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]]>But is there a business in new-style aggregation?
]]>But is there a business in new-style aggregation?
Probably not for all of these or many of the versions we have yet to see. But the blend of style with the right devices and the right business model offers a decent foundation. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue thinks his company can do it with advertising revenue and, for now, all within Apple’s operating system. The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Co.‘s Trove is banking on mixing advertising revenue with being completely cross platform. Others, like News.me and Ongo are counting on a blend of subscription fees and advertising. What they all have going for them: a plethora of information and sources and, thanks to HTML5 and other innovations, formats that are far more pleasing to use than the batches of linked headlines that keep some away from RSS. It also helps that they have consumer-friendly names, some more so than others, and an easy threshold for use.
For consumers, there are now so many of these next-generation RSS readers that it can be daunting to keep them straight. But they have distinct differences. Some curate content with an algorithm, while others use a team of editors. Some have made partnerships with publishers, while some are charging ahead without them. And there are other differences too, in areas like customization, sharing and price. To see how some of the new aggregators stack up, check out our chart below.
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]]>The NYT’s sharper Indian focus comes more than two years after the Wall St. Journal launched its Indian effort. Given the accelerating ad market in India right now, it seems like the NYT should be able to catch the growth that’s happening there.
Earlier this year, Interpublic Group’s Magna Global has forecast India’s advertising market to rise by 21 percent this year. With the ad economy in the U.S. looking more uncertain, it makes sense for the NYTCo (NYSE: NYT) to expand its brand to India. Still, one small blog likely won’t mean much to the newspaper’s bottom line, but it does position the brand well as the Indian market remains in a robust growth pattern.
Beyond ads, the NYTCo sees India Ink as a possible extension of its metered paywall. The press release carefully notes that “initially, access to India Ink will be exempt from The New York Times’s digital subscription packages,” suggesting that free period won’t last forever.
The blog will be edited by the NYT staff in India and the International Herald Tribune in Hong Kong, led by lead writer Heather Timmons, who has covered business in India for the NYT for the last four years.
The move is also one of the first big decisions to come out of the NYT under executive editor Jill Abramson, who replaced Bill Keller this week in the position. Keller announced his decision to step down as executive editor back in June, opting to writing a column instead.
]]>Let’s agree that Rupert Murdoch is right: Content is king. You’ll get nothing but applause from a journalist of four decades like me. Saying it and believing it, however, doesn’t solve the problem of content racing to zero value on the internet. Paywalls such as the ones News Corp (NYSE: NWS). and the New York Times are moving to may seem like the next step, in the same way that sandbagging the tops of levies on the Mississippi are the next step during spring flooding. The problem is that the internet flood never recedes. It is the Great Deluge that grows more powerful every day. Paywalls for general interest publications cannot hold it back.
]]>Let’s agree that Rupert Murdoch is right: Content is king. You’ll get nothing but applause from a journalist of four decades like me. Saying it and believing it, however, doesn’t solve the problem of content racing to zero value on the internet. Paywalls such as the ones News Corp (NYSE: NWS). and the New York Times are moving to may seem like the next step, in the same way that sandbagging the tops of levies on the Mississippi are the next step during spring flooding. The problem is that the internet flood never recedes. It is the Great Deluge that grows more powerful every day. Paywalls for general interest publications cannot hold it back.
Nor can I agree with Jim Spanfeller, who says that we can win consumers with a certain type of multimedia/interactive content. Yes, people want multimedia. They want games, maps, 30 Rock on Hulu, bootlegged first-run movies from Pirate Bay, and whacked-out amateur videos on YouTube and a dozen other sites. But there’s no evidence that they want, for instance, a thoughtful interactive map/video/database mashup on Afghanistan or global warming on which they can comment. There’s no evidence that users love these things so much that they flock to them, stay around, and convert to a news site’s brand because of cool multimedia.
So here’s my position: There is no future in a paywall. No salvation in digital razzle dazzle.
There is, however, a bold future in relevant content.
Relevance doesn’t come easy. Just because a topic is trending on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) doesn’t mean you’ll win by slapping a together a quick blog post on it. Sure, you can place high in search results and get the initial click, but a dissatisfied reader bounces quickly, which forfeits the chance to point out related content and cheapens our brand. Cheese, after all, is just cheese, and people know it.
Technology (I agree with Mr. Spanfeller on this point) is the enabler, not the differentiator here. I run a modest operation specializing in global news that has been experimenting like mad this past year. Here are some lab results you might find interesting.
A year ago, we ceased publishing the daily, 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor newspaper and launched a weekly magazine to complement our website, on which we doubled down by reorienting our newsroom to be web-first. Our web traffic climbed from 6 million page views last April to 13 million in February. Our print circulation rose from 43,000 to 77,000 in the same period.
What we’re learning is that the key to building and keeping traffic is far more prosaic than multimedia and sharing buttons. It rests on overcoming a huge cultural barrier: evolving a serious, experienced, thoughtful newsroom into an audience-first organization. I use the term “evolving” because this is all about the present tense. Trying to understand our current and future audience is a work in progress that will continue for as long as we publish on the web.
One of the reasons our site traffic increased 20 percent from January to February of this year (even though February had 10 percent fewer days) was emphasis on search engine optimization. Everybody who is doing news on the web is thinking SEO, so best practices are—or soon will be—a given. It can be as simple as editors thinking like searchers and writing headlines accordingly. Breaking/developing stories like healthcare reform or the Chile earthquake provide opportunities to drive more readers to our site and keep them there longer. Embedding links to our deeper content (a healthcare reform 101 primer, a science of earthquakes piece) invites readers to understand what we are all about: news for people who are trying to understand the world and are searching for solutions. Paying this sort of attention to content can easily amplify a news story that garners 3,000 page views by a factor of 10.
