 Print or Web: Branding and Message are Still the Same.
Ask yourself, personally: How often do you really "click" on a text ad? How effective is it really? The bottom line on display advertising is no different on the web than it is on paper: Most ads are about making an impression, not counting impressions.
Network Text Ad
Scans page for context. Rotates ads. Relies on text for message.
|
MLN 300 x 800 px Ad
(Produced by our in-house staff More info.)
|
 |
These days, big text ad providers are asking as much as $5.00 to $10.00 per click for plain jane ads.
Some do offer rotating display ads as well.
Note the word rotating. One of the canon laws of good advertising is persistence.
People didn't come to the page to read your ad. They came to read the article.
If the reader can't find the ad again, they can't respond to you.
Text ads form a lot of clutter and noise on the web. They get blended with the text that the reader is reading on the page.
If you want to stand out, the time-honored approaches used in magazines evolved for a purpose.
Look left. Look right.
Which catches your attention?
See how the ad is laid out on an article. (Click on this page and window will close automatically.)
Impulse clicking is a small portion of the ad world on the web.
Clicks are the gravy. Images are the meat and potatoes.
Now, on top of our top-flight display ads, we also offer the preview window technology of SNAP.COM. Hold the mouse button over the "Tickets" link on the right, and you'll see a thumbnail preview of your website! |
|
 CONSISTENCY & DURABILITY
 |
Doesn't it drive you crazy, personally, when you finally see an ad on the internet to which you want to respond, only to find that it's gone? The Google-formula presumes that readers digest an entire page full of links, and make conscious decisions to stop what they are doing and launch off to respond to your ads. What nonsense!
Ad reading has a long tradition of passive absorption. Readers take in ads peripherally as they read the content that they came to see. Sometimes they need to see an ad two, three, five
|
times to have the message "burn in" to the point that they will act on it. They may not, by the way, act by "clicking," but by visiting a local retailer or using the telephone to call for service.
Ads that "customize" and flip periodically disappear from the reader's ability to go back and see them again. Fixed ads provide consistency. MLN offers ads on a fixed and flat-rate monthly. No games. You get maximum benefit of the reader's eyeballs on the page with the repetition that you get from consistent placements on page six of your favorite magazine or newspaper. Are you convinced that CPM ads are the way to go. We can offer limited space on CPM for competitive rates as well.
 |
The Internet has defined advantages in advertising that only print-net hybrids like MLN publications can deliver.
Read a magazine. Where does it go after you're done with it? A newspaper? How much do you pay to have your message in front of readers in publications that last a few minutes, a day, a week, a month?
For the fraction of the money that you're spending now to have your newspaper ad hug a fish or fill a moving box, you have a bit of "digital real estate" that stays in cyberspace for years. We keep articles alive that long because they tag the players careers. More important, we can use the power of the internet to connect back to older stories and make them new again.
|
Thousands of search engines, league websites, team websites, television stations, newspapers and blogs (see clippings ) keep articles alive for years.
Stories, particularly those about athletes in development, last for years because many athletes take three to five years to move through different levels of player development. A rare few become major leaguers and still have their heavily searched features read again and again. Those that remain "hometown heroes" have even better read throughs as they play out their days in front of our core audience of 92 million fans in North America and the Caribbean.
 ONE AD BUY THAT IS FOUR SPORTS & FULL OF FIRSTS IN THE FASTEST-GROWING SECTOR OF SPORTS NEWS.
| MLN Sports Zone |
|
MLN - The Raw Feed |
|
When you buy ads at MLN Sports Group, you are not buying into just baseball, or just hockey. You are buying into the oldest and most established four-sport minor league and independent publications in the business. We are the only large format, display advertising publication that has been full magazine format since 2002, when faster internet access started to become a reality.
Since 2000, Minor League News continued to push the edge of digital publishing, with one of the first real production "e-Zines with a cover and magazine-style layout, the first RSS-news feeds in the minors, the first kids publications, the first sports critics publcation, the first wikimedia-based player directory, and many, many more.
You buy into not just one, but four quality publications that attract slightly different sub-segments of our market.
