Tag Archives: online revenues

PR Week: CIPR president on the NLA’s backlink charging plans

The latest response to the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s (NLA) proposals to regulate hyperlinks to newspaper content for commercial agencies and aggregators – this time from president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), Kevin Taylor.

“I want newspapers to be successful and profitable. I want good standards of journalism and I’m prepared to do my bit: buy a quality daily newspaper and not rely on the free sheets. I hope advertising and online revenues pick up and our best newspapers survive and thrive,” writes Taylor.

“But these latest proposed NLA charges are not the way to fund the newspaper industry. They are nonsensical. The Government needs to be strong enough to stand up to the newspaper owners and impose some regulation on the NLA.

“They are simply a commercial organisation trying to make a living – but they can’t invent a parallel universe in order to justify their charges.”

Full post at this link…

New appointment: Ayers is made regional web publishing director at Trinity Mirror Regionals

A week with particularly brutal cuts across UK regional media, but news of a new digital appointment comes from Trinity Mirror this morning:

Richard Ayers has been appointed regional web publishing director for Trinity Mirror Regionals.

“In this key position Richard will work closely with the regional teams across the division to implement digital best practice and develop content and online services to drive usage, audience and online revenues across the regional network,” a release from the group said.

“Richard has a first class background in online publishing and I am delighted to welcome him to the team,” said Chris Bunyan, digital director of Trinity Mirror Regionals.

“The audience for our regional sites has increased by over 30 per cent year-on-year to around 5.5 milllon users a month. Richard’s experience and expertise will strengthen our digital team and will ensure we continue to deliver and drive compelling online user experiences for this growing audience across our regional websites,” Bunyan said, in the release.

Ayers career includes ten years at BBC News online, in ‘a number of senior digital roles;’ he was ‘portal director’ for Tiscali.co.uk, and more recently he was the managing director of a digital production agency, Magic Lantern.

The Trinity Mirror release also announced that Shaun Collins has been appointed as digital recruitment director, a role which sees him focus on ‘driving digital recruitment products and their performance’.

BBC annual report: executive bonuses remain despite job cuts and calls for management restructure

The BBC’s executive directors’ pay rose by £708,000 in 2007/8 with pay for the 10 directors totalling £4,960,000, according to figures from the corporation’s annual report.

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, received a bonus of £41,000, while outgoing director of Future Media & Technology Ashley Highfield received £34,000. Director general Mark Thompson rejected the offer of an annual bonus.

Both the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and BECTU have challenged the rises in light of 2,500 proposed job cuts at the corporation announced in October.

“Management should have the decency to show restraint at a time when so many BBC staff are under huge pressures following major cutbacks. This announcement will only serve to disillusion staff further,” Paul McLaughlin, NUJ broadcasting organiser, said in a statement from the union.

Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, reiterated the need to improve the management structure of bbc.co.uk before approving further investment. In May the site’s management was blamed for losing ‘effective control’ after a £36 million overspend.

More figures from the report:

  • average monthly page impressions for bbc.co.uk are more than 3.6 billion, while weekly unique users average more than 33 million;
  • BBC Mobile is the ‘most accessed’ mobile browser for news, sport and weather in the UK;
  • levels of audience trust in the BBC have remained steady year-on-year with 75 per cent of viewers rating BBC news programming as ‘fair, informed and balanced

BBC Worldwide

Analysis of BBC Worldwide (part of the annual report and separate reviews released) emphasised the importance of online in growing its global audience. The service’s online audience rose 34 per cent year-on-year. However, the review highlighted the failure of Spanish-language site BBC Mundo to meet the demands of increased internet access.

The launch of BBC Arabic came in for particular praise in the review, creating ‘trimedia’ BBC coverage in Arabic:

“With the launch of BBC Arabic television, our multimedia strategy took a giant step forward. That moment in March 2008 marked the successful culmination of a four-year journey to secure funding and deliver a high-quality television service in a vital region of the world.”

Online revenues accounted for 2.7 per cent of total sales for BBC Worldwide in 2007/8 – rising from 1.1 per cent previously, the report said. The creation of bbc.com and syndication deals with YouTube and iTunes were cited as key revenue drivers for the service.

Independent News and Media is no ‘digital ostrich’ says O’Reilly

Gavin O’Reilly, chief operating officer of Indepenent News and Media (INM) and president of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), has responded to criticism of the publisher’s digital strategy by media commentator Roy Greenslade.

INM has adopted a ‘platform agnostic’ policy for growing its media, O’Reilly wrote in a comment responding to Greenslade, and is not investing in print at the expense of online.

“[T]he O’Brien saga is a distraction from the stark reality facing a company that has put its faith in the longevity of newsprint and averted its gaze from the digital future. It has invested online, of course, but it is way behind many other newspaper companies,” Greenslade wrote, likening INM to a ‘digital ostrich’.

According to O’Reilly, the facts speak for themselves:

INM online revenues grew by 111.5% last year and its 100 websites attract 12 million monthly unique users.

Reports of a ‘volatile’ advertising situation, he added, are not a result of print vs online or structural shifts within INM, but a result of the wider economic downturn.

WAN 2008: Le Figaro: 20% of revenues from online by 2010

Le Figaro is predicting that 20% of its revenue will be generated by its online operations by 2010.

But the French newspaper has plans to beat this, Pierre Conte, deputy managing director for new media and advertising for Le Figaro Group, told delegates at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference today.

After rising from 2 million unique users to its websites to 8 million in two years, the group’s web traffic now accounts for 1 French internet user out of every four.

Last year its online revenues accounted for 13% of its total income – so how will the publisher build on this?

Gradual integration
Online success will only be achieved if all the group’s editorial teams want to take part, Francis Morel, managing director, said.

As such Le Figaro adopted an ‘invite not assign’ policy, giving journalists the opportunity to do work for the websites if they wished (though initially for no extra pay).

According to Morel merging editorial teams for print and online was seen as essential, despite concerns raised by the unions.

Journalists became increasingly enthusiastic about working for the websites and now both editorial teams are on the same floor under the same editorial head, though Morel insists this has been about building bridges and not enforced integration.

Advertising
The group has sought to recoup floundering revenues from print classifieds by making a concerted push with this advertising online, setting up a team to find advertisers for online-only.

Contextual and behavioural advertising is also being experimented with.

E-commerce and diversification
Building around the flagship portal of Le Figaro, the publisher has launched specialist sport, finance and lifestyle websites, in addition to acquiring several e-commerce sites.

Content has also been syndicated to other websites, though this is not a long-term business model, Conte says.

“This business [selling content to other websites] will continue to be weak and limited. We need to work on ad revenue. We are not reinventing anything by saying that, but we need to integrate our sales house.”

Content
News remains a priority online for all the group’s content-based websites. On the Le Figaro site a commenting function has been added to articles and submissions from users are welcomed.

Le Figaro has also set up its own TV studio to produce video clips for online and mobile.

As a word of warning, Morel stresses that the digital developments in these areas have not been at the expense of the print product.

“It is indispensable to continue to invest and focus on print, because while the internet is a key territory, it will not replace print.

“We need to be extremely cautious and prudent. The internet is a very volatile market. We need to be very flexible at any time to change our course because we do not know what tomorrow holds.”