NEARLY one in five adults in Toronto are reading newspapers online now more than they did a year ago, according to new data from the 2008 NADbank Readership study released Thursday.
Of the 19% of adults in Toronto who said that they spent more time with an online daily newspaper than in the previous year, 63% are male and 48% are between the ages of 18 to 34.
These adults who spend more time with online newspapers are also more likely to read a printed version of a daily newspaper, according to the study.
The Toronto findings are taken from the Newspaper Audience Databank's study of product, retail shopping and lifestyle data. The study includes readership data from 80 Canadian daily newspapers in 54 markets plus the two Detroit dailies . It also includes readership data from 58 community papers in 33 Canadian markets.
As part of the study more than 28,300 Canadian adults 18 years and older were surveyed in 22 urban markets.
The study includes data on 27 different product categories ranging from alcoholic beverage consumption to pleasure and business travel.
The Toronto results, released publicly Thursday, document the popularity of online social networks. Some 41% of online users -- or more than 1.4 million adults in Toronto -- accessed a social network site in the past month. Among those between 18 and 24 years old, the percentage spikes to 75%.
Source: editorandpublisher.com
Showing posts with label readership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label readership. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online
Surprise.
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.
This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers.
Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.)
We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable.
Now the online side, where we have a more accurate measurement: NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month. (There’s no readers per copy multiplier there, on the assumption that nearly always, there’s just one pair of eyeballs per online page view.)
So, US daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent — 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print.
Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA’s Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month.
How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn’t offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I’m going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. ** Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers.
So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the pageview split.
So whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. I’ve made a few estimates along the way to reach that conclusion, but only a drastic and unwarranted change in my few guestimates would change that result signficantly.
Is it any wonder then, that online revenue is stuck at less than 10 percent of the print revenue? Given the online share of audience attention, 10 percent looks high, actually. Let’s explore that revenue dimension further by comparing print and online CPMs.
Online, in 2008, NAA reports total newspaper site revenue of $3.109 billion; total page views of 38.726 billion. Online revenue per 1000 page views (CPM): $80.28. (That should raise your eyebrows, because if there are maybe three ads on the average page, it means the average ad is selling for more than $25 per 1000 views, which would be off the charts for most sites. I don’t buy that number, but that question is the subject for more research and hopefully a future post.)
On the print side, NAA reports 2008 revenue of $34.74 billion. Dividing that by 12 months and 83.6 billion printed pages per month, we get a print CPM of $34.62.
Does this make sense? Is it possible that newspapers are managing to demand and obtain an online pageview CPM that’s 2.3 times their printed page CPM? Are the online sales teams that much better than their print colleagues? Or, dare I say it, is it possible that newspapers assigning, by accounting maneuvers, a disproportionate share of their revenue to their online divisions, for example when they arbitrarily assign to online a percentage of the revenue in combination print/web ad packages, or credit a revenue share to online revenue in instances where advertisers are merely bonused online exposure as added value to a print buy?
The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession. Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention. While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to. In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.
POSTSCRIPT, Tuesday April 14, 7:30 a.m.: Dan Thornton at The Way of the Web, has posted some very relevant cautions and caveats to this analysis (but calls it “a good reality check”) and some of the commenters have raised fair questions about the legitimacy of the data. I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, “I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.” I too, know many reporters and editors who don’t read their own paper in print, but of all the data I used, the Scarborough research on readers per copy is the longest-running, most consistent survey, and its results cross-check with “read yesterday” survey data.
As I’ve noted in the comments, I’ve made two assumptions based on scanty information (minutes spent reading print, and number of print pages read). But even if I’ve overestimated those by 100 percent or 200 percent, the analysis still reaches the same conclusion, which is that within the limits of newspaper readership in print and online, the public still reads newspaper content in print by an overwhelming margin. The attention drift is toward online reading, but it’s not as rapid a drift as most of us have been assuming. Is this good news? No, because as pointed out by in the comments, the print-side problem is not readership, it’s advertising, particularly the loss of monopoly pricing power in most categories. And of course, non-newspaper sites are grabbing a big slice of the migration of attention online.
