I’m reading the Sunday paper (a metropolitan daily) and went looking for the weather. It was tacked onto the last page of the sports section, so I glanced there for the first time.
It seems odd somehow and I realized there were no ads, except ads for the newspaper itself.
Why would they do that?
Sure, it may be completely ignored by people like me, but that’s just as true of other sections, like the Wine page and the Travel page and the stock reports.
Do you mean there were NO ads anywhere in the entire sports section? I find that hard to believe.
San Francisco Chronicle. It’s in your local library.
Actually, we’re kinda provincial here in Akron, Ohio. There just isn’t enough money to get every US daily.
So, am I to assume that you mean there were NO ads in the entire sports section? Should I phrase it in a different manner to get a straight answer?
The sports pages of my local Danbury News-Times are almost devoid of ads.
In today’s (Sunday) sports section proper there’s just one small ad for a local radio station. On the very last page, mostly of local results, upcoming events, etc. (in 8-pt type), there are three ads, one of which promotes the paper’s Monday bowling column; all three are eminently unremarkable.
Years and years ago, I vaguely recall trying to run an ad in this paper’s sports section, but they wouldn’t let me. At the time, the sports pages were utterly inviolable.
Of course Greater Danbury is hardly the marketing capital of the world.
We have a Telephone Store in Danbury, in which Southern Bell sells it wares — phones, jacks, answering machines, and so on.
The phone number for this store is unlisted.
I am not making this up.
With all due respect this is next to impossible to believe. I’m sure there are a few pages with wall to wall sports results, but on the back of that page or interspersed with the results are usually numerous ads.
Wait a minute… just so I’m clear do you mean that there were no ads in the sports section of a major daily newspaper or that there were no ads in the weather section.
The sports section is usually a highly desirable spot for advertising automobile and tire products and services.
The OP’s question:
Why would my paper’s sports pages have no advertising?
What are you on about? I gave the “straight answer” in the OP.
And Akron has 217000 people. They will probably have the paper. Turns out we get yours.
That’s the basic question then, Why would they do that? If it’s a tradition of some kind, surely commercialism would have gotten over that obstacle.
I don’t know. But I believed your story implicitly, if for no other reason than that it meshed with my experience.
Danbury was somewhat backward when we moved here in March 1974. In November of that same year with the first snow falling, I went to the town’s largest hardware store and asked for a snow shovel.
“We sold it,” the clerk said, earnestly.
God’s truth.
How about today’s Sunday NY Times? The sports section runs to to 14 pages.
The first ad — a half pager — is on page 7 and is for the paper itself.
Next ads are in a small 2 column by 4" on page 12 in which there are 9 small ads.
Last ads, page 14. Two half-page car ads — Cadillac and Saab.
There seems to be something sacrosanct about the sports pages, at least in some newspapers.
So, unless I’m stupid, there are ads other than for the newspaper itself in the New York Times sports section.
Is that a fair assessment? What does the NYTimes have to do with the SF Chronicle?
I’ll call in the morning. Sorry about you getting ours. It ain’t worth it.
On Saturday the LA Times sold its entire Page 2 of its sports section to advertising. Normally it has a page full of ads for electronics or tires.
First of all, let me give you this: a link to the advertising rates in the Chronicle. Though the link is to their standard page, they provide the full list of advertising rates in a PDF file.
According to the web page I linked, their advertising rates
but not the sports section. Under Weekly Featured Sections you’ll find Wine, Book Review, and so on, but no sports. The PDF file says much the same thing but, inexplicably, they list the deadlines for submitting advertising to the Main, News, Sports and Business sections. No rates for the Sports page are listed explicitly (not that I could find). It looks as if they don’t really sell advertising there.
Why? I couldn’t say. According to this site, the Chicago Tribune sells ads in their sports section.
Perhaps the Chronicle has fallen prey to commercialism of a different type: budget cuts. They may have decided that in their market it’s cheaper to run a sports section without ads to cut the number of pages to a minimum. It could also be a function of how many ads they get for the sports section on any given day.
Whenever you see a layout that includes lots of “Buy Our Fine Newspaper!” and “Your Ad Here!” space, I’d wager that means they had slightly too much sports content for 5 pages, but not enough to fill up 6 (or whatever).
There’s also the possibility that, as in Seattle, two local newspapers have reached an accommodation to save money on certain sections or to split the market, splitting (for instance) the most popular comics in the funny pages section. Perhaps one newspaper has agreed to cut back its sports section so it can spend more on features?
I couldn’t find advertising rates for the Examiner online. Have you checked if they advertise in the sports section? Which newspaper has a better sports section?
It does seem weird that the Sports section of your paper doesn’t have ads. Have you noticed it just this Sunday? The paper may have a policy not to run ads in the sports section.
I work for a newspaper, and what Fish noted about the house ads is correct. They are used for filler – let’s say you have 5.25 pages of content and ads <or not ads> (X column inches). At the press, for that section, you order 6 pages, so you have to fill it with something. You can only order by 2s, so obviously you can’t squeeze 5.25 pages into content into 4 pages, so you jump to 6 pages.
In our local daily, the Sports page ads are for skin bars, autos, and other “manly” stuff.
Every paper is different about advertising policies. It could be that they didn’t sell any ads for the sports section this week (though I find that VERY hard to believe).
Perhaps I can help (I work there).
I haven’t looked at today’s Sports section, but I can quite believe there was no advertising there. There would be advertising if advertisers wanted to run there. Typically most don’t. Although I work in Advertising I don’t work in sales, so I don’t really know why, but I know historically (last few years) advertising in the Sports section has been sparse. For that reason there have been various special incentive rates for that section, but I believe recently these have gone away. That may have reduced the advertising volume in that section even further. If this were a working day I could be checking on some of these details; if there is further interest tomorrow I will be happy to oblige.
As for listing the sports section in our rates, the phrase “Main News sections” includes everything that isn’t included in the other groups (i.e. Weekly Featured Sections). Grocery, Furniture and Electronics are special rate by category of advertiser, not by section. Preprints are another type of advertising also called Inserts.
Hope this helps.
Well, the entire Sports section is *almost * ad-free, but not quite entirely.
The very back page of the section, the other side of the weather page, is an ad for Cingular. The entire page. A full color ad.
Page C16 has an ad for KTVU’s Ten O’Clock News. Another full color ad, taking up about one quarter of the page.
C10 and C12 have ads for what look like books put out by the paper.
And then there are one or two very small ads for advertising in the paper itself.
The rest of the section (the entire section is 20 pages), however, is ad free.