Shop Local, Advertise Local

Example of one of our Shop Local, Advertise Local ads. No really, advertise on Seattle Bike Blog! It's a good deal.

I have been running in-house ads for a while now that say, Shop Local, Advertise Local," but I think it's time to expand on what I mean and wax about the state of being a local and independent journalist in 2025. I also hope to convince business managers and owners to rethink some of their marketing spends. This will be an unusual post for this site, but it's been tumbling around in my head for long enough that I just need to put it out there.

We all say shop local" because local shops are real and unique and parts of the community. Buy a bike from a local bike shop, for example, because Amazon isn't going to have an open door down the street for you when you need to get it fixed. The same truth applies to advertising and sponsorships. Buying a Facebook ad is like someone ordering a product on Amazon that is easily available in a shop down the street. Advertising on Google is like driving out to Walmart instead of shopping on Main Street.

In recent decades, Google and the social media giants have successfully hoovered up local media advertising dollars, decimating local print news first. Seattle lost one major daily, one major weekly and many smaller papers. The Stranger has dramatically scaled back from its once ubiquitous weekly issues available by the front door of most cafes. None of this is news to anyone, I'm sure. But through the process of endless greed, the search and social media giants have since greatly damaged the products they are selling to advertisers, so businesses investing in them are no longer benefiting as they once did (if they ever did). Nearly all the money flows into a couple middlemen's pockets, and customers and small businesses are both screwed in the process.

Meanwhile, independent journalists have been working hard to cover the important local news and stories that might otherwise fall through the cracks of the fractured traditional news media in town. Neighborhood news, zoning meetings, profiles of new businesses or neighborhood champions, the kind of news that is vital for the neighborhood but that Facebook and Google will never care about and that many regional news organizations might cut from their coverage due to limited reporting resources. But it's the stuff many of your local customers do care about. In fact, individuals pitching in a few bucks a month via subscription services like Patreon are the ones covering much of the costs to keep these sites running. For example, 120 people toss Seattle Bike Blog between $5 and $20 every month, and they don't even get any special content in return. They just want to help keep the site going and keep it free for anyone to access because they care about this work. That's the kind of real value local advertisers should be looking for.

So why don't local media sites just run Google ads if that's where the money is? Well, some do, but they generate pocket change for the typical local media site because they don't start paying much until click counts get very high (unless your local site happens to focus on high-paying keywords like HVAC services). That's a problem for media focused on a smaller area or niche, such as Seattle Bike Blog. As a niche topic within a niche geography, the site will always have a ceiling to how many authentic local clicks we get. To get enough clicks to make a network ad like AdSense generate a worthwhile amount of money, I could goose these view numbers with misleading clickbait headlines or by covering topics with a national or global audience, but that's not the mission of Seattle Bike Blog. And even if I do decide to harm the site's mission by chasing one-time clicks from random people around the world, I would just find myself competing against the same problem that has also eroded the value of buying search ads for small businesses and made using search engines less useful than they used to be: Search engine optimization (SEO") scams.

SEO scam sites are nothing new, but generative AI tech has dramatically accelerated the amount of it out there. These sites create content that has only one goal: To rank high on Google's search results for targeted keywords. We're all familiar with these sites because it seems like its all you get when you search for just about anything these days. Once people click these pages, they are bombarded with intrusive ads and maybe some affiliate links to products, but actually useful information is nowhere to be found. The scammers make money and Google makes money twice (search result AdWords ads and in-site AdSense ads). Meanwhile, the user gets nothing of value, and the advertisers who paid for both the AdWords and AdSense ads wasted their money because the user's search was not successful or satisfying. Your company's ad appearing next to obviously vapid and frustrating SEO slop does not leave a good impression. Google's advertiser dashboard will make it seem like these were high-quality, targeted impressions (and will charge the relevant premium), but they were not. Everyone got scammed while Google and some SEO farm pocketed the cash. It's a small scam, sure, but repeated at enormous scale.

Social media sites are also not the obvious advertising sure thing that they may have seemed at one time. In recent years, the social media landscape has shattered, and users are now scattered all over the place. At the same time, an unknown (but likely high) percentage of active accounts are bots. Bots on social media are nothing new either, but generative AI tech has made them more convincing and difficult to detect. Not only do social media users need to be more skeptical about what they see now, but advertisers also need to be skeptical of the value they are actually getting in return for their ad buys. There are always ways to make social media marketing work for you if you are highly motivated to do so. Maybe you can carefully design your business to mesh with a popular Instagram lifestyle look or do something funny on TikTok. But social media advertising just isn't what it once was for the vast majority of business operators who just want to make a worthwhile ad buy and then get back to their actual work.

This is where local media comes in. Everything old is new again, as they say. It's time to reject the privacy-invading, local-economy-draining online advertising cash fire and bring those marketing budgets back home. Want to target your ads at people who are active and engaged in your community? Forget targeting locals on Facebook and instead seek out advertisements and sponsorships on local news and entertainment sites that are run by real local people including (but definitely not limited to) Converge, the South Seattle Emerald, Capitol Hill Seattle, West Seattle Blog, the Urbanist, Seattle Bike Blog, or even larger local orgs like KEXP, KUOW, Crosscut, the Seattle Times and the Stranger. There are local podcasts, newsletters and YouTube channels, too. The number of choices may be a little overwhelming at first, and local media folks should get together to figure out how to make this discovery process easier for advertisers and make sure they are offering ad products local businesses actually want (journalists tend to be awful at sales, myself very much included). Send out an ad buy request, and a real community member will respond and work with you to get a campaign up and running. If none of the listed ad options fit with your needs, pitch your idea and see where it goes. You could also ask your customers where they get their local news and use that as a way to identify a good platform. Readers, viewers and listeners will notice that your business has made the effort to support something that they value, strengthening a local business's reputation as an institution that cares about its community. When you invest in your community, it comes back around.

These local ad buys may not come with fancy (and privacy-invading) customer analytics that Google and Meta provide, but they have value people in the community desire that the tech giants keep failing to provide: Something genuine and real.