Without a doubt we want the byline issue fixed.

For whatever reason the BLOX byline box doesn't honor line breaks so we end up with:

Kevin M. Cox The Daily News

instead of:

Kevin M.Cox

The Daily News

Thanks Nick, that is what I thought. Looks like the bug is in the Performance display area then.

Nick, it sounds like the Facebook model is what you're after. Where you can create Campaigns, that contain Ad Sets (different budgets and targeting), which contain a variety of different individual ads.

That would definitely be cool as well but I'm happy to keep things simpler for now!

I probably did a bad job of explaining this.

We're not looking for an ad with motion, or one that rotates while it is displayed. We can do that with HTML5 or GIF if needed.

We're looking for the ability to upload multiple static image creatives into BLOX as part of the same ad. Then have BLOX randomly (or sequentially) select one of those image creatives to display when the page is loaded. Once the system displays the ad, that particular image is the one the reader sees. Nothing would change for the reader until the page was loaded again.

So BLOX would know that it has this "set" of static image that are all part of the same ad number. So it is a single advertisement in the system. I guess a good way to think of it would be like a collection of images.

When that particular advertisement (medium rectangle, leaderboard, etc.) gets called up to be served, BLOX would then display only one of the available images to the reader. This could be random or sequential.

So if five different readers all get served that same single advertisment (with five images available in the set) they would all see a different image. However the impressions would increment five times for that single ad, as normal. They would all follow the same positions, targeting and day parting since they are a single advertisement.

This would greatly increase the ease of reporting and billing since we'd only have a single "ad" in the system despite it sharing five different "creatives."

Papers could use this as a was to increase revenue as well. For instances increasing the CPM by $0.50 or $1 for customers who want to use this option.

Hopefully that helped make things more clear but if not please let me know and I'll try again!

I appreciate all the responses.

What I'm actually looking for is a statistic that says:

"For the past month you had 100,000 unique visitors. Of those, 10,000 of them had active subscriptions."

I already know how to find our current active subscriptions, what I really need to know is how many of those subscribers are actually visiting the site in a given month.

Did y'all ever launch one Jason?

This is probably a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

We don't have one at work, but personally I've worked with phpBB and liked the flexibility.

Probably the most complicated part would be if you wanted to hook into the Town News database for users/authentication.

Just bumping this one back up since the subject has come up again at our paper.

I'll be looking forward to hearing how this goes Erica. I'd like to make the same move down the road.

Thanks Nick, we definitely appreciate the feedback. You make some great points.

We’re inside the Houston Metroplex so we do have to fight that effect of other outlets having something for free. That has actually shaped our current policy in that we put things that other outlets are covering in front of the paywall, but exclusives or more “premium” content behind the wall.

The relationship building is exactly what got us started on our current discussion.

Interesting idea Jennifer.