Borrell offering LION members free benchmarking survey

LION has teamed with Borrell Associates to benchmark members' online revenues.

Borrell, a noted industry research and consulting firm, will survey member publishers on their revenues in various categories to gather data for a private, members-only report on the state of the LION segment of the industry.

Borrell is providing this service — for which they would normally charge thousands of dollars – in support of LION's efforts to expand the health and reach of local indie publishers.

The report, which will be available in early January, will help members determine not only how they compare with other local online news operations across the U.S., but also how much they could be making in their individual markets.

Participation is free and open only to Full and Provisional members of LION Publishers. To make the report as useful as possible, we will need everyone to participate in the short survey, and be accurate in the data they provide. The survey requests information on revenue and expenses, which will be kept confidential and used only for benchmarking purposes.

Borrell has been surveying local websites for more than a decade and has more than 6,400 sites in its database. The names of participating companies are never disclosed, and individual data points and market-specific data also remain confidential.

The report will provide benchmarking that will help members determine how well they are doing on both revenues and profitability compared with other local online entities. It will provide analysis principally on advertising sales, including categories of revenue. Further, it will offer guidance on how to size the revenue potential in your market based on "realistic" goals achieved by best-practice sites.

To give Borrell's analysts time to crunch the numbers, please download the survey, fill it out and return it prior to Jan. 5.