Readers of MinnPost who live or spend time traveling outside Minnesota - and some local readers - may notice a change in the advertising on our site starting today:  no more text  ads from Google.

We’ve made some changes in how we sell advertising, and the most noticeable to the public is that all MinnPost.com readers - wherever they are - will see our local banner ads.  Rates have been adjusted so that our advertisers will in effect be paying only for the 75% or so of the traffic that accesses the site from Minnesota.

Advertising, of course, is a revenue-generator, and an important part of MinnPost’s plan to become self-sufficient by 2012.  But while we’re generating the dollars, we want the site to look good.  And our banner ads look a heck of a lot more attractive than the Google text ads that some readers were seeing.

More important, though, was that geo- targeting, the technology for identifying where a reader was coming from, is imperfect. Some people accessing MinnPost.com from locations in Minnesota were seeing the Google ads, which were supposed to be seen only by national traffic.  Now they’ll see the same banners as everyone else.

The other major change we’ve made, which will be noticeable to advertisers but not readers, is that we’re selling our banners now by slots or shares, not cost-per-thousand-impressions.  For example, an advertiser can buy one-fifth of a week’s impressions in a certain ad shape.  This new way of buying ads will be easier for an advertiser to understand and easier for us to manage. The new rate card is here. If you’d like to learn more about advertising to MinnPost's well-educated, civic-minded audience, contact Sally Waterman, director of advertising.