Every little helps…
0Innovative councils are using advertising on their websites to help offset running and staff costs.
Councils including Nottingham City, Aylesbury Vale and Hull City are making money on packages from suppliers such as Google and Logonet which generate ads on the local authority’s homepage.
“We do it to offset the cost of running the website – it saves money for the taxpayer,” said Dominic Miller, commercial marketing manager for Nottingham City Council. “We started in June 2008 and we’re the first council to start generating income from our website. A lot of ad spend has moved online so we saw an opportunity to make some revenue.”
Income has grown over the last four years and doubled in the last two, added Miller: “It certainly pays our web hosting costs and contributes toward salaries. It’s beaten our expectations.”
At Aylesbury Vale District Council, Helena Bryan was responsible for setting up advertising through Logonet. “We asked customers if they’d be worried if we used advertising on the site and they said it wasn’t a problem,” she explained.
Bryan expects to generate £4,000-£12,000 per year with expectations at the lower end for this year.
Both Google Ads and Logonet allow the councils to switch off ads whenever they want to. One of the main concerns was not to display unsuitable advertising. “I have a long list of companies we don’t want advertising,” said Bryan. “We wanted to be sure that what we did do fitted with our brand.”