Like everyone, we’ve had hits and misses. There are two types of misses: the spinach that goes uneaten and the junk food that makes you sorry afterwards. We do almost all original content, but we were experimenting the other day by posting AP stories. One that went up with too little consideration was on the marital woes of Sandra Bullock. It shot to the top of our most-viewed list. The problem is, we don’t do celebrity gossip.
We’ve had other misses as well. Usually they are earnest pieces we do from overseas. No amount of trying with buzzy keywords helps the Euro-zone crisis story. Which is not to say there isn’t a market for that story. It won’t be a big hit, but we are increasingly trying to use social networks to draw attention to those.
While SEO won’t cause readers to flock to stories about urban poverty or the Euro, people who care about those subjects are crucial to us, and—to be blunt—to a certain type of advertiser. They are the influencers, the tipping-point people. Influencers live in narrow channels and respond to articles that make it clear why things matter and how problems are being solved.
What about multimedia and interactivity? You’ll see very little video on CSMonitor.com. This is not to say that we haven’t experimented with the medium. It just hasn’t delivered enough clicks to justify the effort. That will probably change one day, and if it does we’ll take another look as long as it enhances our editorial mission. As for interactivity, we typically don’t invite readers to comment at the bottom of our stories. Don’t get me wrong, we want thoughtful comments. But comment-happy sites that don’t moderate often allow a brilliant piece to be followed by a string of rotten tomatoes thrown by—how can I put this delicately?—comment jerks.
The multimedia debate needs a new question: How are we using technology to create a more relevant product? We’re not going to “save” media by out-featuring each other. We can and will re-cement media by using the technology to deliver the experience consumers want most: intelligent, meaningful news that’s accessible where they are in the moment.
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]]>The company plans to raise Rs381.85 crore from this issue, according to Moneycontrol.com. The company has received commitment worth Rs69.35 crore from anchor investors on Thursday, the financial portal reported. Nine anchor investors have subscribed to 32,71,500 equity shares at Rs212 per equity share. The total issue is of 18,175,000 equity shares.
]]>The company plans to raise Rs381.85 crore from this issue, according to Moneycontrol.com. The company has received commitment worth Rs69.35 crore from anchor investors on Thursday, the financial portal reported. Nine anchor investors have subscribed to 32,71,500 equity shares at Rs212 per equity share. The total issue is of 18,175,000 equity shares.
]]>Matt Kelly, who first began his public crusade this summer on paidContent:UK, said: “In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation” (SEO).
“... The game is up. The days of leading the newspaper industry by the hand, down the path of mythic riches, are coming to a rapid close.”
]]>Matt Kelly, who first began his public crusade this summer on paidContent:UK, said: “In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation” (SEO).
“... The game is up. The days of leading the newspaper industry by the hand, down the path of mythic riches, are coming to a rapid close.”
Kelly is on-message with Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey, who has both advocated building loyal audiences before paywalls and is a noted Google (NSDQ: GOOG) critic. “Unique users don’t pay wages,” she has said.
Bailey and Kelly are two parts in an emerging industry effort to regain the initiative from search engines, the web or generally the media transformation that newspapers have endured. Kelly, in Hyderabad, said “traffic from search engines is ridiculously low ... the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source”.
He said knocking SEO consultants down a peg or two to “build sites that perform well for humans, not search engines” is one change necessary to “reverse the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the last fifteen years of the internet”.
Kelly’s full speech…
A couple of years ago, at this very conference, I sat among you and listened as Google’s number one global ad salesman gave the World Editors Forum a very slick presentation about where the newspaper industry was going wrong.
He told us what kind of stories we should publish if we wanted to attract a larger online audience. He told us what kind of headlines we should write and what kind of websites we should build. And how, if we got these things right, Google News would deliver us an audience beyond anything we could hope to achieve in print.
If we still hadn’t get the message, there were separate seminars, two a day, laid on free of charge by Google, complete with glossy brochures, on how to do well in Google News. The seminars were full. We all wanted to know the secret. The brochure made it seem so easy.
Of course, as we’re all aware now, it was too easy. In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation.
We followed the brochure word for word, and we employed the same merry-go-round of SEO consultants to help us build sites that would ping to the top of search engines for a world hungry for our content.
If little things like character, brand…the ingrained values that made the print product a success, got in the way, well ... the ends justified the means. Content wasn’t king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn’t matter as long as the audience grew.
And boy, did it grow. In the UK alone, we soon had several newspaper websites attracting in the region of thirty million users a month. Impressive. Think of all the advertising they could sell!
Ah .. well, actually, there was a slight problem there. As any first-year economics student will tell you, massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value. Great swathes of newspaper website inventory - sometimes as much as 90 percent of page views - went unsold.
Now the very CPM model we’d prostituted our brands for online, began to punish us. The massive oversupply of ad inventory led to a rapid erosion of value and opened a whole new business of network agencies undermining the traditional link between buyer and media owner, and making it cheaper and cheaper to buy our space.But it gets worse. Much worse, in fact, for our long-term future. In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users…
What a word! “Users.” Not readers, or viewers. Certainly not customers - not unless we are being deeply ironic. For the fact is the word “user” is, for the vast majority of people consuming our products online, entirely accurate.
