The ads pay the editor. The editor earns the reader. The ads have to look like the editor wrote them.

Most local-news ad systems lose the reader before they lose the advertiser. Ads chase the cursor, the screen, the click. Pages take six seconds to render. The page becomes a billboard with a story stapled to it. We refuse this trade. The contract below names the three things we will never do, and the three things we will always do.

Four products, sold separately. Most local-media businesses sell one ( display ) and starve. We sell four, in increasing order of premium pricing, with each product solving a different problem for a different kind of advertiser. The system below is the same in every property, so a sales rep in Round Rock can sell into Newport on Monday morning.

Five standard sizes, all standard IAB. The placeholder for every empty slot is the diagonal-stripe pattern — the same construction defined in § 4.5 of Components. Filled creative must follow the brand's content rules: cream or white background, real serif headline, mono label, no auto-play, no animation, no third-party tracking.

Filled creative follows the same content grammar as the editorial. Mono SPONSORED label top-left. Sentence-case display headline. A short, specific blurb. One mono CTA. Sharp corners. White background. No drop shadow louder than ours. Sales reps walk advertisers through a creative template; we do not accept arbitrary GIFs.

Sponsored content is an article we agree to write on a topic an advertiser is paying us to cover. The piece itself is real reporting — we will not run advertorial we would not publish editorially. The disclosure is the cream label band across the top of every sponsored card, the article header, and the article URL. The label band uses the same construction as the newsletter sponsor block ( § 6.10 ).

Editorial rules that bind sponsored content: Real byline. Real reporting. The reporter, not the advertiser, decides angle and headline. The advertiser may not review the draft. The piece runs at the editor's discretion or not at all. If the advertiser asks us to soften a finding, the answer is no, and we refund. These rules exist because the moment sponsored content is allowed to lie, every other ad on the page becomes suspect.

The Pro listing is the highest-margin product in the system. The pitch is not "buy an ad." The pitch is "let us build twelve to twenty-five pages of structured content about your business, indexed in a way that ChatGPT and Google will cite, attached to a directory readers actually use." It looks like UX. It is also recurring revenue.

The Pro side ( right ) is a small ad in every way that matters — the rust top-stripe, the ★ PRO badge, more inventory, more visual weight. But the value to the reader is real: more pages of indexed structured content, more services listed, more hours, more photos, more reviews. The brand reads it as helpful. The advertiser reads it as ROI. The trick is that both are right.

The newsletter is the highest-value ad surface in the system. Higher open rates than the site, higher CPMs, higher CTRs. Three slots per send, never more. Construction is locked: same cream sponsor band as § 6.10, same rust-top sponsor block, same dark blue footer band. No animation. No tracking pixels beyond the property's own open-tracking pixel.

The premier partner stripe is the bluebonnet-bordered band that sits above the masthead on every page of the property for a quarter at a time. One slot, one advertiser, one named local institution. The language is "presented by," not "sponsored." The premium price reflects how much real estate is given over — but also how restrained it is. No clickbait, no rotating creative. The stripe is a name.

The stripe is the same construction across every property in the network — the same 3 px bluebonnet top-border, the same mono "PRESENTED BY" label in bluebonnet, the same Fraunces partner-name in ink. Only the partner name changes. This consistency is the point: a sales rep can show a Newport hospital exactly what their stripe will look like by pointing at the WilCo Guide one.

• Local presence first. Headquarters, flagship store, or major operation in the property's coverage area. Not a national brand buying inventory at scale.
• No category conflict. No two stripes from the same vertical in adjacent quarters. No politically polarized advertisers ( candidates, PACs, single-issue lobbies ).
• Reputation passes the dinner test. Editor's call. If we would not be comfortable sitting next to this brand at dinner, we do not run their stripe.
• Real money. Quarterly commitment, paid up front. No "trial month." The whole point of the stripe is that the brand is on the masthead.
• Editorial firewall. The partner has no editorial influence. If the partner shows up in the news, the news still runs. This is in the contract.
• Quarterly review. Stripe renewals are not automatic. Editor reviews the partner relationship at the end of every quarter. If anything has changed, the stripe ends.

The reader must always know they are looking at an ad. This table is the canonical mapping of surface to disclosure label. Every property in the network uses the exact same six labels, in the exact same construction. If a surface is paid and not in this table, it does not run until it is.

A schematic of the WilCo Guide home page with every paid surface annotated. Every property in the network ships with this exact slot map. Local editors cannot add, move, or remove slots without sign-off. The cap is six paid surfaces on any single page. Today's page has five.

Floor prices for the flagship property. Other properties scale to local DMA size — Newport is at 0.7×, Round Rock Scoop at 0.6×, Cedar Park at 0.4×. A multi-property contract ( 3+ Scoops in one buy ) takes 15% off the per-property floor. The full rate card is a four-pager; the table below is the public summary.

Why the floors hold up. The CPMs above are 1.6 to 3× the typical local-news rate. The premium is earned: no third-party tracking, real engagement, no clutter, premium creative, and a real local audience. Advertisers who care about brand safety pay it gladly. Advertisers who only care about cheap impressions are not the customer.

The hard rules of the ad system. These are bright-line policies — not preferences — and they bind sales, ad ops, editorial, and the local property GMs equally. The system survives only because the lines hold under pressure from a $4k sponsor who wants the editor to soften a paragraph. The answer is no.