Category Archives: Advertising

‘Completely different ideas of size, scale, ambition’: Rusbridger compares his paper with the Times

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Mark Colvin of Australia’s PM radio programme has an interview up today with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. It focuses on the recent publication of figures from behind the Times and Sunday Times paywalls and finds Rusbridger as determined as ever to keep his paper free and champion open online journalism.

Comparing the Times’ new ‘slimmed-down’ online audience – which Rusbridger estimates to be about 30,000-50,000 users a month, against 37 million for the Guardian – he says the two newspapers’ digital operations now represent “two completely different ideas of size, scale and ambition”.

Perhaps the most interesting thing the Guardian editor has to say concerns the effect of the paywall on print sales, which he was expecting to rise when free digital access disappeared. The Times print circulation hasn’t plummeted since, but it certainly hasn’t shown significant gains: circulation fell by 14.81 per cent year-on-year in September, second only to the Telegraph and higher than the 12.3 per cent average for quality titles. August saw the Times’ average daily circulation slip below 500,000 for the first time since 1994.

As Rusbridger points out, the digital arm of the newspaper, rather than acting as a plain substitute which draws readers away from the print edition when free and drives them to it when paid, may serve to promote the whole brand. It may well act “like a sort of marketing device for the newspapers”, he says.

If you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it’s a kind of double whammy.

Rusbridger continues to be one of the industry’s most vocal objectors to the paywall. As he says here, he believes that “the journalist organisations that are best placed to survive are the ones that are going to go with the technology rather than decrying it and fighting it”. To that end, his “overwhelming aim is just to keep on producing the Guardian in a form which will suit whatever technology people invent”.

Colvin asks Rusbridger about the Guardian’s increasing digital revenue – “we’re up well over 50 per cent year-on-year and last year we earned about £40 million”, Rusbridger claims – but not, disappointingly, about the paper’s tactics in any detail, its success at bringing in money in through affiliate projects for example. Tim Brooks, managing director of Guardian News and Media, landed a blow for the Guardian’s approach earlier in the week, putting the Times’ new paywall revenue in a particularly unflattering context: “We’re probably making more money from our online dating service”, he told the MediaPro conference.

No mention of the Guardian’s own losses from Colvin or Rusbridger though. Despite the paper’s continued growth of digital revenue and laudable approach to online journalism, they are still running pretty high.

Read the full interview at this link…

Washington Post buys #election hashtag for midterms

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The Washington Post sponsored the Twitter hashtag #election as part of its coverage of the US midterm elections this week.

Explains Poynter:

The Post’s sponsorship of the term #Election means that it will appear at the top of the list of Trending Topics on Tuesday. When users click on that topic, one of the Post’s tweets will appear above other tweets with the #Election hashtag – giving the Post prime real estate to promote its coverage and updates.

There were rumours flying around as to how much the Post had spent on the ‘promoted tweet’ service from Twitter, but a spokeswoman for the title said it would not comment on the cost.

Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of media partnerships, told Poynter that this was the first time a news organisation had used Twitter in this way.

Using new Twitter, the Post also hosted a live video stream, which it called an Election Day Twittercast, on the @washingtonpost handle.

“The Post will solicit questions from Twitter users as it simultaneously airs on the platform. The Post is among the first news organisations to be able to embed live and taped video on the new Twitter platform,” a release from the Post says.

FT Group’s digital subscriptions rise by 50 per cent

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Financial Times publisher Pearson has reported an increase of 11 per cent in overall sales for its newspaper operation for the first nine months of 2010, according to a Press Association report.

The FT Group, which according to a report by the FT makes up 15 per cent of turnover, also saw digital subscriptions to its content rise by 50 per cent in the first nine months of 2010 to more than 180,000.

NYT: Privacy is nice, but profit is better

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Despite journalists being among those warning of the erosion of privacy in the digital age, it is increasing infringements on privacy that will keep their industry afloat, writes Robert Wright in this New York Times opinion piece.

In fact, the only profitable model for journalism online will be through the continuing removal of privacy and obtaining of information, he suggests.

The further erosion of privacy may be the salvation of journalism – the only way journalists can hope to make a living in the thus-far non-lucrative world of online publishing. As a journalist who harbours such hopes, and has been practising journalism since its glorious tree-based days, I’m in a good position to explain. The willingness of advertisers to spend the money that sustains journalists has always depended on having information about the reader.