We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, “users” is about right. They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.
So, can the process be reversed? Can we begin to rebuild the connection between investment and reward online? I’m here to tell you, yes, absolutely…
We’ve listened to our fair share of SEO experts at Mirror Group, but when we relaunched Mirror.co.uk about eighteen months ago, we fought very hard to put SEO to one side and focus instead on trying to reinject some of the brand values that had served the newspaper so well for more than one hundred years. Some of that bold tabloid panache, the dynamism, the straight-talking, entertaining view of the world so familiar to readers of the Daily Mirror newspaper. And the relaunch was a great success.
Quickly, the new-look Mirror.co.uk was the fastest growing newspaper website in the country; year-on-year growth of 100 percent or more - and importantly, the highest proportion of UK users of any newspaper website in the country.
A good effort indeed. But not, in our eyes, good enough. We wanted to go push further.
So three months ago, we launched two new websites - and actually stripped out from Mirror.co.uk two of our core drivers of traffic; showbiz and football. Creating two new niche websites, built on very different platforms designed especially to show each off in their best light. And the hell with SEO. We we’re chasing passion, here, not page impressions.
In the case of MirrorFootball, it is the ideal platform to combine our brilliant coverage of the British football with a unique collection of photographs and pages stretching back to 1903 - definitively the greatest British football archive in the world. With 3am, it is taking a unique brand and attitude of showbiz gossip and giving it the best possible platform online.
With these two new websites, I believe we have taken a very important first step - a very difficult first step - to put that sense of brand and value and character back.
How? By putting SEO in its rightful place as a tool to be used when appropriate, but focusing our main attention on what is unique and brilliant about each of these properties respresents.Both sites have their critics - 3am in particular has been the subject of quite intense argument concerning it’s navigation. You’ll notice we ignored the SEO brigade here.
Instead of a navigation that would perform well in Google - something like “music news”, “celebrity news”, “film news”, “TV news” etc etc… - we decided to follow a more emotional methodology… “Gasp!”, “Tee-hee”, “Phwoar”... I hope the translators are able to cope with making sense of this - but phrases that better reflect the experience we hope our users will enjoy when they come to 3am. To be shocked, amused, titillated…
Yes, it’s different. And it means the audience may grow more slowly. But it will grow meaningfully. Because its audience will care.
The SEO fraternity have been outraged by our blind stupidity. Dumbstruck by how much we don’t get the web. Interestingly, I sense a touch of foreboding in their mockery. As though they realise the game is up. The days of leading the newspaper industry by the hand, down the path of mythic riches, are coming to a rapid close.
Certainly both sites have rewarded our belief by reconnecting us to both readers and advertisers. In terms of audience, MirrorFootball has achieved two million monthly unique users. 3am.co.uk 800,000. Both sites are growing steadily month by month.
Crucially, traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am.
That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source. We get a lot of traffic to both sites from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience. Counter to our expectation, audience on Mirror.co.uk has also continued to grow, meaning that across our portfolio of websites in the last three months our audience has increased by three million.
We’re very proud of the new-found connection with both users and advertisers. I’ll give you a couple of examples in each case…
With MirrorFootball, we possess a unique asset, our archive, which we are, for the first time in one hundred years, actively putting to work. Last month, we began retailing in earnest, using both print and web to market a collection of books and merchandise based on our unique photographs. I’m not able to tell you how much we’ve merchandise we’ve sold, but suffice to say it has exceeded expectations and we are confident we have the beginnings of a thriving retail business with MirrorFootball.
We’ve also used our content and our engaged audience to re-cement links with key advertisers. Vauxhall Commercial Vehicles joined us as launch sponsors and we’ve created a number of unique pieces of content for them that entertain our users, exploit of history and provide the client with a tailored solution; in this case reinforcing Vauxhall’s positioning as a vanmaker with decades of history behind them.
In the case of 3am.co.uk, we’ve been able to leverage the sense of community and brand engagement by building a bespoke bingo game for our fans to play. It’s twice as popular, head for head, than our game on Mirror.co.uk.
And Samsung are big fans of brand 3am. Together we ran a “be a 3am girl for the day” competition to launch a new mobile phone. The competition winner - a bloke! - gathered an army of nearly 2,000 supporters on Facebook to promote his entry. The power of social networking in action.
So we have to work harder. Explore new revenue streams. Ten years ago, Mirror Group had four or five revenue streams. At last count, we had 28.
Not all of them will turn out to be the big businesses we hope, but we’re working them all, hard, in the knowledge that our future depends on it.These three sites, with their disparate approaches to SEO, and their varied revenue streams, are a big step in the right direction. But they’re a drop in the ocean of change we need to make as an industry if we’re going to reverse the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the last fifteen years of the internet.
There will always be free stuff out there on the internet. But if we want any hope of moving to a position where people will happily hand over their cold, hard, cash for our content online, the very first step we need to take is to re-establish in our online businesses that sense of value, brand, and uniqueness that we take so much trouble to do in print.
If that means It means putting journalism first, and SEO second, then, as a journalist, I welcome that.
Not because we have some romantic view of what good journalism means. But because we have a very pragmatic view of what good business means. But I welcome it as a journalist who believes the true value of our content is, ultimately, measured in commercial terms.
It means not letting SEO wag the dog, but instead focusing on creating the most engaging, entertaining, informative content possible. It means building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines. It means we have to stop thinking about users, but start thinking of readers, listeners, viewers. One day, even customers.
