Rise in Digital Communications

Kim Schmidt recalls that getting the websites going on a professional system led to an array of new opportunities, including On the Record, webinars, podcasts and the documentary film series.

While we’d made big investments from the prior publisher’s static web page, Our first “real” content management system was a proprietary system we signed on with in 2008. While effective, we weren’t monetizing the Farm Equipment site in any real way. We got started in block/banner advertising via a “Founder’s Club” program, and the system allowed a daily news feed, collecting any news added to the site from the day before. 

In a few short weeks, I took a call from an equipment distributor who said he “wanted to advertise on that thing." I gave him the quote for a block ad, and he said he wanted the daily news. I told him we didn’t have anything like that and his reply was to figure it out and give him a price. I asked why and he said he wanted to appear alongside the news we were posting daily because, as he said, “I know that anytime anyone takes a dump in this industry, you guys are already on top of it.”

He was complimenting us for our speed and recognized the fast-moving news that dealers could access for the first time. That's how we started monetizing the daily news feed. It would be a while before Farm Equipment moved from an every-other-week to a daily newsletter, now one of the most-cited benefits of a Farm Equipment subscription.