A mid-sized, multi-title publisher group came to us the way a lot of publishers do: interested in digital ad revenue, but not ready to change how their team sold. So Origami, our print-to-digital ad conversion solution, went in as an add-on, something reps could offer when they remembered to, one advertiser at a time.
It worked, to a point. But a year in, digital revenue across the group had crept up to only around $80,000 annually, a fraction of what the audience could actually support. Every digital sale still depended on a rep manually closing it, so growth was capped at whatever the sales team had time to pitch. Meanwhile print kept its slow, familiar decline, and the gap between the two kept widening. There was no repeatable way to sell the group's full audience, just a growing list of one-off conversations.
The shift came when the group stopped treating digital as an optional line item and started treating it as part of the product. Every print ad, across every title in the group, now automatically included its digital extension. Advertisers weren't pitched a new purchase; they were told, plainly, that the ad they already bought now reached further. Nothing about the advertiser relationship changed. What changed was that digital stopped being something a rep had to remember to sell.
The results were immediate. Within a year, digital ad revenue across the group grew to roughly $650,000, close to an 8x increase, spanning several times as many titles, with no new hires and no added workload for the sales or production teams. The revenue came entirely from advertisers the group already had.
That's the core of what Origami is built to do: turn a publisher's existing print relationships into digital campaigns automatically, with ads scraped, processed and verified by U.S.-based reviewers before anything goes live. There's no setup, monthly or per-seat cost. A publisher only pays when a campaign is actually created and launched, and keeps the large majority of every dollar it generates. Behind it, our remnant ad backend fills the inventory a direct sales team doesn't have time to reach, so nothing behind those conversions goes unsold.
The lesson from this group's experience is a simple one: the biggest jump doesn't come from adding a new product to the stack. It comes from changing how the whole audience gets sold.
Want to learn more or see a demo? Reach out to Craig Massey, chief revenue officer, at craig@ownlocal.com or 561-613-7042.