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]]>But I speak in jest. Important issues and topics being discussed about an important industry, by currently important people. Follow my tweets and coverage on the site here; the hashtag on Twitter is #WAN. Also WAN’s excellent official blog about the conf is here.
]]>But I speak in jest. Important issues and topics being discussed about an important industry, by currently important people. Follow my tweets and coverage on the site here; the hashtag on Twitter is #WAN. Also WAN’s excellent official blog about the conf is here.
]]>Of the 25 English newspapers covered by this round, 12 registered an increase in readership, three remained static, nine registered a drop and one could not be compared as it wasn’t covered during the previous round.
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Of the 25 English newspapers covered by this round, 12 registered an increase in readership, three remained static, nine registered a drop and one could not be compared as it wasn’t covered during the previous round.
Three newspapers—The New Indian Express (11.26%), The Tribune (15.73%), The Hitavada (13.49%)—enjoyed double digit percentage growth in readership while only Mid-Day (-10.02%) suffered a double-digit percentage decline in readership, apart from Metro Now (-34.93%), which has ceased to be a daily.
The Times of India, the country’s most read English daily, saw a 4.02% rise in countrywide readership and now has 7.1 million readers. The second most read daily, Hindustan Times, dropped 4.21% and now has 3.34 million readers. DNA rose 4.76% to 7.93 lakh readers. The Indian Express, currently on a high with its exclusive publication of the controversal Liberhan report, gained 3.02% and now has 2.05 lakh readers. The Hindu saw a decline of 2.95% and now has 21.69 lakh readers.
Among business dailies, The Economic Times leads the pack by a big margin with 7.57 lakh readers, down 3.32% from the previous round. Mint is the second largest business daily with 1.59 lakh readers, down 9.14% from the previous round. Business Standard, which was not covered during the previous rounds, has 1.48 lakh readers, while Hindu Business Line gained 9.73% and now has 1.24 lakh readers. The readership of The Financial Express stayed the same with 38,000 readers.
Mint’s readership decline is seen as surprising by some observers. “...the trend in Mint’s readership in Maharashtra (Mumbai, the financial capital of India) is surprising; IRS R2 2009 reports Mint’s Maharashtra AIR at a modest 15,000, a sharp drop from 25,000 readers in IRS R2 2008. We note that IRS has had issues in capturing the high-end readership of niche publications, which limits its utility,” Kotak Institutional Equities analyst Amit Kumar wrote in a report.
Here’s the complete picture for key English dailies.
Magazines
While some specialty and lifestyle magazines scored impressive gains in readership, most news and business news magazines saw a decline.
The readership of Femina Girl grew nearly ten fold from 1.03 lakh to 10.72 lakh during this round. Readership of Elle grew 135.42% to 1.13 lakh. Society (32.23%), Digit (22.07%), Auto Car (15.08%), Overdrive (19.72%) and Savvy (23.08%) were among publications that saw a double-digit percentage growth in readership. Outlook Money grew 25% and now has 1.05 lakh readers. Business and Economy gained 14.63% and now has 94,000 readers.
Among the news magazines, India Today dropped 3.94% to 18.78 lakh readers, while Outlook fell 6.75% to 4.97 lakh readers. The Week fell 4.04% to 3.09 lakh readers.
Among business mags, Business Today lost 5.92% and now has 2.7 lakh readers. Business India fell 2.7% to 2.16 lakh readers, while Business World dropped 3.64% to 1.59 lakh readers. Outlook Business grew 9.04% to 1.81 lakh readers.
Among the magazines that saw double digit percentage falls are General Knowledge Today (-93.04%), Champak (-16.06%) and New Woman (-17.39%).
Here are the complete figures for English magazines.
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Chandra, 58, is a pioneer in India’s broadcast industry and had hinted at retirement recently.
According to multiple sources at the company, Chandra has recently been spending time at the Lower Parel, Mumbai, offices of the paper and reviewing operations. One person close to the developments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Chandra is looking at the business closely as a precursor to committing big investments for the next phase of the company’s expansion.
Launched in 2005, DNA now has editions in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Jaipur, Surat and Ahmedabad. The Mumbai edition is expected to break even early part of next year. “There are several plans the company is considering, including expanding the Bangalore edition, raising the print run in Mumbai to 600,000 copies, and even a Delhi edition. Each of these decisions involve several hundred crores of investment. Like any good investor, Mr Chandra is spending some time looking at the business closer before making a commitment,” the source mentioned in the first instance in this story, said.
This person denied any change in the status of the promoter group. “There is no change in shareholding and Mr Agarwal continues to be MD,” this person said. Agarwal has been unable to visit Mumbai regularly for several months now consequent to a close family member being ill.
When asked about the company’s plans for a Delhi edition, Diligent Media CEO K.U. Rao said: “We have always maintained that we want to be a multi-edition daily and we are constantly evaluating opportunities and working towards that objective.” He declined to comment further or go into more specifics.
Another person who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, said the company’s board has decided to fasttrack the Delhi edition. This person, however, is neither a board member nor has directly been briefed by one.
Dainik Bhaskar’s publisher, D.B. Corp., has filed for a public issue of shares with the country’s market regulator.
Editor-at-large Ayaz Memon and national sales head Ishu Bhalla have stepped down from their roles at DNA, it emerged yesterday.
