Photo: Advertising dominates Times Square at night in New York City. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Early Learning on the Pros and Cons of Advertising on a Bootstrapper’s Budget

Just over 8,000 people follow me on Twitter, a pretty good number for a rank-and-file reporter. But since beginning to publish the (de)regulation nation newsletter two months ago (click here to subscribe), I’ve learned firsthand that translating that following into a sizable newsletter mailing list is a challenge.

These folks are “my” followers, but when we use Twitter we’re connecting with it as much as we are with each other. Twitter sits in between us, collecting information on what we like, forward, retweet, comment on; who or what we follow and put on lists; and uses that data to help its paying clients, advertisers, target us with their messages. To intensify the complexity of this arrangement, anyone using Twitter is also a potential advertiser, thanks to the relative simplicity and low cost of creating an ad on the platform.

(If I were back in graduate school, I’d explain it this way: “Twitter is mediating and commodifying the relationship between the journalist and her followers.”)

Multiply Twitter by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube (owned by Google parent corp Alphabet), Snapchat, Instagram (owned by Facebook)…and you can see why, in the bigger picture, much of why the digital information ecology has become a life-threatening environment for quality journalism. Platforms have come up with so many clever, enjoyable ways to insert themselves in between news outlets and their audiences, and are earning most of the advertising revenues on all those eyeballs, income that once went directly to publishers.

This is an aggravating situation for the news industry as a whole.

But as an entrepreneurial journalist bootstrapping a news startup, I’d like to figure out how to make it work in my favor.

So, since late March, I’ve been conducting small experiments on whether advertising on these platforms, targeted by environmental policy keywords, will help build (de)regulation nation’s subscriptions.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• A roughly $30 Google AdWords campaign was 100 percent ineffective at generating a single click to the (de)regulation nation signup page.
• A similar spend of $21 for a Twitter sponsored tweet campaign, also focused on an assortment of environmental policy-related keywords as well as placements in the streams of my existing followers, led to just over 8,000 views of the sponsored tweet; and 56 clicks of the link in the tweet, a rate of 0.69 percent. Each of those clicks cost me $0.38.
• My latest Twitter sponsored ad campaign doubles my budget (from $1 to $2 per day); and instead of using exclusively keywords to target the ads, I’ve also selected a variety of other environmental-policy-relevant accounts to mirror. In its first 24 hours, the results have been terrible: 1,000 impressions and two clicks, which means I paid $1 for each of those responses. But I’ll watch this campaign for a few more days before changing it up.

My conclusions to date about small-scale advertising on popular platforms:

• Google AdWords is not useful for (de)regulation nation at its current scale.
• Twitter seems more effective at this early stage for sending people to my signup page. This may be because most of the people seeing my sponsored tweet already took one positive action when they clicked the “follow” button next to my name.
• But since I know via my newsletter publishing platform’s analytics that one percent of visitors to the (de)regulation nation sign-up page subscribe (a good rate by industry standards, I’m told), my initial and very limited Twitter campaign did not net a lot of new subscribers for the money.

Given those findings, you may be surprised to learn that I’m enjoying placing and tweaking these Twitter ads, figuring out how to tap into the mountain of data that Twitter has gathered about us over all these years.

Why? Because it’s teaching me a few new, measurable things about the environmental news audience that will help me improve what I’m doing with (de)regulation nation, as well as in my other reporting work.

But I’m also taking away that when a news entrepreneur has limited financial resources, and is in the earliest days of launching a news product, advertising on a big platform—for all its reach and power—won’t replace personally connecting with my early core subscribers-supporters, my colleagues, and my friends and relations to gain traction for the venture.