One of the challenges of managing a Web site of a traditional media property is how to find a rational way of setting the revenue budget.

The challenge is more acute when an Internet operation has metro dailies, small dailies, weeklies and broadcast sites as part of the total network.

What revenue budgets make sense and how do they differ among the different types of properties? Broadcast sites don’t have traditional classified listings to tap. Weekly site have less competition than dailies, especially major metro dailies. Publishers already are under severe financial pressure and are understandably concerned about the additional burden of contributing to an aggressively increasing online revenue budget.

A growing standard in the industry is setting a revenue budget that is a percentage of the total print or broadcast budget. One report out of the Newspaper Association of America said that online ad sales were 5.4 percent of total newspaper sales in 2006. The top 20 percent of performers had online revenue exceeding 9 percent of total sales. We can say with some confidence that the larger the paper, generally, the higher the percentage.

There are several benefits to using this metric. One is that it uses the industry as a benchmark for measuring your own performance. The second is that it takes any guesswork or debating out of the decision. Third, it creates a standard for comparing the performance among properties within a company’s group or network.