A Swiss Online Magazine Earned About EUR 5,000 From Advertising in Six Months
Quick Summary (If You Are in a Hurry)
- A Swiss canton online magazine started selling ad space and earned about EUR 5,000 in net profit from advertising in its first six months.
- The magazine wanted to run paid ads but had no way to place them on its website.
- The real cause was its WordPress theme, which had no built-in ad spots and was years out of date.
- I rebuilt the magazine on an ad-ready theme, moved its articles across, and optimized its images, finishing in about three days.
- I also showed the team how to find and approach local businesses to sell ad space to.
The lesson: when a publisher cannot sell ads, the website theme is often the blocker, not the design.
Full Case Study
At a Glance
- Client: a Swiss canton online magazine, published in print every two weeks and online on WordPress
- Platform: WordPress, rebuilt on a purpose-built magazine theme with built-in ad placement
- Service: Monetization rebuild
- Timeline: about three days for the rebuild, 2016
- Headline results: the magazine earned about EUR 5,000 in net profit from advertising in its first six months
Client and Context
The client was a local newspaper for one Swiss canton. It came out in print every two weeks and ran an online edition on WordPress. The online edition was updated every day with two or three new posts, mostly local news and interviews with well-known people in Switzerland.
The owner had bought the website and wanted two things from it. He wanted it to look modern, and he wanted to earn money by selling advertising space to local businesses. Other Swiss and German papers already earned money this way.
My main contact was the magazine’s technical director. He knew what the owner wanted, but he did not know WordPress or website building, so he hired me through Upwork. The site and all its content were in German, which I do not speak, so we worked together in English.
The Problem
The magazine could not sell advertising, even though local businesses were ready to buy it. The block was in the website itself, not in the sales effort.
Its WordPress theme, the ready-made framework that controls how a site looks and what it can do, simply had no built-in places to show paid ads. The magazine had three real problems:
- The theme had no ad spots built into its design.
- The theme was at least five years old and could no longer be updated.
- The site looked plain and dated next to other regional papers.
These gaps cost the magazine in two clear ways:
- It earned nothing from advertising, which was its main plan for new income.
- It had nothing reliable to offer the local businesses that wanted to advertise.
The Audit and Diagnosis
The real blocker was the magazine’s old theme. It had no feature for placing ads in set spots on the page, and it was too old to fix.
I confirmed this in two ways:
- I logged into the WordPress dashboard and opened the theme’s settings. It offered very few useful options, and it had not been updated in at least five years.
- I viewed the live site the way a reader would. It looked plain and dated, well behind other regional papers.
I could have forced ads onto the old theme with extra plugins, which are small add-on programs that bolt features onto WordPress. But that would have been a fragile patch on a weak base. A theme built for online magazines, with ad spots already part of its design, was the cleaner and safer answer.
The Solution
I rebuilt the magazine on a new theme made for online publishers, and I built that foundation myself.
- Chose the right theme. I recommended a well-coded, well-known magazine theme with strong support and built-in ad spots, one I had used many times. I showed the technical director demo sites built with it, he chose a design he liked, and the owner approved it.
- Built the new site in a safe space. I installed a fresh copy of WordPress in a separate dev folder, away from the live site, then set up and configured the new theme to match what the owner wanted.
- Moved the content across. I exported every existing article from the old site and imported it into the new one, so nothing was lost.
- Fixed the images. The old images were heavy and the wrong size, so I optimized more than 3,000 of them in Photoshop to the sizes the new theme needed, which also helped the pages load faster.
- Handed off the German work. Once the foundation was ready, the magazine brought in a Swiss team to write and optimize the ongoing German content, which I do not handle. I left them a step-by-step PDF guide and short videos so they could learn the new theme quickly.
I also showed them how to find and approach local businesses to sell ad space to. And I suggested Canva, a free online graphics maker, so they could make ad graphics when an advertiser did not have one ready.
The Results
The magazine earned about EUR 5,000 in net profit from advertising in its first six months. This figure is the magazine’s own, reported by the technical director, who was satisfied with the early results.
After the rebuild, the magazine had everything it needed to earn from advertising:
- It could now place ads in set spots across the whole site.
- Its existing articles carried over into a clean, modern design.
- Its pages loaded faster after the image work.
For the first time, the magazine could promise advertisers a real place to appear and turn its local readership into income.
Tools and Methods Used
- Diagnostics: the WordPress dashboard and a hands-on review of the live site
- Build and performance: WordPress, a purpose-built magazine theme, and Photoshop for optimizing the images
- Advertiser graphics: Canva
Are You Facing a Similar Problem Right Now?
Many publishers and small business owners feel stuck when their website cannot do what they need. It is easy to assume the whole site must be torn down and rebuilt from nothing. Often the real blocker is just one piece, like the theme, and the fix is simpler than it first looks.
If you want calm, simple help to understand your own website, you can contact me.