Daily Newspapers
A daily newspaper comes out each day, although some don't publish on Sunday.

The advantage to a daily newspaper is that the advertiser can run any day they want. This is important if the advertiser wants to be in the newspaper on the day people are most likely to buy their product or service.

For example, major department stores can run towards the end of the week and on Saturday to reach the people who are about to do their weekend shopping. I once handled the banks for a large daily newspaper, and they would always run on Mondays and Tuesdays. I always assumed they ran at that time because they were afraid of being lost in a huge newspaper that was typical towards the end of the week but it turned out that they ran early in the week because their banks were closed on the weekend and they didn't want to sell people on their services when nobody was there to take their call.

Another advantage of a daily is that an advertiser can run as often during the week as he wishes. For example, a funeral home director approached me once after one of the frequent advertising seminars we give for newspapers. He asked me how often he should be advertising, and I explained that he might want to be in there whenever people come in and out of the market. His case is unusual since there's not a lot of waiting time between needing a funeral home and hiring one, so we suggested running daily.

Many dailies also have some of the highest paid circulation in their area, and can be one of the most affordable places to advertise in on a cost per paper basis. Because of the high volume of newspapers dailies usually put out, their rates may seem high, but as with printing anything in large quantities, the per copy cost of printing goes way down. That's why many agencies try to figure out this per copy price to compare different products.

Actually, many ad agencies will calculate the cost of an ad not per copy, but per thousand copies. So let's say a full page in your newspaper costs, let's say, $3,000. I've worked for newspapers where a full page is $15,000 and others where a full page was little more than $1,000. But let's say $3,000. If the newspaper had a circulation of 30,000, then the cost of running that ad per thousand copies could be calculated by dividing the price of the ad, $3,000, by the number of thousands of copies the ad will appear in, or 30. Remember not to divide by 30,000, just 30, since you're looking for the cost of 1000 papers, not one paper. So $3,000 divided by 30 is $100. This means that for every thousand newspapers in which their ad appears, it costs them $100.

Now this can only tell you so much. The price of the ad is still $3,000. The cost per thousand equation is really meant as a way to standardize and compare prices of different mediums. And even then it's not telling you a whole lot, because many times the lower the circulation of a product, the more targeted and therefore more valuable the reader is, and therefore, more expensive. But it's just nice to know that when someone asks you what your cost per thousand is, or CPM as they call it, then you know what it is. CPM's are much more frequently used when pricing any preprinted inserts (such as inserted glossy coupon pages) that your newspaper might carry.