]]>Through 2008, price of imported newsprint kept going up to touch $960, severely affecting the profitability of India’s print industry. Prices of Indian newsprint usually moves in line with international prices. Newsprint bill is usually the single largest cost component of newspaper publishers in India and hence the commodity’s price fluctuations have an inversely correlated impact on profitability. Newsprint prices have traditionally followed a cyclical pattern in the long term.
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Through 2008, price of imported newsprint kept going up to touch $960, severely affecting the profitability of India’s print industry. Prices of Indian newsprint usually moves in line with international prices. Newsprint bill is usually the single largest cost component of newspaper publishers in India and hence the commodity’s price fluctuations have an inversely correlated impact on profitability. Newsprint prices have traditionally followed a cyclical pattern in the long term.
Harish Nagpal, AVP for production and materials at publisher HT Media Ltd, said three main factors were contributing to the price rise.
1) Waste paper, which is an important raw material in the manufactuing of recycled newsprint, has become more expensive.
2) Most currencies started depreciating against the US dollar, so exporting nations had to hike prices to make up for the depreciation in the local currency.
3) Freight costs are now higher. “Crude oil used to be $40 per barrel six months ago. Now it’s about $75-80,” Nagpal said.
He added that most publishers have started stocking up their inventory as prices are expected to continue on an upward trajectory.
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]]>In April, the daily had effected a slab-based salary cut which ranged from 7.5-12% and excluded those earning upto Rs4 lakh per annum.
In a memo to section heads this evening, Diligent Media CEO K.U. Rao said the company was rolling back 50% of the cut effective 1 November and the remaining 50% will be reviewed again in December.
The move will likely put peer pressure on other media companies to roll back salary cuts as well. Late last month, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd said it will pay a part of future variable pay in advance.
]]>In April, the daily had effected a slab-based salary cut which ranged from 7.5-12% and excluded those earning upto Rs4 lakh per annum.
In a memo to section heads this evening, Diligent Media CEO K.U. Rao said the company was rolling back 50% of the cut effective 1 November and the remaining 50% will be reviewed again in December.
The move will likely put peer pressure on other media companies to roll back salary cuts as well. Late last month, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd said it will pay a part of future variable pay in advance.
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While newspapers around the world have seen falling circulation for years, India’s print industry had bucked the trend, helped in part by relatively low (but growing) broadband and Internet penetration and a strategy that used growing advertising revenue to subsidize the cost of the newspaper for readers. National dailies in English can be bought off the newsstand for as low as Rs2 per copy.
Such a widespread fall in circulation, which hasn’t spared the country’s mightiest publishers, comes even as early signs of structural shifts are being seen. The Times of India launched a weekend newspaper at a relatively high cover price—Rs6—and Amazon’s Kindle e-reader is expected to start selling in India in a week’s time. Kindle will help publishers distribute the newspaper to readers at no marginal cost per copy. It is another matter that it will be a few years before there is any meaningful level of adoption of e-readers such as Kindle.
Deccan Chronicle, whose nine editions are reported together by ABC, is the only major newspaper to have reported a higher circulation—13.33 lakh to 13.49 lakh. Other newspapers to report a higher circulation during this round are Nagaland Post, Dimapur, Assam Tribune, Patna & Ranchi edition of Hindustan Times, Hitavada, Nagpur and Hyderabad and Nagpur editions of The Times of India.
“There was never a doubt that the trend that we have seen globally—that of falling newspaper circulation and readers migrating online—would come to India, too,” said Smita Jha, associate director at the entertainment and media practice of consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Timing of this trend was the only question. It was also clear that it would first appear in the national, English language print media. That is just what has happened.”
Jha said the regional language newspapers will continue to grow sales for much longer as there were untapped markets available to increase penetration. Also, a degrowth in circulation should not be equated with a degrowth in revenues, she pointed out. “The rate of revenue growth has slowed, but most national English newspapers are still making a profit,” she said.
While many newspapers had taken steps to control pagination in view of high newsprint prices that prevailed during the period under review, it’s unlikely that newspapers deliberately controlled circulation as well, Jha said, in response to a question. “At least we haven’t seen anything like that.”
If the industry wisdom that business publications sell less during a market slump is true, it probably partly explains why business dailies have, without exception, lost sales.
The complete chart of the performance of English dailies is below. Here’s how some of the leading titles performed (Circulation figures are rounded off. For complete figures, see chart below):
Bangalore Mirror dropped 29.79% to 88,350 copies. Business Standard saw lower circulation in all 11 editions that were surveyed, and in New Delhi, where it had the highest circulation, the business daily saw an 18% drop in circulation to 26,461 copies.
Mysore Bangalore-headquartered Deccan Herald saw circulation fall by 6.89% to 2.14 lakhs.
The Hindu Business Line saw a 5% drop in circulation to 1.63 lakh copies.
All eight editions of The Economic Times saw declining circulation. In Mumbai, where the paper had the highest circulation, it fell 11.76% to 2.03 lakh copies.
Chennai-headquartered The Hindu saw a 6.39% drop in circulation. The daily, which is printed in 12 centres, now sells 13.6 lakh copies.
The New Indian Express saw a decline of 10.4% in circulation and now sells 3.09 lakh copies.
The Statesman in Kolkata saw a marginal drop in circulation to 1.66 lakh copies, while the New Delhi edition of the paper fell 11.92% to 6,187 copies.
The Telegraph saw a 4.09% decline in circulation to 4.65 lakh copies.