I want to emphasize that this analysis was limited to newspapers and newspaper sites as input to that industry’s ongoing search for business models that work. Any individual newspaper or newspaper group has at their command internal data to repeat this analysis more accurately for themselves, and I’d encourage them to do so. There has been a tendency in the industry to inflate the significance of unique visitors. As noted by Josh Benton in the comments, 100,000 monthly unique visitors on the site is not nearly the same as 100,000 print subscribers, but you can find such statistics conflated into equivalence on everything from ad sales materials to 10-K reports. What the industry really needs to do is to develop a valid, independently-audited measure of audience attention. Who knows, it might even help them sell some print advertising.
________
*Method: Multiplying daily readers times 313, Sunday readers times 52, adding the results, multiplying by 24 pages read, dividing by 12 months.
**According a print newspaper “engagement” study presented a few years ago, on weekdays 45 percent of readers spent more than 30 minutes, 34 percent between 16 and 30 minutes, 21 percent under 15 minutes. Sunday time is higher.
Source: niemanlab.org
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.
This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers.
Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.)
We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable.
Now the online side, where we have a more accurate measurement: NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month. (There’s no readers per copy multiplier there, on the assumption that nearly always, there’s just one pair of eyeballs per online page view.)
So, US daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent — 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print.
Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA’s Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month.
How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn’t offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I’m going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. ** Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers.
So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the pageview split.
So whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. I’ve made a few estimates along the way to reach that conclusion, but only a drastic and unwarranted change in my few guestimates would change that result signficantly.
Is it any wonder then, that online revenue is stuck at less than 10 percent of the print revenue? Given the online share of audience attention, 10 percent looks high, actually. Let’s explore that revenue dimension further by comparing print and online CPMs.
Online, in 2008, NAA reports total newspaper site revenue of $3.109 billion; total page views of 38.726 billion. Online revenue per 1000 page views (CPM): $80.28. (That should raise your eyebrows, because if there are maybe three ads on the average page, it means the average ad is selling for more than $25 per 1000 views, which would be off the charts for most sites. I don’t buy that number, but that question is the subject for more research and hopefully a future post.)
On the print side, NAA reports 2008 revenue of $34.74 billion. Dividing that by 12 months and 83.6 billion printed pages per month, we get a print CPM of $34.62.
Does this make sense? Is it possible that newspapers are managing to demand and obtain an online pageview CPM that’s 2.3 times their printed page CPM? Are the online sales teams that much better than their print colleagues? Or, dare I say it, is it possible that newspapers assigning, by accounting maneuvers, a disproportionate share of their revenue to their online divisions, for example when they arbitrarily assign to online a percentage of the revenue in combination print/web ad packages, or credit a revenue share to online revenue in instances where advertisers are merely bonused online exposure as added value to a print buy?
The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession. Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention. While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to. In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.
POSTSCRIPT, Tuesday April 14, 7:30 a.m.: Dan Thornton at The Way of the Web, has posted some very relevant cautions and caveats to this analysis (but calls it “a good reality check”) and some of the commenters have raised fair questions about the legitimacy of the data. I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, “I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.” I too, know many reporters and editors who don’t read their own paper in print, but of all the data I used, the Scarborough research on readers per copy is the longest-running, most consistent survey, and its results cross-check with “read yesterday” survey data.
As I’ve noted in the comments, I’ve made two assumptions based on scanty information (minutes spent reading print, and number of print pages read). But even if I’ve overestimated those by 100 percent or 200 percent, the analysis still reaches the same conclusion, which is that within the limits of newspaper readership in print and online, the public still reads newspaper content in print by an overwhelming margin. The attention drift is toward online reading, but it’s not as rapid a drift as most of us have been assuming. Is this good news? No, because as pointed out by in the comments, the print-side problem is not readership, it’s advertising, particularly the loss of monopoly pricing power in most categories. And of course, non-newspaper sites are grabbing a big slice of the migration of attention online.
I want to emphasize that this analysis was limited to newspapers and newspaper sites as input to that industry’s ongoing search for business models that work. Any individual newspaper or newspaper group has at their command internal data to repeat this analysis more accurately for themselves, and I’d encourage them to do so. There has been a tendency in the industry to inflate the significance of unique visitors. As noted by Josh Benton in the comments, 100,000 monthly unique visitors on the site is not nearly the same as 100,000 print subscribers, but you can find such statistics conflated into equivalence on everything from ad sales materials to 10-K reports. What the industry really needs to do is to develop a valid, independently-audited measure of audience attention. Who knows, it might even help them sell some print advertising.
