The Stuart News Sets Major Milestone:

Electronic Tearsheet Ad System Breaks
100 Million Records!

Quincy, MA, November 9 – A bit of newspaper advertising history was set just before 3 am EST Sunday by a 3 color, 5 column x 18” real estate display ad placed by Mercedes Homes Inc. That ad, which appeared in The Stuart (FL) News of the Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers, marked the 100 millionth record in E-Sheets®, the industry’s largest Electronic Tearsheets database, created by MerlinOne Inc. of Quincy, MA.

Wendy Jones, Treasure Coast’s Account Executive who sold the record-breaking ad said, “We send no more paper tears. E-Sheet has made it so much easier for my advertisers, and 90% of my builders use E-Sheets. I use it to pull ads from weeks or months ago to reuse. E-Sheets is a wonderful service for our advertisers.”

“These are such huge numbers that even we have trouble making sense of them,” says MerlinOne Inc. CEO David Tenenbaum. “We calculated that if each of the 100 million database records was a penny, and they were all stacked on top of each other, the pennies would rise 508,000 feet, or 96.3 miles tall!”

E-Sheets was created in 2001 to replace the manual proof-of-publication tearsheet process with a fully electronic system, and was intended to both save newspapers the cost of newsprint, postage and labor, and to better serve advertisers and agencies, especially national agencies. It is used by 186 titles, ranging in size from large properties like the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to smaller ones like The Day in New London, CT and Foster’s Daily Democrat in Dover, NH, and currently holds ad information for 1.9 million advertisers and 45,752 agencies. On a typical day, 60,000 information requests are made by users, and a million new records come in every 9 days.

MerlinOne estimates that E-Sheets has saved the industry about $40 million in postage and shipping costs alone, and it enables a national advertiser to use a single login and see their ad campaign in newspapers across the nation, on the day of publication. E-Sheets also serves as a research resource: every word on every newspaper page sent to E-Sheets is indexed and searchable. Currently there are 18 billion words indexed!

“We are thrilled so many newspapers entrust us to present their pages to their advertisers, and we look forward to serving the industry with advanced capabilities, like electronic invoices, as we all move forward together,” says Tenenbaum.

SETS RECORD – Wendy Jones (left), Account Executive for Scripps Treasure Coast News-papers, holds up a page of the The Stuart (FL) News Friday in Port St. Lucie, FL. The Mercedes Homes ad on the page she holds was the 100 millionth record in the MerlinOne E-Sheets electronic tearsheet database system. Delivering tearsheets electronically via E-Sheets has saved the newspaper industry an estimated $40+ million dollars over the last 5 years.