The Times of India in Bangalore, Mangalore and Mysore saw a 4.4% decline to 4.83 lakh copies. The paper saw declining circulation in greater Mumbai (-6.73%), Lucknow (-13.89%) and New Delhi (-10.5%), while circulation rose in Nagpur (16.7%) and Hyderabad (4.41%). Figures for the Pune edition were unavailable while there was no half year-ago figure for Ahmedabad, where the paper now sells 1.90 lakh copies.
The announcement comes via the now-familiar letter to customers from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—playing up how U.S. buyers will be able to download wireless when traveling internationally along with the first international shipping of the device. Instead of downloading purchases to a PC and moving them to a Kindle when traveling, Kindle users will be able to mimic their U.S. wireless behavior overseas. It’s not completely the same, though—reading the fine print, international downloading of books or even already purchased material from your archives will run $1.99. The promo material includes the reminder that you can sample free chapters; not clear if there’s a fee for that or for downloading newspapers and magazines.
]]>The announcement comes via the now-familiar letter to customers from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—playing up how U.S. buyers will be able to download wireless when traveling internationally along with the first international shipping of the device. Instead of downloading purchases to a PC and moving them to a Kindle when traveling, Kindle users will be able to mimic their U.S. wireless behavior overseas. It’s not completely the same, though—reading the fine print, international downloading of books or even already purchased material from your archives will run $1.99. The promo material includes the reminder that you can sample free chapters; not clear if there’s a fee for that or for downloading newspapers and magazines.
Just this weekend, I was on a panel about mobile journalism where I brought my K2 and the moderator from Holland, Roeland Stekelenburg of NOS, showed me his sleeker Sony (NYSE: SNE) model with a mention being able to buy it and fill it in Europe. The other advantage for him: Sony’s support of the EPUB file format. Amazon’s Stanza iPhone app supports the format but not the Kindle. That Sony, however, didn’t have wireless. The 3G Daily Edition Sony, due for the holidays, lists for $399—and, so far, is wireless only in the U.S.
New content: The launch includes first-time access to many international publications, including La Stampa (Italy), El País (Spain), El Universal (Mexico), O Globo (Brazil), The Daily Telegraph (UK), bringing the total newspapers and magazines to nearly 90. The BBC’s Lonely Planet guides are now in the Kindle store, which Amazon says has added 75,000-plus books in the past five months. The U.S. store has more than 350,000 titles but global customers will have access to less than two-thirds of that. Even so, Bezos told USA Today, “It’s a substantial market.”
Bezos told AP: “I think that ultimately we will sell more books in Kindle editions than we do in physical editions.” But much of that will rely on increasing sales of e-Readers—and that lower price of $259 is still too high for most buyers. Ditto for the $489 large-format Kindle DX, which reads native PDF files and can pivot to landscape, slated for international sales next year.
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]]>China’s media industry, despite being less affected by the global recession than the West, is no oasis, he said. Offsetting the attractive growth opportunities are massive barriers to entry. “You can pretend to do a lot of things in China, but you can’t really make money there.” He prefers other Asian countries, such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines for doing business. (Webcast of the conversation is available here but slow to load.)
]]>China’s media industry, despite being less affected by the global recession than the West, is no oasis, he said. Offsetting the attractive growth opportunities are massive barriers to entry. “You can pretend to do a lot of things in China, but you can’t really make money there.” He prefers other Asian countries, such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines for doing business. (Webcast of the conversation is available here but slow to load.)
Crawford, who is a large investor in Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), agreed. “Where I have to own U.S. companies, I like ones that have large revenues outside of the U.S. There’s no question that in the next 25 years—pick a number—75 percent of the incremental growth of the global GDP is going to come from emerging markets,” he said. “That’s where the people are, that’s where the unmet needs are, that’s where the flow of capital is going. And they’re not over-leveraged.”
Since they were speaking to a roomful of budding U.S. journalists, Crawford turned to the business of newspapers and the effect on reporting. Crawford apologized for his “dour outlook” and tried to muster a bit of cheerleading, but ultimately his tone was downbeat. He spoke about the importance of journalism as an essential public good, but right now, he mostly sees a media landscape pockmarked with hyperbolic pundits and frenzied bloggers. “I despair sometimes when I watch Fox News”—he pauses to poke Chernin, who adds, “So do I!”—“and MSNBC and I see people yelling at each other and talking over each other. They’ve become entertainers and not real journalists.”
]]>But the all-important question is: how much would they be prepared to pay? Answer: as close to nothing as they can get away with…
But the all-important question is: how much would they be prepared to pay? Answer: as close to nothing as they can get away with…
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—If their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source, people who read a free news site at least once a month told us.
—Just five percent of those readers would choose to pay to continue reading the site.
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—If their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source, people who read a free news site at least once a month told us.
—Just five percent of those readers would choose to pay to continue reading the site.
—Eight percent would continue reading the site’s free headlines only.
—And 12 percent of respondents are not sure what they would do.
The findings are the first to be released from our research (read paidContent:UK on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for more on price points and models). They will serve as a warning to publishers considering a paid content strategy.
Bitten by the low prices of online ads and the recent slowdown in advertising generally, News Corp (NYSE: NWS) is not alone in re-examining the financial viability of online news provision. Other publishers, too, are considering models including charging-for-content, readers’ clubs with value-added extras, selling physical merchandise and memorabilia and even reader donations.
Although, as our recent analysis showed, newspapers have continually hiked their print cover prices over the last few years, they opted to let web news go free when the web took off more than a decade ago. Those that now opt to charge for stories will have a hard time squeezing back in to the bottle a genie that has been out for all this time.
