politics, News Monitor, World, Business, Sci-Tech, Culture, Education, Regional & General. Each tile advert appears both on the Front Page and at the top of the index on every story page.

The best advertising positions are those on the most popularly read wires which are also the highest placed on the front page and therefore the easiest to read.

Tile adverts are best for branding and online service promotion purposes. Their effectiveness is maximised by utilising them in a niche position which relates to the product or service being advertised and in combination with a skyscraper advert. (NOTE: When purchased in combination with a skyscraper advert a discount applies to the displayed price.)

Approximate numbers of impressions per month associated with each tile advert and price per month (excl GST).

Sky Scrapers

IMAGE: Example of the a skyscraper advert on a business wire story.

Skyscraper adverts on Scoop are 200 pixels wide and can be from 200 pixels to 400 pixels deep. They can be either animated or static. The file size limit is 30kb.

Like tile adverts “skyscraper” adverts are associated with Scoop Wires, are therefore niche targeted on the basis of content. Skyscraper adverts appear on the right hand side of every story page above the story index.

The best skyscraper advertising positions (and most expensive) are those in the most popularly read wires. Though the most appropriate position for an advertiser is likely to depend more on the content.

Skyscraper adverts are best for branding and online service promotion purposes. Their effectiveness is maximised by utilising them in a niche position which relates to the product or service being advertised, and when used in combination with a “tile” advert. (NOTE: When purchased in combination with a tile advert a discount applies to the displayed price.)

Approximate numbers of impressions per month associated with each skyscraper position advert and price per month (excluding GST).

Banner Adverts

IMAGE: Example of a banner advert.

Banner adverts on Scoop are of the Internet standard size. 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels deep. They can be either animated or static (animated is reccomended). The file size limit is 20kb.

Banner adverts on Scoop are, to use the Internet terminology, served “Run Of Site”, which means they are presented in rotation across all Scoop pages carrying banner positions.

Banner adverts are best used for branding and product launching purposes as they have such a high profile position on the page.

Their effectiveness is maximised primarily through design, duration and timing of campaigns. Scoop can provide advice on the best methods to maximise click through rates and impact. Typically campaigns of less than a month are not as effective as those that last a month. It is possible however – for product launches – to provide very high rotate campaigns (40,000 impressions in a week) which can have a high impact.

Scoop sells banner adverts in lots of 10,000 for $200 (excluding GST) and provides discounts for bulk purchases.

Email Adverts

Front Page Profile

Suggested Campaign Formats

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

Contact Alastair Thompson

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