________
*Method: Multiplying daily readers times 313, Sunday readers times 52, adding the results, multiplying by 24 pages read, dividing by 12 months.
**According a print newspaper “engagement” study presented a few years ago, on weekdays 45 percent of readers spent more than 30 minutes, 34 percent between 16 and 30 minutes, 21 percent under 15 minutes. Sunday time is higher.
Source: niemanlab.org
Monday, March 16, 2009
About that newspaper ‘doomsday' list
DON’T lose too much sleep over the list of 10 supposedly doomed newspapers that made the rounds in the last couple of days.
Although some of the papers one day may succumb to anemic readership and revenues, there is not enough information or analysis underlying the scary list to support the proposition that the publications are more or less doomed than any of 10, 20 or 30 other papers that might have been named, instead.
For the record, the papers on the list are the Philadelphia Daily News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Miami Herald, Detroit News, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Daily News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The hit list, which was produced by Douglas A. McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St., was rapidly and uncritically republished everywhere from Time Magazine to the Drudge Report. Although Doug is a friend whose ordinarily thoughtful work I have cited on occasion, there is no hard data or deep analysis to support his findings.
Doug gives no evidence why the Plain Dealer is any more endangered than any of the other newspapers published by its parent, Advance Publications. Or why the Miami and Fort Worth papers are more at risk than some of the other McClatchy titles.
Even though weak economies are hardest on the No. 2 papers in two-newspaper towns, Doug predicts the demise of the print edition of the Boston Globe while saying nothing of the apparently fragile financial status of the far smaller Boston Herald.
Two more No. 2 papers, the Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News, indeed are facing steep challenges, as discussed respectively here and here.
Doug joins the many commentators who have been quick to predict the demise of the San Francisco Chronicle, but, as explained here, it is unlikely the Chron will be shut down. Rather, it almost certainly will be folded in due course into the cluster of MediaNews Group papers that encircle it in northern California.
Given that MediaNews, the parent of the Detroit News, is locked into a complex series of financial relationships with Gannett, the senior partner in the Motown joint-operating agreement, it seems unlikely the parties can let the News fail.
While the Strib and N.Y. News face fierce cross-town competition in their respective markets, each has the potential to partner with a rival paper to drastically reduce operating expenses and, thus, enhance profitability. The potential partner in the Twin Cities is the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The N.Y. News could team with Newsday, the New York Post or even the Newark Star-Ledger.
Doug’s doomsday list omits the names of some papers that arguably could be more endangered than the ones he mentioned. One of them is the Seattle Times, whose publisher says he is "holding on by our fingertips" even as the competing Post-Intelligencer seems poised to go out of business.
Source: newsosaur.blogspot.com
Although some of the papers one day may succumb to anemic readership and revenues, there is not enough information or analysis underlying the scary list to support the proposition that the publications are more or less doomed than any of 10, 20 or 30 other papers that might have been named, instead.
For the record, the papers on the list are the Philadelphia Daily News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Miami Herald, Detroit News, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Daily News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The hit list, which was produced by Douglas A. McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St., was rapidly and uncritically republished everywhere from Time Magazine to the Drudge Report. Although Doug is a friend whose ordinarily thoughtful work I have cited on occasion, there is no hard data or deep analysis to support his findings.
Doug gives no evidence why the Plain Dealer is any more endangered than any of the other newspapers published by its parent, Advance Publications. Or why the Miami and Fort Worth papers are more at risk than some of the other McClatchy titles.
Even though weak economies are hardest on the No. 2 papers in two-newspaper towns, Doug predicts the demise of the print edition of the Boston Globe while saying nothing of the apparently fragile financial status of the far smaller Boston Herald.
Two more No. 2 papers, the Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News, indeed are facing steep challenges, as discussed respectively here and here.
Doug joins the many commentators who have been quick to predict the demise of the San Francisco Chronicle, but, as explained here, it is unlikely the Chron will be shut down. Rather, it almost certainly will be folded in due course into the cluster of MediaNews Group papers that encircle it in northern California.
Given that MediaNews, the parent of the Detroit News, is locked into a complex series of financial relationships with Gannett, the senior partner in the Motown joint-operating agreement, it seems unlikely the parties can let the News fail.
