Your own feed is yours, free. Post about your business there all day: your story, your products, your people. Content becomes an advertisement the moment you direct it at someone else's audience, a journalist's or a publication's feed, and that's the point of the whole design: local businesses funding local journalism, and being seen doing it. Back one journalist by name, back a whole community, or buy a spot from a paper that publishes its own rates.
The three ways
- Full ad. Headline, copy, images or video, and a link. It appears in the feed and on the stories and posts people open.
- Minimal ad. A tagline and an optional link, text only. Lighter presence, lighter cost, same placement.
- Profile support. No ad at all. Your name on the journalist's or publication's profile, or anonymous if you prefer. Closer to a donation.
Whichever you choose, 90% of what you pay goes to the journalist or publication, and the tier prices, the recurring math, and refunds are on how payments work. Every tier can be one-time or recurring monthly; an ad runs for 30 days. Profile support is the natural ask for family and friends who want to back the work without buying an ad.
Placing and receiving
Placing any of these is open to everyone; an account is all it takes, and a vouch is not required. Receiving is the other side: a journalist or publication takes direct support on a Premium membership, once their payouts and tax form are set up. That's why some people you follow can be supported and others can't yet.
There are two ways in. Offer support from the advertisement form: pick who, pick a tier, set a budget, pay, and it goes live. Or respond to a journalist's pitch: a local journalist may send a ready-made support request, you get an email with a link to review it and approve payment, and the journalist handles the creative.
Who, where, and how long
You can back a specific journalist, a publication (the whole operation, not one person), or an area: name the community and we connect your backing with local journalists there who meet our standards. Backing a person or publication by name is live and immediate; the area path is a beta we're onboarding town by town.
For a full or minimal ad, you choose who sees it: local, readers within about 30 miles of a place; state; country; or global. You set your own budget, an amount and a duration, with minimums that vary by tier and reach and no maximum. We don't sell top placement. Every ad gets shown; your budget decides how often, not whether. An ad's share of impressions is proportional to its daily spend, campaigns rotate inside the same pool, and no one can buy out all the impressions. A fee breakdown, including card processing, appears before you pay.
Booking with one paper
A publication can publish its own rates on its Advertise page, linked from its profile: the spots it sells, how long each runs, what each costs. Where it does, pick a spot and a run length, write the ad (a headline, a couple of sentences, a picture, a link), pay, and it's live, usually in a few minutes. The price on the card is the price you pay; we read it from the publication's own rates when you book. Where a paper doesn't publish rates, a request form is there instead, and it reaches the same place.
The ad goes live when the payment clears and runs for the length you bought, rotating with the other advertisers there. What you're buying is a run and an audience, not a fixed number of views; no advertising platform can promise the second. Booking happens on the web; the iPhone and Android apps show a publication's rates and hand you the booking page. If a price changes while you're filling in the form, we stop and tell you rather than charging a different number.
What you can see
Once an ad is live, you see how it's doing on the same page the journalist uses: impressions, clicks, clicks out to your site, audio plays and 30-second listens when your ad runs alongside a podcast or narrated story (a play in the car counts the same as a play in the app), and how readers reacted to the work it ran beside, over the last 7, 30, or 90 days or all time. An impression counts once 50% of the ad has been visible for at least one continuous second, on web, iOS, and Android, and a reader scrolling back over the same ad isn't counted twice. Totals roll all platforms together.
Self-promotion and links
The profile is the home for your off-platform presence: a website, a newsletter, the other places you publish. Content is different. Community feeds aren't a place to solicit. Content whose main purpose is promotion, a subscription pitch, a donation ask, traffic to another site, stays visible to your own readers, and in a town's Recent feed it runs at the pace ads run at, not ahead of the reporting. Want it in front of the community sooner? Promote it. What leads the feed says what gets there free.
Personal payment and donation links (PayPal, Venmo, tip jars, and the like) aren't allowed, in content or on a profile; creator earnings run through the platform's payment system. Payment details that are part of a story someone is covering, a charity drive or a venue selling tickets, are fine. Whether something is a story or a promotion is determined by My Local Press, and that determination is final.
One address
An email about a support request from a journalist comes from noreply@mylocalpress.com, the only address we use for those. If something looks off, don't click anything and reach us directly.