College Media Network wants to continue to provide a high level of service for college media in the long term and to do that, we must charge a license fee for newspapers who are smaller.
Below, we outline the various options and implications of our new licensing structure.
BEFORE YOU READ ON...please understand that we did extensive market analysis and calculated long term costs for our business and the costs of alternatives for college newspapers when structuring these fees.
We hope that as you evaluate our fee structure with comparable services you will understand that our rates are conservative for the services we provide.
Any claims to that beat our pricing structure with equal service should be scrutinized for their long term viability as a solution.
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How does this work?
Newspapers using CP5 will be invoiced an annual payment* of $1,995 for the services rendered by CMN. The components and services included in this package are available for review to the right (Core Services).
This cost is most attributable to user support and training. There is an option to reduce this cost by half at $995/yr, but the newspaper will only have collegepublisher.com for training and information on how to publish.
For anyone moving forward with a $995 contract, any design support or training would be billed at $150 per hour. Support hours billed would relate to issues that resulted in user error and would be communicated in advance of invoicing.
*If a college publication averages over 25,000 page views per month, all of these fees are waived.
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What about advertising?
Flexibility is the goal.
Newspapers will have more choice with managing online ad inventory by selecting one of the following on an annual basis:
A. CMN and the newspaper will share the inventory among all 5 ad units with a 70/30 breakdown. The newspaper will be able to utilize each ad placement up to 30% of the page impressions. The college newspaper will retain 100% of the revenue made off local ad campaigns they schedule – any unused inventory on the newspaper-side will be filled with remnant ads (of which the newspaper will receive 20% of the revenue – checks will be sent when they meet a certain minimum threshold).
B. CMN will sell all 5 spots and remit a payment of 20% of the total revenue to the newspaper.
C. The newspaper can buy the entire inventory from CMN at a rate of $7.50 per 1,000 page views. Naturally, the newspaper would retain all the revenue from the advertisements placed on site.
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What about existing contracts?
We plan to honor any existing affiliate agreements in place, but will not be renewing under those terms and look to transition CMN newspapers to the new Access Network affiliate agreement.
Please contact us with questions and concerns as soon as possible.