While the Strib and N.Y. News face fierce cross-town competition in their respective markets, each has the potential to partner with a rival paper to drastically reduce operating expenses and, thus, enhance profitability. The potential partner in the Twin Cities is the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The N.Y. News could team with Newsday, the New York Post or even the Newark Star-Ledger.
Doug’s doomsday list omits the names of some papers that arguably could be more endangered than the ones he mentioned. One of them is the Seattle Times, whose publisher says he is "holding on by our fingertips" even as the competing Post-Intelligencer seems poised to go out of business.
Source: newsosaur.blogspot.com
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
How Financial Times Defies the Times
Famed Pink Broadsheet in the Black by Raising Price, Charging for Web
THE Financial Times is charging more for copies of its salmon-colored daily broadsheet and is making readers pay for its online content as well -- not exactly recessionary measures in the toughest times ever for the newspaper industry.
The Financial Times Group has bucked the newspaper trend, with 2008 profit up 13%. The robust performance saw owner Pearson's shares rise on a day when the U.K. stock market plunged to a six-year low. Not that the Financial Times is immune to an ailing global economy: Its ad revenue and newspaper readership both fell 3% in 2008, while management recently announced 80 layoffs and introduced the option of a three-day week over the summer to help cut costs.
But circulation revenue was up 16%, thanks mostly to a dramatic cover-price rise from £1 ($1.42) to £1.80 ($2.55) in the space of 18 months. And the 3% ad-revenue drop was minimal compared with those of some rivals that recorded 30% falls at the start of this year.
Perhaps most significantly of all for the long term, people must pay to view Financial Times content on the web. In 2008, the number of digital subscribers was up 8% to 109,609. On top of that, FT.com claims 1 million registered users, with 7.2 million unique users in 2008 (up 27%) and 49.2 million page views (up 68%). Daily newspaper circulation is 432,944, and worldwide readership is 1.3 million.
'Religious issue'
Charging for content on the web goes against the doctrine that information yearns to be free -- and supported solely by ads. "We've taken a lot of flak," said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. "People have a funny attitude on the subject. Some people associated with the internet see it almost as a religious issue. They take great exception to putting content behind a veil.
"Internally, we always believed we were doing the right thing," he continued. "Our main product is content, and we wouldn't feel comfortable in a world where we couldn't sell our main product."
The site, which has Asia, U.S., Middle East, U.K. and Europe versions as well as a Chinese-language site, allows limited access to non-subscribers, who can see up to three articles a month for free. After that, the browsers need to register, and for more than 10 articles a month, a paid subscription is necessary.
The standard subscription has recently been increased to £149 ($210) from £99 ($140), as the emphasis moves toward subscriptions to drive revenue in a weak advertising market.
The newspaper is based in the U.K., but 70% of its audience is overseas. Its web traffic is 40% from the U.K., 30% from the U.S., 20% from Europe and 10% from Asia.
Not chasing volume
Of course, the Financial Times has been helped in its staunch adherence to charging for content by the fact that it is essentially a niche proposition. It's aimed at global business decision makers and since there are never going to be more than a couple of million of them, there was never going to be any question of chasing volume.
"I've heard of some scary stuff going on [at rivals], with CPMs as low as 10¢," Mr. Grimshaw said. "At those rates, you need a lot of page views to make any money at all. There's a lot of what I call plain-vanilla inventory out there with only the [cost per thousand page impressions] to distinguish one site from another, which has pushed CPM through the floor. A lot of publishers and portals have pursued volume over other things."
FT.com, meanwhile, has focused on targeting technology and is still getting premium advertising from the financial-services sector, as well as luxury brands such as Rolex.
Vanessa Clifford, head of press at Mindshare U.K., said, "The Financial Times represents high-quality journalism. It is a very strong brand that has built up over many years, and they can command a premium for it. When budgets contract, advertisers stick with the trusted titles."
U.S. papers seek more circ revenue
The Financial Times isn't alone in increasing pricing, but it does charge more than its principal American competitors. The New York Times raised its metro weekday price to $1.50 from $1.25 last summer, and The Wall Street Journal upped its cover price to $2 from $1.50 around the same time. Both are increasing home-delivery charges, too.
