If you are using Google Ad Manager you could probably create an HTML5 ad with different links -- one for the phone number and one for a click through to the advertiser's site. I don't know that we've done this for a phone number link, but we have put two different links on one ad for a place that sells dog food. If you clicked on the left side of the ad it took you to their puppy food page and the right side took you to their adult dog food page.

I applaud your attempts to get this addressed. It would be nice to hear something other than crickets.

Are pulling the information for all of your users with the API calls? I've used it to get a single user's custom fields when they get to particular page, but I haven't found a way to get the information for all users in one export. For example, we used a custom field to save a subscriber's high score for a javascript game. When that user comes back to the game, the score is shown. But I don't know how to get a list of all of the users that have saved high scores. If I could see all of the users that have a value set in that field, I would know how many of them played the game.

Our paywall provider does allow us to do this, and I can tell you we do use keywords to make things paid all the time. We also use the keyword to make something free in a section that would otherwise be paid such as a COVID-19 article (free) in news (paid section).

Another thing that our paywall provider allows us to do is make landing pages paid or free. I don't know if the TownNews metering system allows for that. For example we can have a page with coupons that is only available to subscribers (https://lancasteronline.com/coupons/). You can't see the contents of that page unless you logged in because that page contains full content pieces.

Someone in our company just got a response to my revenue question from Rick Rogers at TN:

To answer Maureen’s concern about the $250 fee, there is no upfront fee for the Evvnt calendar. Actually, you will generate revenue from day 1. Here is an example of how it works. LNP launches Evvnt on June 1, and will earn 20% of all calendar listing revenue up to when the $249 fee is covered for TownNews/Evvnt. Meaning that TN/Evnnt will take 80% of the upsell revenue up to $249 in a one-month period. Once the meter hits $249, LNP will then earn 40% of upsell revenue, 60% to TN/Evvnt. If you do not hit the $249 mark in a month, there is still no fee, your revenue share just remains at 20%. I hope that is helpful.

I still have more questions though, so we're trying to get a demon/training session scheduled.

Personally, I'm also confused by the wording in the email about the cost. The email says:

The upgrade comes with no associated monthly charge. To offset Evvnt's standard $250 monthly per-site fee, 20 percent of Evvnt upsell revenue—up to a cumulative total of $250—will be passed to participating TownNews clients. Once the total upsell revenue for a given site exceeds $250 in a calendar month, the revenue share rises to 40 percent (to the participating site).

So does that mean there is no monthly cost even if you don't sell any events? Or does that mean that you have to sell enough to clear the $250? Or does that mean that  the sites which do make sales need to sell enough to cover the $250 x the number of sites participating?

I'm also wondering what the alternative is if you choose not to switch to Evvnt? Do you just keep going with the calendar functionality as it is or does that mean you don't have a calendar?

The email was a little a vague, and after having the Blox Photo Sales suddenly shut down because of issues with the 3rd-party fulfillment site, we're a little hesitant to jump into another 3rd-party dependent situation.

We do have advertorial content on our site. I don't know how successful it has been. For that you'd have to talk to someone in our advertising department.

As for placement we have it showing up in our front page grid (https://lancasteronline.com/), but we created a special block to allow the sponsored content to stay in place for 24 hours while the regular news articles flow through the grid. When there is no sponsored content, the spaces just fill in with regular news.

So the 2nd, 7th, 13th today happen to have sponsored content. And those articles will stay essentially pinned in those spots for 24 hours. If the 24 hours for one in the 2nd spot ends before the others, it will drop out and the 7th will move into the 2nd spot, and the 13th will move up to the 7th spot. When the 24 hours is up for all of them, the grid will just have our regular most recent news stories in all of the spots.

If you have any questions about what we did, I'd be happy to answer them.

I just sent you an email with the code that we used for this. If you have any questions about it, let me know.

I agree 100% that it would be great to have the ability to do this built into the system.

Is this the sort of thing that you're looking to do https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/what-s-the-most-dangerous-road-in-lancaster-county-here/article_5b2bed78-f3f8-11e8-bfe3-2b2c88e012a3.html ? If it is, we did it with some css, an html asset and a gif. I'd be glad to share our html code with you if you would like it. It's set up so that you include the html asset in any story, then put a div in the article body that contains the image for that article. That way we could reuse it although I don't believe we have used it for anything other than this article.

Thanks very much