What's the ad percentage in your section?

I'm going round and round with the ad manager about the ad stacks in sports. We're getting 10 page Sunday sections with 40 percent ads, which means we really only have six pages. Today is so jammed, we had to kill our usual NFL capsules preview page because there was no room.

So what percentage do you lose to ads on an average Saturday for Sunday during football season?

 

How's the rest of your paper? Do they have high ad stacks too?

 

what exactly do you think is an acceptable ad-to-editorial percentage? your section doesn't sound that out of line to me since, oh you know, there's that pesky matter of having to pay salaries and other bills that keep you in a job.

 

It's probably about the same, Hank.

And TX, I understand that. I'll bend over backwards to work with the ad department. But when I have to kill a regular feature in the section because there's no room, I get curious how it's going at other papers.

 

I'm at a couple of free weeklies, so the ad:ed ratio is probably different than it is at a paid weekly or daily. But the papers tend towards 65:35 in favor of ads. My sections vary wildly -- sometimes my pages have more than 50 percent ads, sometimes they have very few. Too many ads suck in stereophonic sound when you're at a tab, because you don't have a lot of real estate on a page to begin with. But more ads = less chance of layoffs, so I won't complain but so loudly.

 

Heh, we get anywhere from 4-8 pages depending on the day, with Sunday obviously as our 8-page day. We get maybe two ads a couple of days per week. Sometimes we have no ads.

The news sections get all the ads because as we've been told by the ad manager, "No advertiser wants to be in the sports section because no one reads it."

Riiiiight. Everybody just throws the sports pages out every single day. Stupid bitch.

 

The Asian spa ads always want to be in the sports section. Course after they ran an ad promoting a cucumber eating contest, complete with Asian woman eating a cucumber, on the prep page, the pictures stopped, but the ads remain.

Our section is really pretty light on ads most of the time. It's a bit heavier on Saturdays and Sundays b/c they sell ads for the college football pages.

 

We'll hae 8-12 page sundays, usually with 3-ish open pages (and and open front). Usually 1 or 2 pages are something like 75-90% ads, the rest are in the 20-40% range.
Could have used more space tonight.
Best ad is one that has been running for 4 months in a row. City next door installed a roudabout and they run an ad on how to successfully navigate it. It's a freaking roundabout, how freaking hard is it?

 

Isn't there some goofy Page 2 you can kill before the NFL page?

 

Funny that. Happens to be one of our two ads. The other is for cell phones.

 

It was already killed for some local stories.

 

Ads?

What are ads? :