CASE /// REGIONAL LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE
CITICON
Live clientLIVE CLIENT · REGIONAL LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE · CITICON-ONLINE.DE
A magazine's website that stopped costing money and started carrying advertising space of its own.
Around €10,000 a year that the website can earn instead of cost.
Seven advertising positions, at the rates that were actually booked: €150 and €250 per position per month.
They are unsold at the moment, and the honest version of that is further down this page. What is proven here is the surface and the rate — not this month's revenue.
“A project without a clear ROI is not an investment. It is an expense.”
Where they stood
CITICON is a regional lifestyle magazine. Like every magazine, it does not earn its money from readers — it earns it from the advertising space inside the publication. That is the entire business model.
The website did what most magazine websites do: it existed. It presented the publication. It sold nothing, and it carried nothing.
What the real problem was
If a company earns its living selling advertising space, and its own website carries no advertising space, then the website is not part of the business. It is an expense the business tolerates.
That is the question we bring to every project: what does this company actually sell — and is the website participating in that, or standing beside it?
The decision — and why
We built the site so it could do the same job as the magazine.
Seven advertising positions, managed from the backend, each bookable with its own link and its own specification. And a rule that matters more than it sounds: if a position is not booked, it does not render. No empty boxes, no “your ad here” placeholders. A reader only ever sees advertising someone actually paid for, which is why the page does not feel like an advertising page.
Alongside it, a proper editorial section where the articles can be read online, styled the way the large magazines do it rather than the way company websites do it. That section is what makes the advertising positions worth buying: nobody books a space on a page nobody reads.
What it is worth
Seven positions. Advertising has actually been sold in them, at €150 and at €250 per position per month — real rates from real bookings, not estimates. At that level the seven positions carry roughly €10,000 a year: revenue the website earns instead of costs.
And the part a case study normally leaves out
Right now those positions are empty. Two carry the magazine's own advertising; the rest are unsold. Not because they don't work — they demonstrably do — but because selling them is not currently a priority.
We are showing that on purpose, because it is the most useful thing on this page. A website that can earn money only earns it if somebody works it, and that decision gets made again every month. It is the same lesson I first learned optimising processes in automotive: the hardest part was never the system, it was whether anyone would use it.
Which is why we don't hand a system over and call it delivered. A build without someone running it afterwards is half a project.
Full disclosure: CITICON is my mother's company, and the website was originally a gift. It has been a paying maintenance client for years — new issue, new articles, every month — but you should hear that from me rather than work it out from an imprint.
Technically: built on WordPress in an older structure, which limits what can be extended today. Built now, the foundation would be different. The thinking behind it would not.