Will readers pay for news online? That’s so yesterday. The new question is: will an online audience pay for access to special deals?
Today GateHouse launched RadarFrog, a clearinghouse of deals, special offers and other shopping promotions it will cross-market with its hundreds of community news brands. A premium membership for $9.99 a month entitles users to a $25 gift certificate to local restaurants and online delivery services each month, “plus access to even better deals, coupons and exclusive sales,” according to the press release. There is also a free membership with registration.
While GateHouse is aiming to make some money through subscriptions, it stands to make much more by taking a cut every time a consumer redeems a RadarFrog deal.
In order to execute the new strategy, Gatehouse promoted their chief digital revenue architect, Shannon Dunnigan, to CEO of RadarFrog.com. It’s an ambitious move and shows how important this move into affiliate marketing is to the company.
“Affiliate marketing is a huge untapped opportunity for us,” Dunnigan said. “We knew we needed to diversify our business model and this is clearly a growth area we’re excited to get into.”
Dunnigan, along with Bill Blevins and Jay Fogerty, began exploring this new segment more than six months ago. Through research, networking and attending affiliate marketing conferences, Dunnigan and her team formed a plan to build a universal platform for deals and shopping promotions that would tap the power of existing national brands while also offering local advertisers in specific markets new opportunities to reach local audiences.
In the end, the team decided to partner up for technology and business relationships, choosing OneBigPlanet to power RadarFrog. Dunnigan says she knows GateHouse could have done everything themselves and probably kept more of the revenues, but partnering allowed the company to launch with thousands of business deals already in place.
The decision to brand the project separately, and with no association to the news brands in each community, is a smart one. Not only would it be difficult to co-brand something like this at hundreds of different community news properties from a logistical standpoint, but it’s smart to enter this market as brand agnostic and seek new audiences who are not already reading GateHouse products.
Still, Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media counts a combined local audience of more than 10 million per week across 21 states. So it has a substantial base for marketing a new brand like RadarFrog. A quick check of a couple of GateHouse’s daily newspapers (it has 87 of them) found a dynamic widget in the right rail promoting a specific deal in conjunction with RadarFrog (eg. The Patriot Ledger).
And what about the name? “It’s positive and happy,” Dunnigan says. “The first time we showed the proofs of the logo around, it made everyone smile. So we said, that’s the one.”