Our experience with online advertisers to date suggests they’re mostly interested in targeting specific markets, by which I mean geographic markets, and finer gradations where possible. The online Chicago Reader takes in a fair amount of money that way, and the ad inventory in the music section often sells out. We’ve had a much tougher time selling the Straight Dope because of the perception that its audience is spread all over the place and its interests are diffuse, even though we offer advertisers the ability to geotarget specific locations. The presumption with the SDCMB is that users will mostly be in metropolitan Chicago, and that they’ll self-sort by areas of interest - clubs, restaurants, neighborhoods, etc. This is pretty much how advertising in the printed paper works. In other words, if you’re opening a new music club in Chicago, you’ll probably want to run your online ad only in the After Hours section of the SDCMB, on the assumption that that’s where your core audience hangs out. So to answer your question, we plan to charge everybody as close to the rate-card rate as we can get, but we figure to do a lot of targeting.
I think SDC will also invigorate the editorial side of the Reader. I’ve been helping Cecil with research on the first SDC columns, and I have to tell you it’s been a riot. The first SDC column appears next week; we’ll be interested to hear what people think.