“This does not look like good news for a pay model in a competitive environment,” says Andrew Freeman, Harris’ senior media research consultant. “As long as free alternatives exist, consumers will turn to them for their daily news information, meaning heavy losses in terms of audience figures for those that charge. It remains to be seen whether the news industry will take the leap and begin charging for that which has been free for so long.”
We think the question for news publishers is this: is five percent of your readership (that’s the number who tell us they would pay) enough to offset the decline in advertising revenue that would come with putting your site behind a pay wall?
Let’s go in to more detail…
Age: Those who have money are less likely to pay...
—Younger readers are more likely to pay than older - 13 times more 16-to-24s said they would pay than did 35-to-44s and 55-64s
—Pre-middle agers (35-to-44s) are most likely to seek out a free alternative news site.
—And those stingy 45-to-54s are most likely to simply read their favourite site’s free headlines. But that’s not good enough for younger folk - 16-to-24s are four times less likely to do that.
Class: The middle ground loves free most of all…
—The upper middle and middle classes (“ABs”) are most likely to pay to continue reading their favourite news site, but that’s just six percent of them.
—That’s the same rate for the lower middle class (“C1s”).
—The skilled working class (“C2s”) are least likely to pay and most likely to find an alternative free news site.
—Interestingly, the number of working class people and those dependent on the state (“DEs”) who would pay is almost the same as ABs.
Regions: Geordies would survive on free headlines…
—Londoners are Welsh are most likely to pay for their favourite news site. Yorkshiremen, Midlanders and those in the South-East are least likely.
—No-one in the north-west or south-west of England would pay.
—Scots, South-Westerners and Yorkshiremen are most likely to find free alternative news sites.
Methodology: Harris Interactive surveyed 1,188 adults (aged 16-64) online within the UK between August 26 and September 2, 2009. Figures for age, sex, education, region and internet usage were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. See raw data.
]]>‘Innovative ads’ is a euphemism for ads that often intrude into editorial space, some examples of which, you can see in a slideshow by clicking on the image or here (courtesy AdEx). From an advertiser’s perspective, innovative layouts offer an opportunity to run a campaign that stands out from regular display advertising in set spaces and shapes. Readers tend to habitually skip a lot of traditional advertising, studies show. Newspapers charge a premium for ‘innovative’ advertising and such campaigns do not have a rate card and are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
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‘Innovative ads’ is a euphemism for ads that often intrude into editorial space, some examples of which, you can see in a slideshow by clicking on the image or here (courtesy AdEx). From an advertiser’s perspective, innovative layouts offer an opportunity to run a campaign that stands out from regular display advertising in set spaces and shapes. Readers tend to habitually skip a lot of traditional advertising, studies show. Newspapers charge a premium for ‘innovative’ advertising and such campaigns do not have a rate card and are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Greater advertiser demand for such campaigns have resulted in increasing tension between media agencies and publishers in the last few years. Media agencies are forced by their clients to get publishers to push the envelope in terms of how bold some ad layouts can get (can our logo replace your masthead please?*) while publishers are caught between maintaining the editorial integirty of their products and saying no to large and powerful media agencies.
“Nine out of ten times, we say no,” said Rajiv Verma, CEO, HT Media Ltd, which publishes Hindustan Times, Hindustan and Mint. “What you see is only what we say yes to, you don’t see what we say no to,” said Verma, adding, “But the readers today are different. If something is vibrant and cheerful in the paper, and doesn’t alter the product itself too much, they don’t seem to mind. Our reader surveys don’t show any dissonance with such advertising.”
The play of power equation between the publisher and the advertiser is evident in that 55% of such advertising happened in non-metro newspapers. Large metro publications have greater ability to say no to a potential advertiser. Some 32% appeared in Metro newspapers and 12% in what AdEx categorizes as ‘mini Metros’.
The top three sectors in terms of usage of such advertising are food and beverages, media (well, talk about irony), and banking/finance/investment, in that order.
“The biggest challenge in advertising today is to break through the clutter and stand out,” said Premjeet Sodhi, chief planning officer at Lintas Media Group. “The result of clutter is ad avoidance by the readers. In such an environment, innovative ad formats help the advertiser to grab the attention of the reader,” he said. Sodhi says publishers are willing to offer more and more due to competition among them for advertising and “people are offering today what was definitely not available a few years ago”.
One publisher said usage of such advertising might have gone up so much because of greater financial pressure during the first half of this year owing to the global economic slowdown. “This was a good opportunity for advertisers to coax newspapers into doing things they would normally not,” he said, asking not to be named as he did not want to upset his peers.
HT Media’s Verma said decision-making on such advertising is always done after consulting the editorial team. “We are very clear. We won’t do anything that affects the sanctity of news in our publications. At the same time, as an industry if we don’t innovate, we will die. That’s evident from what is happening to the newspaper industry in other parts of the world.”
But that difficult line between the acceptable and the sacrosanct seems to be inching in one sure direction. “At one time, front page was considered sacrosanct. At another point, the masthead was considered sacrosanct,” said Lintas’ Sodhi. He left the rest unsaid.
*Apocryphal story: A leading national daily was approached by a big telecom player recently with a request to incorporate the brand into the masthead of the publication. The request was not granted.
This is, by no means, a complete list. But one can draw some general conclusions by looking at the experiences of what is admittedly a very sample size. The newspapers tend to be located in smaller, often rural markets; online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition (in general, about 75 percent of what the print product costs); where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5 percent); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions.
