Tag Archives: WAN

WAN Amsterdam: How a regional newspaper in Austria hopes to make half its revenue from digital by 2011

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In the last session of the WAN/World Editors Forum 11th Readership Conference the speakers looked at shaping the future of the newspaper (information courtesy of WAN conference updates).

While Karen Wall, assistant managing director of Metro in the UK, focussed on good old print, arguing that the free newspaper model was growing, Christian Ortner the editor-in-chief of the regional newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten, in Austria, took the WAN audience through his newspaper’s decision to become the ‘Yahoo for local search’ in their area.

“Today Google has taken over search,” said Ortner. “Down to the small restaurant, Google is serving the local market.”

But he believes that “what happened in search need not happen for local news, services, parties, classifieds, restaurants, videos and other content.”

Vorarlberger Nachrichten Online is now aggressively pursuing online opportunities, forecasting that half its revenue will come from its digital platforms by 2011.

Here’s what the paper is developing, as told by Ortner:

  • 17 citizen forums, which connect active citizens at the community level. “Politicians and journalists are also members of the list. The citizens’ ideas are picked up by the newspaper reporters, who try to communicate and solve the problems. VN now generates thousands of new and dedicated ‘freelance journalists.'”
  • ‘MyVillage’ hyperlocal websites, which deliver fresh and useful information to the users about their immediate neighbourhoods. The strategy for the online platform calls for lots of micro-sites on niche topics.
  • Video, video, video, from a variety of sources – local reporters, news agencies and the users themselves. “What works for YouTube can also be successful locally.”
  • A ‘mobile journalist’ team covering breaking news, with videos and photos. The ‘mojos’ focus on ordinary people and local stories.
  • A multi-brand strategy that focuses on target groups: “We believe the online upside is greater than the print downside.”

WAN Amsterdam: What have newspapers done to build new audiences?

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The 11th Readership Conference is addressing building new print, as well as digital audiences (not just stopping the old readers running away). So how exactly have newspapers across the world successfully built up new audiences? (Quotes and information courtesy of the WAN conference updates)

The Telegraaf in the Netherlands has used sport and social networking

  • Using Hyves.net they used the network’s ‘send to a friend’ function and a widget for users’ home pages that allowed them to see how they were performing against their friends. The contest had 170,000 participants: 110,000 through Hyves and 60,000 through the Telegraaf’s sports site, Telesport.
  • For the Olympics, the Telegraaf provided editorial content to a Hyves web section dedicated to the events which included blogs from Telegraaf reporters in Beijing and other stories from the Telegraaf sports team in Amsterdam.

Lara Ankersmit, publisher for online media, at the paper, said the partnership provided strong branding tied to popular sports events, and more than 170,000 registrations and e-mail addresses.

The Verdens Gang newspaper company in Norway has increased revenue while losing readers

  • A graph of VG’s print circulation decline over the past several years looks like a ski slope – it dropped 20 percent since 2002. But, at the same time, profit increased from 270 million Norwegian krone (31 million euros) to 365 million krone (41 million euros).
  • The approach is ‘continuous product diversification and improving production efficiency considerably’ through new prodcucts such as social networks, and doing more marketing: VG spends 10 million euros annually on market examination.
  • It pays more attention to distribution. Ensuring good product placement at sales outlet is one important focus, as is establishing new outlets, such as coffee shops.

Torry Pederson, CEO of VG said that good journalism that attracts attention, on all platforms. “Don’t cut down on journalistic resources to cover the important stories,” he said.

The Bakersfield Californian is focusing on who isn’t reading the paper

  • In five years, it went from having no weekly newspapers to having three, from no magazines to three magazines, from one website to 11 websites. It created three subsidiaries and built its own social media software.
  • Alongside market research there was commitment to invest in new product development – at least 1 per cent of revenues each.
  • New products recaptured six of the eight percentage points in consumer reach lost by The Californian. It increased non-core revenue from 1 per cent to 12 per cent.

Mary Lou Fulton, vice president of audience development at the paper said “Before, we focused primarily on the circulation, profitability and content of our daily newspaper (…) The essential shift in thinking was to become interested in who was not reading the newspaper or advertising in it. That was a big wake-up call.”

WAN Amsterdam: Little known fact?… Guardian special advisor@Digital Revenue Goldmine

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Caroline Little, this year’s keynote speaker at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Digital Revenue Goldmine event, used her experiences at the Washington Post and Guardian to talk about the future of the web for newspapers.

