Case Study: Harmony Central, a site that boasts more than 70,000 unique visitors daily, is using search-based ad technology from Accipiter Solutions to serve up new ads in archived PDFs.For more than a decade, Harmony-Central.com has been harmonizing with its rhythm-driven visitors. Harmony Central Inc. is a leading Internet resource for musicians, supplying valuable information, news and product reviews, as well as classified ads and chat rooms.
While most Internet sites would be satisfied with an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors monthly, Harmony Central aims to meet and tackle the challenge of reusing ad content and boosting advertising revenue and click-throughs while enabling review content archived in PDF format to be more useful to its present-day readership.
Harmony's online archived media source features review articles of music-related equipment and associated products previously published by Electronic Musician Magazine.
Harmony Central offers musicians the ability to search out product reviews from a database spanning 10 years of articles and reviews published by Electronic Musician magazine.
When users go to the Harmony Central site, they can download the articles and reviews from Electronic Musician as a PDF file. Electronic Musician has been part of the Primedia Business Magazines and Media portfolio since 2004.
The reviews number in the thousands, and Harmony Central's long-term goal is to archive every review from Electronic Musician into PDFs going back as far as 20 years.
Click here to read more about the increasing use of electronic editions of newspapers and periodicals.
With the exponential growth of both the Internet and high-speed access availability, capitalizing on the ability to combine content offerings with brand recognition and direct response for advertisers is one of the most pressing challenges facing publishers today.
Harmony Central has been using Accipiter Solutions Inc.'s ad-based technology AdManager License since 1999 to serve ads to its Web site.
To better extend their publisher's ad inventory, Harmony Central wanted to add the value of placing present-day ads into archived PDF content.
Harmony knew many of its existing advertisers were running traditional print ads in the music-related publications.
AdManager gave them a way to serve those ads online by repurposing the existing ads into the archived PDFs. This both extended ad inventory and opened up new revenue opportunities.
Accipiter's AdManager lets Harmony offer publishers the opportunity to insert current ads into archived content for consumer download.
Using AdManager's technology, publishers can insert current media ads into older content that is featured in archived PDFs. The ads are also relevant to the reader; the ads placed are congruent to the user's keyword search text.
Wilson Chan, co-founder and chief technology officer for Harmony Central, explains how the initial concept for placing real-time ads into archived PDFs presented itself as a way to meet advertisers' demands for new product innovation: "We had previously identified the banner ad creation and campaign management process as a major pain point for our advertisers. As a result, we are always trying to develop new products to minimize their burden."
Chan said that some of Harmony Central's core customers have been in print advertising for more than 20 years and are very proficient at it.
The inspiration for trying to place real-time ads into PDFs came from Chan's experience with the growth of online magazine offerings.
"I was a longtime subscriber to eWEEK, and when they started offering an electronic edition through Zinio, I jumped at the opportunity to try it. The whole experience was fairly pleasant, but I also saw some room for improvement. The online edition is a verbatim copy of the print magazine down to the smallest classified ad. Having seen on-the-fly generation of PDF invoices in an intranet environment and having been with an ad-supported Web site for over 10 years, I immediately made the connection," Chan said.
The process of pairing ads and PDF was, according to Chan, mostly an economically driven move, and the process, once in motion, was a relatively short undertaking.
"It took about a month to come up with a demo, another month to solicit feedbacks from our content partners. During the process, I learned a great deal about print advertising. To give you an example, our advertisers consider the Internet 'Wild, Wild West' and seldom complain about placement conflicts with their competitors. It's totally different in the print world. Publishers are very sensitive to this placement issue and lay out their magazines accordingly," said Chan.
And because the print world operates differently, Chan said he encountered some difficulties he had not foreseen at the onset, "Like I alluded to before, the print advertising world is more conservative. Advertisers do not appreciate their competitors' ads appearing next to their product reviews. Going forward, we will distribute more non-review articles and we're also looking into upgrading our AdManager software to the new version that supports competitive ad inclusion."
Next Page: Harmony Central rotates ads and provides performance tracking.
On the IT side, Chan recalls that the impact on the existing operating systems was minimal, but said there is room for improvement.
"We had to allocate some resources for processing incoming PDF files. The current process takes about 10 to 15 minutes per article, and so we're hoping to streamline the process in the future. On the hardware side, we were lucky enough to have some spare server capacity. We did have to come up with more storage space for the PDFs."
Using AdManager's technology gives Harmony the ability to rotate new and current ads into older archived PDFs. Not only does Harmony insert the ads on the fly based on a customer's keyword search, but the inserted ad also comes with AdManager's tracking technology to track click-through rates up to a full year following download.
To help its burgeoning content partners see the return on the insertion of on-the-fly current ads into PDFs, Chan said the company provides monthly reports detailing how often each article has been downloaded, and the company is planning to add a reader's comment form to each article giving content partners direct feedback.
"For our advertisers, once we are fully deployed, we will provide them AdManager reports which include click-through and action tracking. They are already familiar with these reports from their banner ad campaigns on our site," said Chan.
A Pairing for the Future
The results of the pairing of content and ads in downloadable PDFs have been nothing less than stunning, and Chan said that one of the current content partners has increased its circulation 5 percent to 10 percent by offering content PDFs on the site.
"The concept of reusing print ads is a very compelling one for some of our advertisers. We can now approach companies who are not quite ready to try banner advertising yet. And in our specialty industry there are a lot of them. We also benefit from our content partners' willingness to sell PDF ads on our site through their existing sales channel."
The site currently places five ads in each PDF article download. The articles are still in the proof-of-concept stage, and Chan estimates the articles get downloaded over 10,000 times a month.
"For publishers, the benefit is twofold. First, they can monetize their archived content by putting it online. Second, they can create a new revenue stream by offering a new product to existing advertisers who have not fully embraced banner advertising," said Chan.
Chan said online publishers can increase their revenue as well by targeting traditional print advertisers and catering to existing advertisers who want a higher-impact product.
"This is a great product that brings together the print and online publishers while preserving their individual branding and identity," said Chan.
Harmony stands out as one of the few online resources to offer publishers the opportunity to insert current ads into archived material, including instrument reviews, musician accessory reviews, and other music industry-related content.
"From the publisher's perspective, this technology derives the most value from the available content and ad space. It's not an unrealistic expectation to one day in the near future see 10 percent of our publishers' revenue coming from PDF downloads," Chan said.
"There has never been a better time for publishers to fully monetize their available inventory and maximize online advertiser dollars," said Brian Handly, CEO of Raleigh, N.C.-based Accipiter Solutions. "Meeting that challenge means expanding and reusing content and extending its ad reach for customers and advertisers."
As for the future, for Chan the PDF beat goes on as Harmony sets out to tackle and streamline the process of tagging the ad spaces.
"We're looking at the internals of the incoming PDFs and determining if the ad blocks can be automatically identified," Chan said.
