Helping Customers Win
As customers connect from anywhere through any device and look for multimedia, the Internet solutions that satisfy their needs are increasingly complex. That's why we're innovating on our customer's websites to help them win in the local community. And we're more focused than ever on connecting the consumer to the content they want.
Results are measured in usage, unique visitors, and repeat traffic. More than 16 million users visit our customers' sites each month. IB customers have the number 1 TV station Web site in 18 of the top 25 U.S. markets.
Economies-of-Scale
IB initially innovated to get TV stations and their viewers connected to the Internet. Today, we've built expanded content management solutions and a publishing system that allows us to bring the content to the consumer, however they connect to the Internet. By leveraging economies-of-scale of the network, IB provides its customers with a variety of services:
- Multi-tenant content management system
- WebTrends site analytics
- DART ad serving
- Akamai site delivery
- Treets email delivery system
National Reach, Local Relevance
IB's powerful network of more than 70 local media websites attracts 16 million monthly users, and half-a-billion monthly page views. However, it's really a selected and targeted audience of local users, one that's increasingly important to advertisers. IB offers advertisers a one-stop solution to reach local Internet consumers.
Custom Campaigns
While we offer standard IAB ad units, our custom campaigns set us apart. By listening to our advertisers' individual needs, we create customized campaigns to meet their objectives including:
- TV/Web convergence packages
- Custom sponsorships
- Video vignettes from our in-house TV production studio
Generating Revenue
We generate tens of millions of dollars a year in local revenue for our customers. We do this by creating advertising inventory and usage on our customers' websites and performing scores of sales activities from training local sales staff to executing creative to enabling local advertisers.
Our Team
IB's local team of "Regional Sales Directors" has more than 62 years of combined Internet sales experience. In short, we know more about local online sales than anybody else. That's why our sales are growing at nearly 50% in 2007, or more than two-and-one-half times the estimated Internet average.
Leveraging the Network
The challenge for most local websites is "scale," meaning getting enough reach to be effective for consumers and advertisers. IB helps its customers achieve scale by aggregating our more than 70 local websites into a powerful national network that spans all the major markets and covers the bulk of the U.S. population.
IB leverages this network to create distribution relationships that help drive traffic back to our customers' sites. Our relationships include the greatest brands on the Internet, including our unique relationship with CNN where our top local content is distributed throughout CNN.com.
IB also employs the latest in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques providing our customers with a major source of traffic. By leveraging the network and optimizing content and code, IB's customer sites appear prominently for relevant searches in all the major search engines.
A Powerful Variety of Cutting Edge Media
IB embeds all of the relevant content and functionality into a user experience that is convenient for visitors to the sites. From a video player to vertical content, from pictures of real time events, to well written copy, the IB Internet experience is created to drive more usage and user satisfaction.
Award-Winning Journalists
IB's award-winning journalists work in the newsrooms of our customers' sites producing stories, videos, slideshows, interactive tools and more. These local journalists ensure local sites have the most up-to-date, comprehensive coverage available to fully engage local audiences. We provide news online when it happens, not after it appears on TV or elsewhere.
National Content
Local journalists are supported by a full national news team at our St. Paul headquarters. This team covers late-breaking national news stories, special interest content, and provides round-the-clock coverage for our local customers. Our journalists can guide mainstream media operations onto the Web. IB customer sites benefit from our content-sharing relationship with CNN.com. Local publishers can leverage CNN's global newsgathering resources for best-in-class world and national news coverage on their local sites.
Making Websites Better
Our success comes from our content and functionality improvements, ranging from increased editorial specials, to well-placed, easy-to-access video.
While reach and engagement were originally driven from television promotion, today the momentum of the Web is driving growth for our customers. Across our network, average monthly unique visitors have increased 20% from 2006 to 2007 while average monthly page views increased 33%.
Vertical Interests
IB grew to 16 million users per month on the single value proposition that Internet users want relevance. Local TV stations and their unique news content provided this relevance to the Web user. Today, we are expanding to capture vertical areas of interest (autos, sports, health, etc.) through both content and functionality.
Websites & Applications
We recognize the Internet is about much more than websites. We're bringing our powerful content and applications to the Web at large, distributing to meet the market on any site in any format. In addition to hosting websites, we're rolling out modular solutions for web publishers. Our product team is innovating for the future.
