Guardian trials hyperlocal ad system on new local news sites

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Guardian News and Media (GNM) will trial a low cost advertising system designed for local and hyperlocal websites on its new Guardian Local beatblogs . Addiply , the advertising system developed by online entrepreneur Rick Waghorn, is already live on Guardian Leeds and will be adopted by its sister Edinburgh and Cardiff sites, GNM's Sarah Hartley told Journalism.co.uk. The system, which is used by Trinity Mirror's NcjMedia for its community news websites , offers low cost adverts that can be sold on a weekly or monthly basis with different rates for different sized customers. Publishers retain 90 per cent of the revenue earned from the ads, with the remaining 10 per cent split between Addiply and PayPal.

"One of the things Addiply is good for is for people to be able to promote their own community events and local services. It's not designed or intended to bring in big name advertisers; it's more for the smaller advertisers in the community or for people listing individual items for sale," said Hartley.

While not giving specific traffic figures for the three local sites, Hartley said their audience has grown every week since their launch in February . In addition to news, features on the sites include a 'find your councillor' search and 'report local problems' feature powered by MySociety, Flickr content, relevant Delicious links and local Soul Mates and job adverts.

"We're very pleased with how it's going and we're seeing quite a good level of engagement. It's difficult to measure that, but we can measure comments on the site and the amount of retweets and Facebook comments we get," she said.

The sites will initially use Addiply to power text ads from local business. But the system can also be used for rich media ads and gives the Guardian the technology to sell larger ad spaces, such as banner ads, to bigger, local businesses, Waghorn told Journalism.co.uk.

"The Guardian has gone on record as saying this whole project is very much 'suck it and see', and see how can we make local work. Addiply is still in its infancy, but is very much part of this age of experimentation.

[Clay Shirky said we needed thousands of experiments [for the future of news]](http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/clay-shirky-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom-to-replace-newspapers-dont-build-a-paywall-around-a-public-good/)

; the combination of the Guardian Local Leeds and Addiply is just one of those," he added.

Independent news sites including the Lichfield Blog , SR2 Blog , GreenerLeith.org and the People's Republic of South Devon also use Addiply, which was set up in part as an alternative to Google Ads, to run their advertising.