…As a member of the late-baby-boom generation, I grew up valuing privacy. But as a journalist with a family to feed, I’m increasingly approving of the very different sensibility of younger people, who seem to have been stripped of self-consciousness by, among other things, Facebook.

The importance of the sharing of data online by communities and the value of targeted advertising as a result was a topic which was also raised at a business-to-business publishing debate at the Association of Online Publishers summit last week.

New figures suggest continued growth for US magazine advertising

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Advertising revenue for US magazines continued to increase for the second quarter in a row according to figures released yesterday from the Publishers Information Bureau and posted on the Association of Magazine Media website.

The results for the third quarter of 2010 suggest that rate-card revenue and the number of magazine advertising pages both increased overall compared to the same period in 2009.

The number of ad pages rose by 3.6 per cent following a 0.8 per cent growth in the previous quarter, with a total of 136 magazines reporting a rise in ad pages, compared to 25 magazines in the same period last year. PIB also reported that 132 titles recorded revenue increases this quarter, while only 37 titles did in the same period last year. PIB rate-card revenues were reported to be up by 5.3 per cent.

Reporting on the results the Wall Street Journal said the statistics should give publishers “more hope that the declines that killed dozens of well-known titles in 2009 are behind them”.

Digital ad revenue up 30 per cent at Wall Street Journal

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The Wall Street Journal’s latest revenue statistics, detailed in a staff memo from Dow Jones & Company CEO Les Hinton (published on PoynterOnline), show an increase in digital ad revenue of more than 29 per cent.

According to the figures, the publication has recorded year-on-year growth across all platforms in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2011.

Print and online revenues for the publication are reportedly up by more than 17 per cent on the previous year’s figures for the same period, while total print advertising revenue increased by more than 21 per cent.

Print circulation revenue was also reportedly up more than 9 percent, or 13 per cent when including digital.

But while in his memo Hinton makes a comparison to competitor the New York Times Company’s release of revenue statistics last week, paidContent clarifies the potential differences of each in its own report on the figures.

Hinton specifically refers to the New York Times Company’s own figures “as a basis of comparison.” He pointed out that the NYTCo forecast last week that online ad sales would be up 14 percent for the quarter, while print ad revenue would be down five percent. It’s worth noting, however, that those figures include the NYTCo as a whole, while the figures Hinton cites for his company seem to refer only to the performance of the Wall Street Journal.

Sans Serif: Indian newspapers pilot talking ads

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Volkswagen is running an ad in two Indian newspapers, the Hindu and the Times of Indian, that talks to readers, Sans Serif writes. A light-sensitive speaker has been added to the paper from which an advertising message is broadcast when triggered.

In some ways its a fairly basic addition, but as Sans Serif points out:

[T]his must be the first time daily newspapers of the size and reach of ToI [Times of India] and Hindu have done it at a time when American newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post are just about coming to terms with the reality of advertisements on the front page.

Full post on Sans Serif at this link…

US newspaper ad revenue decline slows

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Advertising revenues for US newspapers declined by more than five per cent in the second quarter of this year – the sixteenth consecutive quarterly decline – but the rate of decline has slowed according to a report by AFP.

Figures published by the Newspaper Association of America this week reportedly show that revenues for online and print newspapers dropped to $6.44 billion from $6.82 billion year-on-year.

Online advertising revenues actually increased by 13.9 per cent, while print print advertising fell 7.62 percent, the AFP report added.

The overall decline was reported as an “improvement” compared to a 9.7 per cent drop in the first quarter of this year and a 23.7 per cent fall in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Hatip: Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog

Paywall subscribers worth a quarter of print counterparts, claims survey

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With TheTimes.co.uk and SundayTimes.co.uk still not releasing traffic figures through the Audit Bureau of Circulations, we can’t yet see the impact of the paywall in terms of browser figures. But according to research published by Enders Analysis, the value of a paywall subscriber is only a fraction of a print reader.

The research, carried out by Benedict Evans, compared annual incomes from subscribers for paywalled newspapers TheTimes.co.uk and WSJ.com with those for UK quality daily papers.

The main findings quoted online are as follows:

A newspaper paywall subscriber is worth only a quarter to a third of a print buyer: even if every single print buyer is successfully converted to the paywall, newspapers will still face a basic problem of scale.

Paywalls will not be able to compensate for lower revenue per reader by expanding the audience for paid news, due to the long term decline of circulation, free online news, 24-hour broadcast news and free-sheets.

Future change will be radical: publishers may need to consider producing a newspaper its loyal readers recognise and value with just 200 rather than 500 journalists.

Hatip: paidContentUK