The press online strategies

1. The press online
strategies
12 Nov. 2008
Gilles Fontaine
Mail: g.fontaine@idate.fr
Tel: +33 6 70 70 85 92

2. 22
The landscape: print
Distribution of paid publications decreasing
 Down 4.1% in Europe 2002-2006
Free newspaper circulation increasing (8% of worldwide newspaper
distribution)
 But vulnerability to advertising market
Average age rising
 In 2007 in the United States, only 33% of 18-24 year olds and 34% of 25-34 year
olds claimed to read a newspaper one day of the week
Revenues from classified ads falling sharply
 Down 16.5% in the US in 2007

3. 33
Heavy competition on the online news market
TV channel websites are developing
"Web-only" online newspapers
Hazy boundaries of news aggregators
Some press agencies are targeting the end market
Trafic market share does not
translate in audience market share
Internet Newspaper websites
Number of page views per internaut 51% 24%
Time spent online 23% 20%
2004-2007 rise in number of page views
and time spent online on newspapers- USA
Rank website Market share
1 Yahoo! News 7.13%
2 The Weather Channel 4.74%
3 CNN.com 3.66%
4 MSNBC 2.97%
5 Yahoo! Weather 2.09%
6 Google News 1.85%
7 New York Times 1.70%
8 Drudge report 1.59%
9 Fox News 1.59%
10 People Magazine 1.36%
Top 10 news and media sites –
USA – February 2008

4. 44
Online ads not compensating for loss in print ads
Newspapers online ads revenues decreased 2% YoY in Q3 2008
Free newspapers: 1 to 1.5 € per reader/month
Online ads revenues: 0.1 to 0.15 € per UV/month
4 to 5 pages per visit
Online advertising: « lose 10 get 1 »
-
10 000
20 000
30 000
40 000
50 000
60 000
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Print Total Online Total
US newspaper advertising revenues
(million USD)

5. 55
Sustainable for a web-only news service ?

6. 66
The HuffingtonPost metrics
Created as a blog, now:
Staff: 45
Operation costs: 4 to 5 m$
Breakeven at (theoretically) 4m UV/month
Niche content (politics)
Invest in editing
+ News feeds and blogs
To be compared:
 Washinton Post: 500 journalists; vast majority dedicated to print.
 Annual cost of running the NYT bureau in Bagdad: 3m $

7. 77
Elements of strategy
Increasing traffic
 Syndicated content, Google, Facebok, RSS etc…
 Getting traffic back on the newspaper website
 Additional, value added content and services (CityMag, ecommerce etc…)
Improving stickiness
 Value added web content (moving staff from print to web)
 Video (first YouTube, then original)
Improving ad placement
 Not only banners, search
 Outsourcing placement of unsold inventory to Ads networks
 Yield management
Saving the classifieds
 Critical size: partnerships with pure players (eg Yahoo HotJobs) or between
newspapers (eg CareerBuilder)
Building social networks
 Critical size: partnerships with pure players (eg Topix)
B2B business line ?
 Corporate communications services

8. 88
The impact on print
Strategy 1: Strong investments on print content to differentiate
from web offers and maintain prices.
 Only for premium newspapers
 Who can afford ?
Strategy 2: Decrease in prices of newspapers. Ultimately most of
them become free
 0.50€ targeted newspapers
 An (unknown) share of the pay-press is already free
Strategy 3: No more daily print; a web-site + a high-end,
advertising- friendly magazine
 60% of costs come from printing and distribution