Looking to add a new stream of revenue in a rough time for the print media industry, the Washington City Paper this week is introducing a daily deals operation that its publisher hopes will further its relationship with its longtime advertisers.
“It’s just a different platform for ways in which you are helping your clients market their businesses,” said Amy Austin, the alt-weekly’s publisher. “There’s print. There’s online. There’s events. And there’s e-commerce.”
Called Real Deals, the new platform appeared on the City Paper’s website yesterday with a 50-percent-off coupon for the Still Point Spa in Takoma Park. The spa, not coincidentally, was chosen last year by readers as the best area day spa in the alt-weekly’s Best Of issue. Austin told DCist that Best Of winners were approached first for the new deals page, but that she hopes the City Paper’s larger rolodex of advertisers will want to participate, too.
But the City Paper is hardly the first newspaper to try to boost its revenue through the model spearheaded by companies like Groupon and LivingSocial. Last May The Washington Post launched The Capitol Deal, which sells a variety of heavily discounted food, retail and travel packages. And just as the City Paper’s Real Deals capitalizes on its popular Best Of issue, The Capitol Deal blurbs Post coverage in marketing its offers. Both papers maintain there is no interaction between their editorial and business sides on the daily deals operations.
At the alt-weekly level, the City Paper’s corporate siblings in CL Inc. (formerly known as Creative Loafing)—the Chicago Reader and Creative Loafing Atlanta—have had deals sites running for more than a year. Austin said the ventures have been successful for the other papers, and in some cases have branched out beyond simple coupons. The Reader’s platform, also called Real Deals, has scratched together one-off underground restaurant events.
“The common thread is creating these unique experiences,” Austin said. “A lot of our clients do multiple kinds of business with us.”
Though recent issues of the City Paper have sometimes felt a bit leaner than usual and several open editorial positions have gone unfilled for several months, Austin said the paper’s financial health is good. CL Inc., which is itself owned by Atalaya Capital Management, a private equity firm in New York, sold off its papers in Tampa, Fla. and Charlotte, N.C. last October.
Though City Paper’s Real Deals operation is in its very early infancy—so far just eight coupons for the Still Point Spa offer have been sold—Austin is confident it will catch on, even if the online coupon market seems a bit saturated. (Besides the City Paper and the Post, WUSA also runs a daily deals operation, to say nothing of market giants LivingSocial and Groupon.) Relationships with advertisers that date back to the City Paper’s founding in 1981 will go a long way, Austin predicted.
“We have 30-year relationships with the market,” she said. “There’s ways to better the experience for readers and clients.”
(Disclosure: Before joining DCist I was a frequent contributor to the City Paper and my name still appears in its masthead as a contributing writer. While a regular at the alt-weekly, I had very little interaction with Austin or any of the advertising staff.)