The Journal also has online revenue to brag about. Although News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch initially suggested he'd like to take down the online pay wall, he changed his mind once in possession of the paper and adopted a hybrid of free and paid content. Last fall the Journal did away with a long-running $99 introductory offer for the print and online editions; that combination now costs $181.
The Financial Times is also expanding its circulation revenue more quickly than The New York Times or the Journal. The Times Media Group recently reported increasing circulation revenue 3.4% in 2008, despite losing 3.6% of Times weekday circulation in the most recent reporting period. The Journal said its fourth-quarter revenue jumped 9% from the same quarter a year earlier; its circulation held steady in the most-recent period.
The New York Times, of course, had tried cordoning its columnists and other "premium" online content behind a wall called Times Select, which was free to print subscribers and cost everyone else $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month. It got about 227,000 people to pay for online-only memberships, generating some $10 million in new revenue. But in September 2007 the company ended the experiment, deciding the revenue wasn't enough to offset the traffic and visibility the site was losing.
In another sign of circulation revenue's growing importance, the Journal recently argued loudly against an article in The New York Times that suggested the Journal was heavily discounting its prices to gain circulation.
Source: AdAge.com
THE Financial Times is charging more for copies of its salmon-colored daily broadsheet and is making readers pay for its online content as well -- not exactly recessionary measures in the toughest times ever for the newspaper industry.
The Financial Times Group has bucked the newspaper trend, with 2008 profit up 13%. The robust performance saw owner Pearson's shares rise on a day when the U.K. stock market plunged to a six-year low. Not that the Financial Times is immune to an ailing global economy: Its ad revenue and newspaper readership both fell 3% in 2008, while management recently announced 80 layoffs and introduced the option of a three-day week over the summer to help cut costs.
But circulation revenue was up 16%, thanks mostly to a dramatic cover-price rise from £1 ($1.42) to £1.80 ($2.55) in the space of 18 months. And the 3% ad-revenue drop was minimal compared with those of some rivals that recorded 30% falls at the start of this year.
Perhaps most significantly of all for the long term, people must pay to view Financial Times content on the web. In 2008, the number of digital subscribers was up 8% to 109,609. On top of that, FT.com claims 1 million registered users, with 7.2 million unique users in 2008 (up 27%) and 49.2 million page views (up 68%). Daily newspaper circulation is 432,944, and worldwide readership is 1.3 million.
'Religious issue'
Charging for content on the web goes against the doctrine that information yearns to be free -- and supported solely by ads. "We've taken a lot of flak," said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. "People have a funny attitude on the subject. Some people associated with the internet see it almost as a religious issue. They take great exception to putting content behind a veil.
"Internally, we always believed we were doing the right thing," he continued. "Our main product is content, and we wouldn't feel comfortable in a world where we couldn't sell our main product."
The site, which has Asia, U.S., Middle East, U.K. and Europe versions as well as a Chinese-language site, allows limited access to non-subscribers, who can see up to three articles a month for free. After that, the browsers need to register, and for more than 10 articles a month, a paid subscription is necessary.
The standard subscription has recently been increased to £149 ($210) from £99 ($140), as the emphasis moves toward subscriptions to drive revenue in a weak advertising market.
The newspaper is based in the U.K., but 70% of its audience is overseas. Its web traffic is 40% from the U.K., 30% from the U.S., 20% from Europe and 10% from Asia.
Not chasing volume
Of course, the Financial Times has been helped in its staunch adherence to charging for content by the fact that it is essentially a niche proposition. It's aimed at global business decision makers and since there are never going to be more than a couple of million of them, there was never going to be any question of chasing volume.
"I've heard of some scary stuff going on [at rivals], with CPMs as low as 10¢," Mr. Grimshaw said. "At those rates, you need a lot of page views to make any money at all. There's a lot of what I call plain-vanilla inventory out there with only the [cost per thousand page impressions] to distinguish one site from another, which has pushed CPM through the floor. A lot of publishers and portals have pursued volume over other things."
FT.com, meanwhile, has focused on targeting technology and is still getting premium advertising from the financial-services sector, as well as luxury brands such as Rolex.
Vanessa Clifford, head of press at Mindshare U.K., said, "The Financial Times represents high-quality journalism. It is a very strong brand that has built up over many years, and they can command a premium for it. When budgets contract, advertisers stick with the trusted titles."
