YCombinator-backed Seeing Interactive, which helps newspapers build and sell space in online ad directories and YC-backed Weebly, the service that lets you create your own drag and drop websites, have partnered up to give local newspapers even more options when selling local advertising to small and medium sized businesses.
Seeing Interactive, which raised $1 million in June, used to direct businesses to Weebly when they needed to build websites to supplement Seeing Interactive’s SEO-optimized Marketplace directory pages. Seeing Interactive has now integrated Weebly into its backend and as of January 1st will allow its newspaper clients to offer advertisers the ability to manage their website and directory listings from the same dashboard. Newspapers can now sell the two services as a package, or separately.
“Many of our end users–newspaper’s clients–have never used the internet past e-mail and Weebly makes it easy for them to have a premium website. We’re thrilled to be able to integrate with Weebly,” says CEO Lloyd Armbrust.
Seeing Interactive has already done a test launch with several newspapers including the Norfolk Daily News, The Daily American in Somerset, (the confusingly named) York News Times and Belo Corp’s The Press-Enterprise. You can see an example of a Weebly/Seeing Interactive site here and the power of the SI 81-point SEO audit and social media integration here.
According to Armbrust, the new Weebly white-label website integration has made The Press Enterprise an extra $60,000 in the first three weeks of trial and Armbrust projects revenue of over $500,000 for the entire year. Here’s to saving newspapers, one search ranking at a time.
