FAQ

Since we specialize in helping monetize municipal sites, our control processes have been designed specifically to meet your needs. Working with our major municipal site partners, MMS has established a comprehensive set of standards and parameters that assure that only appropriate and relevant advertising appears. Each municipality has full control over which advertisers and ads appear on their website.

At no point in the advertising process will we ask for or expose any personal information of your citizens. Throughout our dealings with our municipal partners, our clients have yet to receive a single complaint regarding the placement or content of advertisements. If you have any further concerns regarding security, please feel free to contact us so that we can provide you with a contact list of current clients for testimonials.

There are no start up, maintenance, or membership fees involved with our services. We incur all of the time and costs associated with:

• Ad server management
• Development of advertising packages & pricing
• Generating sales leads
• Developing proposals
• Closing deals
• Ad trafficking and reporting
• Managing advertiser relationships
• Customer service
• Technical support
• Developing sales collateral materials
• Collections/reconciliation
• Ongoing program management

All that is required on your end is initial set up time.

Each government entity determines whether they need to pass a local ordinance that permits them to offer online advertising (we can provide sample ordinances for review and guidance). Once you are ready to begin advertisements we will supply you with links to place on your website, email, or e-Newsletters. This link will connect to our servers and when a user visits your site, their browser will see the link and the link will make a call to our ad server. After the link is placed on your website, your work is done.

Once your tech team has placed the links, their work is done. The ads serve automatically based on the priorities established by the ad server.

Three types of advertising will appear on the site:

(i) Local Advertising
We aggressively reach out to your community to ensure that local businesses are aware of the program, often working with the local chamber of commerce and other business associations. We price advertising according to a wide range of factors including – total site traffic, site features, and overall local advertising market conditions. Prices and advertising packages are designed to allow local advertisers to participate regardless of the size of their budget. Products include display advertising, text links, and directory listings.

(ii) National Advertising
Because we work with key websites in many states, national advertisers are beginning to see the value of purchasing from a number of our sites simultaneously.

(iii) Network Advertising
Many major firms purchase most of their online advertising through an ad exchange or network. Municipal Media works with our aggregator sell to these networks. Once you have signed a contract, this advertising can be served within several days so your site can start earning revenue immediately. In most cases, revenue will increase the longer a site runs advertising, since more advertisers are aware of the program and there is more competition for the space. Since MMS works on a revenue-share basis we are highly motivated to maximize revenue for our municipal partners.

The simple answer is: it’s complicated. Many different variables go into valuing your website which makes it difficult to generalize dollar amounts for website monetization. The only generalization that can be made is that the more traffic generated by a website, the more money it will make. However, this does not mean that websites with smaller amounts of traffic cannot be profitable. After all, every dollar you make is one more dollar that will not burden the people and communities you serve.

Some municipalities are interested in generating revenue from services other than their web site. Given appropriate volumes, MMS can manage online advertising through newsletters and email communications in order to help municipalities generate even more revenue. Municipal Media can also create the sale of direct mail inserts in a municipality’s postal mail correspondence.

Municipal Media works on a revenue sharing model. For every dollar that is earned through your website, e-mails, or e-newsletters, you earn 60% and we earn the remaining 40%. We succeed, only if you succeed.

Contact MMS at 847-922-1584 or info@municipalmedia.com to discuss how we can help monetize your web site. We’ll walk you through the process, help you understand how advertising can be easily integrated into your site and provide you with preliminary revenue projections.