The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways – before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with – and don’t pay enough attention to – internet marketing. Factoids:

* 42 percent of small businesses say they use the local paper less and 23 percent use yellow pages less – while 43 percent use search engines more.
* “Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
* “Only 9% are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.”
* Mediapost found a disconnect in how small-business owners act as business people and marketers vs. how they act as consumers. That is, as consumers, they use and are satisfied with the internet and search to find other local businesses, but as marketers themselves, they use online less.

The more creative and forward-thinking local small businesses keep finding Front Porch Forum in our pilot area.  Most buy ads and report back remarkable results.

Consumers might “hate ads,” but not enough to pay even as little as a few cents a day to avoid them.

He reported on a survey…

When we asked consumers if they would pay $39.99 a year, which comes out to less than $4 a month, for an ad-free version of one of their favorite sites, only 2.4% said definitely yes, they would be likely to do so. And only 3.5% said they’d be very likely. In fact, 84% of the people said they’d be unlikely or not at all likely.

At the lower price of $29.99 a year, or less than $3 a month, only another 1.9% of consumers said they would be very likely to pay for an ad-free version.

After 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million…

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter…

Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million…

Large papers… can sell premium ad space… for $15 to $50 for every thousand impressions. But these and other papers of all sizes have increasingly relied on middlemen — known as ad networks — to sell less desirable space, typically for around $1 for every thousand impressions…

There are now more than 300 networks, most offering custom ads, and they are popular venture-capital investments and acquisition targets…

Some sites unaffiliated with newspapers have also limited inventory and banned ad networks, and many report good results…

Front Porch Forum works with a limited ad inventory and we do not use ad networks.

[Disclosure: Epik is a sponsor of Front Porch Forum.]

Far be it from me to question the mighty GOOG, but some of the ads that its magic algorithm selects to go with our blog postings leaves me smiling.

And sometimes I’m left just scratching my head. E.g, just now the top ad was for a law firm asking… “Need help beating the death penalty?” or something to that effect. Do people on death row have internet access? But more to the point, how did Google decide that that ad would appeal to our readers?