]]>This is, by no means, a complete list. But one can draw some general conclusions by looking at the experiences of what is admittedly a very sample size. The newspapers tend to be located in smaller, often rural markets; online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition (in general, about 75 percent of what the print product costs); where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5 percent); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions.
Newspaper: Daily Gazette
City: Schenectady, New York
Average paid circulation: 44,242
Pricing plan: Online-only subscriptions are available for $2.95 a week; while print subscribers, who pay $3.00 a week for home delivery, can pay an additional penny each week to also get unlimited access to the website as well as to an electronic edition. Blogs, AP stories, TV schedules, photo galleries, and breaking news remain free.
When pay wall was introduced: August 2009, although the paper was already charging readers to access the electronic edition
Results: Website traffic has plummeted by 40 percent in the three weeks since the Gazette started charging for most of its online content, including obituaries, managing editor Judy Patrick tells us. But she says “online subscriptions are slowly building.” There are 670 online-only subscribers.
Comment: The Gazette competes with the nearby Albany Times Union, which makes all of its content available for free, although it does charge 75 cents to access a digital copy of the paper. It’s too early to tell how the Times Union’s traffic has fared.
Newspaper: Valley Morning Star
City: Harlingen, Texas
Average paid circulation: 23,294
Pricing plan: Online-only subscriptions are available for 75 cents a day, $3.95 a month, or $39.50 for the year. Daily print subscribers get free access to web content and also to an e-edition of the paper. Weekend subscribers have to pay an additional $3.16 per month for online access, while Sunday-only subscribers have to pay $3.56 a month. Event listings, obituaries, AP stories, video, blogs, and classifieds all remain free.
When pay wall was introduced: July 2009
Results: A representative did not respond to a request for comment, but since the Morning Star started charging for online content in mid-June, another Freedom Communications daily, the Lima News, has followed suit. Traffic to the Morning Star’s website was actually slightly up in July, according to Compete.
Comment: “It will allow greater value to our many loyal print-edition subscribers by not giving away the news to non-subscribers,” Valley Morning Star Publisher Tyler Patton said in announcing the move. The Morning Star is the only daily in Harlingen.
Newspaper: Newport Daily News
City: Newport, R.I.
Circulation: 12,000
Pricing plan: Online-only subscriptions cost $5 a day, $10 a week, $35 a month, or $345 a year. Print and online combo subscriptions cost $11 a month or $100 a year. Obituaries, classifieds, blogs, and a copy of the front page are available for free online.
When pay wall was introduced: June 2009
Results: Publisher Buck Sherman told us that the goal was to “drive people back to the printed paper” and not to bring in online revenue. He says that so far “we have done well,” adding that single-copy sales are up 8 percent. Website traffic is down by about 30 percent since the paper began to charge, according to Compete figures.
Comment: The Daily News model grabbed headlines earlier this year because the paper was charging substantially more for the electronic edition of the paper than the print one. Competition is limited, with the much bigger Providence Journal pulling back on statewide coverage.
Newspaper: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
City: Little Rock, Ark.
Average paid circulation: 182,789
Pay model: Online-only subscriptions, which include access to an electronic edition, are available for $5.95 a month or $59 a year. Print subscribers get online access for free.
When pay wall was introduced: 2002
Results: Publisher Walter Hussman told the Guardian that the Democrat-Gazette charges in order to drive newsstand sales. The paper’s average daily paid circulation is down about 1 percent since it put up its pay wall. Revenue from online subscription sales amounts to only about $200,000 a year.
Comment: The Democrat-Gazette is the only newspaper in Little Rock. It’s the largest local daily in the U.S. to charge for online access.
Newspaper: Albuquerque Journal
City: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Average paid circulation: 101,810
Pay model: The Journal charges $110 a year (or $38.25 for three months) for full access to the paper’s website, along with an electronic edition of the paper. Readers can also pay $185 a year for a subscription to the print edition, the electronic edition and online access. Alternatively, they can pay $153 a year for home delivery and online access.
When pay wall was introduced: 2001
Results: Assistant Managing Editor Donn Friedman says that between 1,500 and 2,000 people pay extra each month for some sort of additional online access—a number that he says has “remained fairly consistent” over the past eight years. Each month, about 300 people who go to the site and then see a notice saying that they need either an online or print subscription to access online content sign up for some sort of subscription, he says. Paid daily circulation is down about 6 percent since the newspaper instituted the pay wall. Asked whether it has been a success, Friedman says, “We are still committed to the print retention model and the idea that our content has value.”
Comment: The rival Albuquerque Tribune was shut down last year, although the Journal still competes with the Santa Fe New Mexican, although it has a smaller staff.
Newspaper: Bend Bulletin
City: Bend, Oregon
Average paid circulation: 32,682
Pay model: Online-only subscriptions are available for $8 a month or $96 a year. Print subscribers pay $11 a month or $132 a year for home delivery, in addition to online access. The paper says that on average 30 local news, business, sports, features and entertainment articles are kept behind a pay wall each day.
When pay wall was introduced: 2005
Results: There are 1,200 online-only subscribers, says New Media Director Jan Even.
Comment: The Bulletin is the only daily newspaper in Bend.
Other papers that charge readers for online content include the Tribune of Lewiston, Idaho, the Idaho Press-Tribune of Nampa, Idaho, and the Herald Times of Bloomington, Ind.
Any other newspapers to add?
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