Imagine: You walk into one of our fine, local restaurants. As you step inside the door, you smell the aromas emanating from the dining room. Before you’re seated, the hostess tells you, “If you’ll answer two questions, your dinner is on the house.”
This probably hasn’t happened to you, because restaurants don’t make a habit of offering free meals, grocery stores don’t offer free groceries, retail shops don’t offer free merchandise, attorneys don’t offer free services. No, businesses don’t give away their products and services because they need money to keep the doors open.
Of course, the Cape May County Herald is no different. So how do we make it all work?
In the last number of years the Herald has gone far beyond a Wednesday print publication that averages 80,954 readers per week, year ‘round. Our multi-media enterprise includes general audience sites like www.capemaycountyherald.com, and niche sites like www.dotheshore.com. Together these sites have had over 130,000 unique visitors in the last month. Our growing digital capabilities have dramatically increased our ability to serve you in a timely fashion with a set of tools and features that, we hope, are essential parts of life, work, and fun in Cape May County.
One way you help support all the Herald’s free content is by patronizing our advertisers, which we and they are extremely grateful for. Another, new way you can support us begins this Wednesday. We will be testing a new service with Google called Google Consumer Surveys. When you read more than four or five articles on the Herald website, Google will ask you to answer one or two very short multiple-choice questions per day. A recent question I answered was, “Do you own a smartphone?” Your answers are anonymous and no personal data is being collected.
Google will share the revenue they receive with us. What we offer remains free because we are finding new and innovative ways to generate revenue via print and digital media. One way to do this is through partnerships with other media companies like Google.
A big part of innovation is experimentation. In the weeks ahead, we may experiment with how these surveys are delivered—in terms of where, how or how frequently they appear. You are a valuable part of our experimentation team. Your feedback is appreciated.
We hope you’ll agree that completing a five-second survey to feast on the bounty of the Herald’s website is a delicious bargain.
Thank you for reading the Herald.
Please send your compliments, complaints or suggestions to Admin@cmcherald.com.
Cape May – Governor Murphy says he doesn't know anything about the drones and doesn't know what they are doing but he does know that they are not dangerous. Does anyone feel better now?
