BY JOHN ECKBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
For new Internet surfers boggled by the variety of the World Wide Web, the Cincinnati junction of the information network has come into sharp focus.
Cincinnati.Com, one of the top 15 city Web sites in North America according to Web Magazine, has a new name.
Today, it becomes Cincinnati.com.
As umbrella for online editions of The Cincinnati Enquirer and The Cincinnati Post, the name change means out-of-towners and local Internet users will have an easier time finding the Queen City's front door to the Internet, said James Jackson, online director of The Cincinnati Enquirer.
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BY THE NUMBERS
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In 1997, its second year of operation, GoCincinnati had:
42.6 million page views.
8.8 million user sessions or visits.
Created 32,000 pages.
Readers sent 30,800 postcards.
Readers sent 37,000 e-mails to the newspaper.
The newspaper published 975,000 classified advertisements. The newspaper converted 129,750 display classified ads for publication.
The newspaper built 278 Web sites.
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"Overall, our Web sites have grown very rapidly, and part of it is about the Internet itself, which has grown at a phenomenal rate," he said. "Cincinnati is a little behind the rest of the United States in terms of access to the Internet, certainly in terms of businesses that use the Internet.
"But we have a foundation upon which a lot of rapid growth is happening. Anybody who has a Web site will be seeing significant growth."
The site registers 850,000 user sessions a month and 4.5 million page views. About 2,500 e-mails come to the Enquirer monthly. The site also has 58,500 pages.
The growth of the Internet as an advertising vehicle is not lost on the Enquirer, the largest advertising and news-gathering organization in the Tristate. Nor is it lost on its Internet division.
While Mr. Jackson would not release advertising revenues from the newspaper's Web site, he said revenues were growing and so were the number of Web sites maintained by advertisers -- about 300. The company received a 30 percent increase in Internet advertising for 1998, when compared with 1997, Mr. Jackson said. Double-digit increases are also projected for 1999.
Clearly, newspapers like The Enquirer have found a revenue source in Internet portals, national and local experts say.
The New York-based InterMedia Advertising Solutions (IAS), an agency that tracks Internet advertising, found that revenues on national newspaper Web pages are dramatically up when the first quarter of 1998 is compared to first quarter 1997.
The New York Times received $870,000 in the first quarter of 1997 and saw that increase 97 percent to $1.71 million for the same period this year. At the Wall Street Journal, 1997 first-quarter revenues were $2.6 million and increased by 50 percent to $3.9 million for the same period this year. USA Today saw 1997 first-quarter revenues of $2.02 million rise 23 percent to $2.48 million for the same period this year.
Revenues are on the rise, in part, because national advertisers are increasingly seeing the Internet as an advertising opportunity, rather than an advertising afterthought. For example, IBM posted $3 million in advertising on the Web in the first quarter of 1997 and boosted it by 148 percent to $7.6 million for the same time frame this year, according to IMAS figures.
Increases also occurred at Honda, from $353,000 to $1.29 million for a 251 percent increase; Compaq, from $130,690 to $1.55 million for a 1,900 percent increase; and Toyota, from $946,588 to $1.1 million for a 21 percent increase.
"The context, though, is this: Internet on average represents 1 percent of the total advertising dollars spent annually in the United States," Joseph C. Philport, president of IMAS, said. "The Internet is still an emerging advertising medium."
When Cincinnati.com, formerly GoCincinnati, and Enquirer.Com were launched Nov. 1, 1996, content mirrored the printed newspaper, and only a small sample of Enquirer content was available. Since then, online features like local traffic reports, weather radar, television listings, community guides and postcards have been added.
The Enquirer bought the domain name Cincinnati.com from Keith and Kevin Siepel, co-owners of the Mariemont-based Premier Internet, a service provider and Web site design firm. The sale price of the domain name was not disclosed, Mr Jackson said. The company had registered the name Cincinnati.com and other key domain names during the early days of the World Wide Web in 1995.
"We were trying to register Cincinnati.net at the time, but on the day it was supposed to be granted by Internic, which had a sole source government contract for managing name space on the internet, the name went to another host," Keith Siepel said. "We ended up with Cincinnati.com and Cinti.net. Our impetus was that it was easy to remember."
Creating a name for an online magazine is one thing. Actually creating an online magazine is something else, and it is a lot harder to do. "When we had Cinti.com, we would get numerous e-mails," he said. "One came from somebody coordinating Japanese travelers to find out where the best Japanese restaurants were. We referenced them to the ever-memorable gccc.com. -- that's the chamber of commerce.
"For us, an online magazine was a very expensive proposition to put up and maintain, particularly to keep it current. But if you're already a newspaper, it's in the middle of your dinner plate."
Operating the Web site gives a glimpse into the changing dynamics of the new-media world, Mr. Jackson said. Most people read Cincinnati.com at work, particularly during lunch hour, the busiest time. The next peak comes at 8 p.m.
Sunday classified ads and news are consumed throughout the week.
Sports is the No. 1 site for readers, he said, and the shelf life of the Sunday paper is preserved through the Web site.
"On Wednesday, people are still reading the Sunday online edition," he said.
The Monica Lewinsky story drove online readership to new highs. In August, the story led to an 800 percent increase in viewers to the national news section of the site.
"It's not about doing business the way we have in the past -- writing a 500-word story and publishing it on a 24-hour-a-day cycle," Mr. Jackson said. "It's about giving readers direct access to the full scope of information so that they can sort out democracy for themselves."