Most delegates had probably heard the sentiments of Little’s speech before, unless they’ve been living on another media planet for the past five years, but were eager to ask how she had implemented changes at her two workplaces.

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/carolinelittle.mp3]

What was her budget? How would she have coped without the strength of brand? How to manage economically while making the changes?

Little did not really give concrete examples and afterwards she told me it was perhaps too early in the day to talk specifics – she’s only been in the role at the Guardian since August. I’ll be sure to follow up with her in a few months time… The news report on her speech can be read here.

WAN Amsterdam: Mobile advertising to become a real business in a few years…

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Plenty more blog action to come as I file back from Digital Revenue Goldmine, WAN’s 3rd World Digital Publishing Conference. In the meantime, here’s a nice pic from Martha Stone’s (Director, Shaping the Future of the Newspaper, at WAN) talk which looked at US advertising trends. We’re currently in the monetizing mobile session – hope lots of productive hints will come out of that.

Tweets from the 3rd World Digital Publishing Conference

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    Reuters: EU investigating Google-Yahoo advertising deal

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    European Union anti-trust watchdogs are investigating the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo, which would see the two companies share some ad revenue.

    The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has called on the EU to probe the tie-up, which Google and Yahoo have said would only come into force in the US and Canada.

    WAN said the deal would affect Yahoo’s ability to compete with Google in the future.

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

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    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.

    Online Journalism Scandinavia: How to kiss 713,000 teenagers and still make a profit

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    Norway’s largest city is in cyberspace, and its 713 000 ‘citizens’ are generating good revenues for the newspaper that owns it.

    Schibsted-owned VG.no is not only Norway’s most read and most profitable news site, it also has a social network making a nice contribution to the news site’s admirable financial results.

    A city of teenagers
    VG is currently earning a gross margin of more than 50 per cent from this social network, called ‘Nettby‘ (Norwegian for NetCity), Jo Christian Oterhals, head of development, VG Multimedia & chairman of Nettby Community AS, Norway, told the audience at World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Gothenburg last week.

    The 713,000-strong city is in fact the biggest city in Norway, bigger than the capital, Oslo.

    “Teenage girls are very active here, and we all know that if you get the girls, you also get teenage boys,” said Oterhals, who explained that Nettby’s 713 citizens make up for 61 per cent of all teenagers in Norway.

    This demographic is obviously an attractive one for advertisers, but premium membership is also an important source of revenue. “Premium membership is really important for us now, we have more than 50,000 paying customers at any given time,” Oterhals added.

    City guards key to success
    Nettby is Norway’s second biggest social network after Facebook, but VG.no is not worried about the competition from the trendy website, because the users and purpose of the two social networks are so different:

    “Nettby is a place you go to meet new people; on Facebook you keep up with existing friends,” Espen Egil Hansen, managing editor of VG.no, told me on a previous occasion.

    Nettby is very much like a party where teenagers hang out, flirt and meet new friends.

    “But you can’t just open the door, the best parties are well administered,” said Oterhals.

    “That is why Nettby has city guards, volunteers who help moderate and control Nettby,” he explained, adding that these city guards were hand-picked by Nettby’s own people.

    “To throw a good party you need good planning, a place, a host, basic rules, a bouncer, an invitation and a few introduction. We try to provide all this,” said Oterhals.

    No recipe to make teenagers read news
    “Currently there are almost no links between VG and Nettby other than the logo, as it was very important for us when we started Nettby that the kids who came in there did not get the impression that this was their fathers’ website,” said Oterhals.

    In other words, Nettby has not been a recipe to get young readers reading newspapers – a topic much discussed during WAN.

    Instead, Oterhals told journalism.co.uk, part of the rational for running this social network was to be part of what is happening on the web and to figure out how young readers use the web.

    “What is your competitor online is not as easy to figure out online as in print – it could be Google, it could be Facebook – so we stay awake at night thinking about what the next big thing will be, who our new competitors are,” he said

    VG.no has also launched the site in Sweden, where it failed due to many Norwegian teenagers hanging out there, and more recently in Spain, where it is an add-on to the online operation of 20 Minutos, Schibsted’s Spanish freesheet.

    “Analysts said Nettby’s success will last for six years max, so the challenge for us is to look at how can we repackage and launch it as new products. I think that will be our strategy for the future,” said Oterhals.