U.S. papers seek more circ revenue
The Financial Times isn't alone in increasing pricing, but it does charge more than its principal American competitors. The New York Times raised its metro weekday price to $1.50 from $1.25 last summer, and The Wall Street Journal upped its cover price to $2 from $1.50 around the same time. Both are increasing home-delivery charges, too.
The Journal also has online revenue to brag about. Although News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch initially suggested he'd like to take down the online pay wall, he changed his mind once in possession of the paper and adopted a hybrid of free and paid content. Last fall the Journal did away with a long-running $99 introductory offer for the print and online editions; that combination now costs $181.
The Financial Times is also expanding its circulation revenue more quickly than The New York Times or the Journal. The Times Media Group recently reported increasing circulation revenue 3.4% in 2008, despite losing 3.6% of Times weekday circulation in the most recent reporting period. The Journal said its fourth-quarter revenue jumped 9% from the same quarter a year earlier; its circulation held steady in the most-recent period.
The New York Times, of course, had tried cordoning its columnists and other "premium" online content behind a wall called Times Select, which was free to print subscribers and cost everyone else $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month. It got about 227,000 people to pay for online-only memberships, generating some $10 million in new revenue. But in September 2007 the company ended the experiment, deciding the revenue wasn't enough to offset the traffic and visibility the site was losing.
In another sign of circulation revenue's growing importance, the Journal recently argued loudly against an article in The New York Times that suggested the Journal was heavily discounting its prices to gain circulation.
Source: AdAge.com
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Online newspaper readership climbs 16 percent
DESPITE a virtual meltdown in the newspaper industry, the nation's top 10 online newspapers posted a 16 percent increase in December Web traffic, according to a report released Tuesday by Nielsen Online.
Such results bode well for an industry that is currently undergoing tumultuous times, with a growing number of pulp-based publications contemplating bankruptcy, scaling back delivery days, or switching to an online-only format, as readership continues to decline and advertisers shift their spending online.
Unique visitors in the month of December rose to 40.1 million, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the report.
Chuck Schilling, Nielsen Online's research director agency and media, noted in a statement:
Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth.
News coverage in December ranged from how the 2008 holiday season would be affected by the weakening economy to Obama's latest nomination for his administration, all of which helped to drive this impressive growth.
The New York Times posted a 6 percent increase in its December Internet traffic to 18.2 million unique visitors, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the report.
USA Today jumped 15 percent to 11.4 million unique visitors and The Washington Post climbed 12 percent to 9.5 million.
Publications posting substantial increases included the New York Daily News with a staggering 99 percent increase to 5.9 million, the Los Angeles Times with a 73 percent jump to 8 million and the New York Post with a 60 percent increase to 4.6 million.
Despite such gains, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which audits the paid circulation figures of publications, noted the six-month average for the top 25 U.S. Sunday newspapers, dropped by 3.2 percent to 7.2 percent for the period ending in September, over year ago figures. The Washington Post fell 3.2 percent, while the New York Daily News dropped 7.2 percent.
Source: cnet news
Such results bode well for an industry that is currently undergoing tumultuous times, with a growing number of pulp-based publications contemplating bankruptcy, scaling back delivery days, or switching to an online-only format, as readership continues to decline and advertisers shift their spending online.
Unique visitors in the month of December rose to 40.1 million, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the report.
Chuck Schilling, Nielsen Online's research director agency and media, noted in a statement:
Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth.
News coverage in December ranged from how the 2008 holiday season would be affected by the weakening economy to Obama's latest nomination for his administration, all of which helped to drive this impressive growth.
The New York Times posted a 6 percent increase in its December Internet traffic to 18.2 million unique visitors, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the report.
USA Today jumped 15 percent to 11.4 million unique visitors and The Washington Post climbed 12 percent to 9.5 million.
Publications posting substantial increases included the New York Daily News with a staggering 99 percent increase to 5.9 million, the Los Angeles Times with a 73 percent jump to 8 million and the New York Post with a 60 percent increase to 4.6 million.
Despite such gains, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which audits the paid circulation figures of publications, noted the six-month average for the top 25 U.S. Sunday newspapers, dropped by 3.2 percent to 7.2 percent for the period ending in September, over year ago figures. The Washington Post fell 3.2 percent, while the New York Daily News dropped 7.2 percent.
Source: cnet news
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