MLN Sports Zone - www.mlnsportszone.com - A feature magazine with original stories and photos from the best writers and photographers in minor league and independent sports. The oldest continously operating publication in the minors.
MLN - The Raw Feed - www.mlntherawfeed.com - The first national RSS newswire dedicated to minor league sports. A top source for thousands of publications, including Google News, MSN, and Yahoo! News.
The MAJOR BLOGS of Minor League News - www.majorblogs.net - Sports opinion and blogs by veteran journalists whose beat is minor league and indy sports.
These publications open the door for you to the world of Minor league sports, whose fan base is on the rise. New stadiums and arenas serve a nation of small towns growing and thriving in a world where the internet and next-day shipping improve the quality of life and bring MAJOR ATTITUDE to minor league America.
With over 41 million fans in baseball, and millions more in AFL, minor league hockey, and the multitude of basketball leagues, we estimate that there are 92 miliion fans across North America who move the turnstiles at ballparks and arenas. As the only diverse four-sport publication focused on that niche, we can deliver a client that you have not been able to touch through sports before. |
| Magazine Format |
|
Newswire Format |
|
 |
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| The MAJOR BLOGS of Minor League News |
|
The Open Source Sports Directory |
|
| Sports Critics / Blogs |
|
Fan Driven Player Wiki |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 PRINT MEETS INTERNET
 |
MLN offers the quality of print with the power of the internet. Designed for the broadband era, our articles feature big, 11"x14" equivalent photo layouts and pages of articles laid out by hand.
We will only put one to two display ads on any page, making sure that you get the maximum absorption from your ad dollars.
You choose the display ad system that fits you best . After eight years publishing this magazine, and experience on our staff of those who have been in the digital side of the business longer, we can neither endorse nor recommend any system that counts clicks, hits, "unique readers" or other types of metrics as being accurate.
We can offer you our current subscriber base for the magazine, or estimate provided by our service providers for the free publications. If you want to work with circulation numbers, hand us an ad to place, and buy a certain number of placements. If you want to do your own metrics, you can provide us code* for your ads and monitor them through a system that best meets your needs.
|
| |
 All Impressions are Not Created Equal.
If you add up all of the impressions, or even "unique visitors" and think that you've got a handle on who is really seeing your ad on a website, think again.
Let's take Really Large Social Network, on the right. We've highlighted the prime advertising space and co-marketing opportunities for this firm's standard pages. There are a bazillion other ads dropped on every other kind of page content.
You are being charged for impressions, but are you making one with the reader?
People who come to social search engines are what we call "active participants" not passive readers. Hundreds of ads are a nuisance around which they play, flashing by as they check their email, add friends, and socialize.
Advertisers try all kinds of cute tricks to grab their attention, which, individually, might work but in concert of dozens of sponsors producing hundreds of impressions an hour, becomes a noise that is dialed out in most cases.
Your best shot at having your "impression" absorbed is with passive-reading publications.
The sample below is from MLN Sports Zone, our magazine. We've eliminated the big 17" photo at the top for space considerations here. Once you get past the killer photo, what do you see?
Passive reading content and a HALF PAGE AD.
Unlike a social search engine, or a cluttered, busy website with a lot of links, the consumer is coming here to read the content of the article.
Our unscientific studies show that the average reader takes from 1 to 5 minutes to read the content of the page. All that time, your ad is in their prime viewing range.
Compare this to the .5 seconds or less that some of your "impressions" are seen on other kinds of internet publications.
Combine that with the fact that the ad will be there, day in and day out, impression after impression, and you have created a persistence that helps sell your product.
|
 |
| |
 |
Click Here to buy advertising on MLN Sports publications.
*Products from the same company or parent only. No resale, barter,or sub-letting of ad space to other companies, or companies that sell ad space to third parties.
**Flat rate ads with articles are monthly through Adify. If you want to buy ad space in-perpetuity directly, please email us with questions
†Works for ads that we host. If you host your own ads, some systems will work, while others may not, depending upon the code used. Email us with questions.
|
