Snapshots: Dayton Daily News Acts Like a Start-Up with Pets Site

Snapshots from the Edge: A look at new ideas in online newspaper publishing
By Ray Marcano, Internet General Manager, Dayton Daily News

The pet business is booming. Merchandise and services such as clothing, organic food, day care and insurance have created an almost-$40 billion (and growing) industry, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. In addition, pet owners are starting to refer to themselves as "pet parents," and dog parks are gaining ground in communities across the United States. More than 69 million U.S. households have one or more four-legged members.

A group at the Dayton Daily News decided to act like a tech start-up and launch a niche Web site in just nine days that centered on this growth area. 937pets.com and 513pets.com are social networking sites dedicated to pet lovers in the Southwest Ohio region, namely the Miami Valley and northern Cincinnati. In addition to social networking among pet lovers, the site offers photo uploads, photo galleries, helpful information and polls.

Page views for all the company's pet-related products — e-paper sites and the new pets sites — doubled in month-over-month (May vs. April) traffic numbers. Page views exceeded the previous high by 20 percent in May. The pet health/veterinary and the "Communicating with Your Pet" forums are especially popular, as are the photo galleries.

The following is a day-by-day look at how the Dayton Daily News launched these highly successful sites in May.

The Process

Day 1: Thursday May 3: A group at the Dayton Daily News met and decided to launch the sites. We also decided to see if we could act more like a technology company and push the development process as quickly as we could. An artist on our online creative team and an artist at CoxNet in Atlanta created a few mockups for the proposed site.

Day 2: Friday, May 4: We received initial site design, which allowed plenty of room for photos and forum discussions. We contacted a freelancer who created the CSS to apply that design to the site, a process that took four days. Our in-house developers started building out the back end and gathering content for the site.

We initially settled on the names, 937paws.com and 513paws.com, because 513pets.com was already taken. We contacted the owner of 513pets.com to see if he would be interested in selling. Our marketing department contacted an outside agency for some logo ideas, and our in-house designer and CoxNet contributed logo ideas as well.

Since we didn't have time to build two sites, we added code that allowed us to customize information on the pages based on the URL. This enabled us to keep all of the information in the same database, but display it in different places. If someone typed in 513pets.com, they would see the 513pets.com header.

Days 3-5: Saturday-Monday, May 5-7: Our freelancer built the CSS for the site and delivered it to us Monday night. In the meantime, in-house teams wrote scripts to pull pets photos from DaytonDailyNews.com to the new site; gathered content for the site, including stories and calendar events; and created polls for users.

Day 6: Tuesday, May 8: The owner of 513pets.com agreed to sell the domain name, so we changed the name of the sites from "paws" to "pets" (not all pets have paws, of course). We received a terrific color palette from CoxNet and applied the palette.

Days 7 and 8: Monday and Tuesday, May 9-10: We finished polishing the look and feel and applied content to the site.

Day 9: Friday, May 11: We finished the site. However, we had to wait an additional 4 days to launch because the purchase of 513pets.com had not come through. We received the URL on Tuesday May 15, applied it to the site and soft launched. We hard launched on Thursday May 17.

At its height, we had nine people involved internally, not counting the freelancer and assistance from CoxNet. The nine internal staff members added content, built the modules, came up with discussion topics, started discussions and more. Some people worked regular workdays, others worked through the weekend to prepare the site. The launch required putting a few things off for a week or so, but we still had enough staff to keep day-to-day operations going at daytondailynews.com.

Content and Promotions

We incorporated a large amount of automated content; RSS feeds from our e-paper pet blog, user-contributed photo galleries and events listings.

To get conversations started, we used staff to post to the discussion boards, add events and contribute to our listings: pet daycare, breeders, boarding, groomers, mortuaries, pet stores, pet sitters, trainers and vets. We utilized staff from all areas of the online group, and this flexibility resulted in a robust.

We also built a bridge between the new site and the photo gallery on our e-paper site and imported those photos into the 937pets.com and 513pets.com databases. As a result, we were able to launch with more than 800 photos.

To promote the site, we ran ads in the all eight of Cox Ohio's newspapers. We promoted the site using text links on our e-paper home pages and pet channels. Most of our page views came from our e-paper promotions. A few ideas for future marketing efforts include partnering with a local shelter on a fundraiser and holding an event on the parking lot of a locally owned and operated pet store.

Less than two months after launch, a handful of advertisers are already expressing interest in the product.

First Published:
July 1, 2007