In addition to creating the first online newspaper archive repository dedicated to small town and community American newspapers, Discover America’s Story is about showing newspaper publishers that their archive content has significant value and, through its digitization, can generate revenue. Digitizing isn’t a tough sell – every publisher we speak with is eager to have their bound volume and loose printed archives digitally preserved and placed online for the world to enjoy and explore.
The only stumbling block is their perception that they will have to dedicate scarce resources, both financial and in manpower, to make it happen. They rarely see the archive as a resource that can actually make money for them.
A great article came out last week – “Aviation Week Partners with Boeing to Digitize 100-Year Archive.” It’s a great reminder of the value of historical content. In just its first two months, the article says the archive site had 45,000 unique visitors and that is good news for the advertising department.
The article quotes Aviation Week president Greg Hamilton: “This gives us a new content-based marketing vehicle. Next year we’ll gate this at various premium levels, but in addition to monetizing base subs or premium subs we also have an opportunity to do some enterprise-type sales of the content to corporations, government, and academia. For instance, we’ve already had companies ask us if there’s some way they can use these archives to document their own history with digital reprints—sort of a ‘my history as seen through Aviation Week’s archives’ type of thing.”
It’s a model that will not only work for Aviation Week owner Penton but also for the hundreds of newspaper publishers across the country who are trying to find a way to place their bound volume archives online while trying to survive in an age of dramatic changes in the media industry.
Publishers can contact us to learn more about generating revenue with archives and an easy turnkey program to make digitizing the content easy and stress free.
