January | 2010 | *contains graphic material

January 28, 2010

3 reasons the iPad won’t save newspapers

A big slice of the Jesus Tablet presentation yesterday was taken up with the New York Times’ SVP for Digital, Martin Nisenholtz, demo-ing the NYT’s iPad optimised app. Apparently the app was thrown together in 3 weeks (!), but already looks like a fantastic interface for looking at content, and one I personally will certainly purchase for myself. Nisenholtz said “We’re incredibly psyched to pioneer the next generation of digital journalism. We want to create the best of print and best of digital, all rolled up into one”.

But will the iPad save newspapers? Will it help publishers crack the paid content puzzle, and get people buying news content again, like the good old days? I really, really don’t think so, much as I’d like to believe it. Here’s why:

1. Readership. Newspapers are/were a genuine mass market medium. I mean really, really mass: the majority of the country used to purchase one every day. Even 10 years ago national daily papers in the UK sold almost 13m copies a day, which at current prices translates to ~£6m in revenue every day. In the year 2000 daily newspapers made £1.8bn in cover sales. To put it in context, the Daily Mail sold about £400m, while Coca Cola sells about £500m. Serious business, and that doesn’t even include advertising revenues.

In total, over the last 10 years the daily newspaper market has lost about £465m a year in cover sales. Now … let’s suppose, generously, that a newspaper might make £10 from the sale of one iPad app. In order to cover that shortfall App store would need to sell 46,000,000 newspaper apps to cover that shortfall.

The reality is, however great it looks, the iPad will probably still be a niche item. If they do really well, Apple might sell 2m in the UK. Of those, let’s say 1.5m buy a paid-for newspaper app (this is unlikely but still possible, considering the Guardian has sold 70,000 iPhone apps in the first month). That’s still only £10m to share between 10 daily papers. Handy new revenue line, but a long long way from revolutionising your business.

2. Competition from the internet. The iPad is, according to Jobs, the “best web experience you can get”. From what I’ve seen, it looks it, and that’s enough for me.

This is the difference with the iPhone, and its stunning success as an app platform. The iPhone apps are vast improvements over what you could expect using the iPhone’s net browser – intuitive, quick, nice to use. But if the iPad is built with the internet in mind, will people convert to a paid-for newspaper app when they can look at the same newspaper’s website for nothing? Some people will, including myself, for the small incremental benefits you will no doubt get from an optimised native app. But I bet a whole lot of people will be satisfied with the “best web experience you can get”.

3. Fundamental structural industry problems that remain un-addressed. The newspaper industry is in trouble because its structures and costs are way out of proportion with a digital age. It’s not in trouble because consumers were waiting for a nice piece of kit to read newspapers on.

When digital distribution means a one-man operation can start a site that competes on the same stage as national newspaper sites with hundreds of employees, there’s a big problem.

And unfortunately, the economics of iPhone/iPad content app distribution will be exactly the same. While big publishers will get in first with apps, pretty soon the smaller guys, the startups, will start to compete in the same space. And their apps will probably be free as well, and then you’ll be back where you started, except you spent £100,000 on an above the line marketing campaign for your app and they didn’t. And there you go

January 25, 2010

Alan Rusbridger: so where’s the Guardian sleepwalking to, exactly?

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian has been in the news today discussing, yes, paywalls. Quoted at length but full article here:

The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a “sleepwalk into oblivion”.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

The Guardian editor told an audience of academics and journalists in London that it is more important than ever to focus on journalism: “If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis.”

Now contrast with this article, also from the Guardian:

Guardian News & Media managing director Brooks told staff in a memo posted on the company intranet yesterday that the current rate of losses at GNM, which publishes the two national newspapers and the guardian.co.uk website network, which includes MediaGuardian.co.uk, was “unsustainable”.

Brooks added that GNM was losing £100,000 a day, a rate that its parent company, Guardian Media Group ”cannot afford”.

In July Guardian Media Group has posted a pre-tax loss of £89.8m for the year to 29 March, with GNM reporting an operating loss of £36.8m.

I yield to no man in my conviction that the Guardian and guardian.co.uk are absolute first-rate media organs … but do you really want business advice from the organisation that’s losing £100,000 a day (yes! every single day!)? The truth is these days you can’t and shouldn’t keep journalism and business models in distinct silos, never letting them communicate with one another. That’s how things used to be done, back when newspapers were making truckloads of money. It’s all part of the same conversation, and so it should be. (A good start would be by guardian.co.uk moderators not deleting my entirely inoffensive comments on their site, I assume because I gently poked fun at Rusbridger …)

Here’s to more, and better, thinking about and discussion of business models, and less sleepwalking to oblivion, or wherever the Guardian is heading.

January 22, 2010

content is (mostly not) king

Strangely, I’ve recently heard the phrase ‘content is king’ a couple of times in one day from two different people. Once in regard to an advertiser looking at branded content; once in regard to publishing strategy. I can only empathise with Faris Yakob who spoke about his “annoyance [with] people, including myself, saying Content is King too much, as though it explained stuff”.

On the one hand it expresses something plainly obvious: content is good. People like reading, watching and listening to it. And it’s a fundamental pre-requisite for monetising through ads or subs, or something else entirely.

But I always found the idea that ‘Content is King’ a little glib, and got the feeling publishers keep saying it in the hope it becomes self-fulfilling; that someday soon a new business model will arrive for monetising their king-ly content. Sly Bailey gives a good example of this kind of thinking, in some very measured words to paidContent.org on the subject of paywalls:

“The important thing for us is to develop the brand with the right content that engages a passionate audience … and whether over time that gives you the opportunity to think about areas you can charge for, that’s an open discussion – but you have to create that content overall in order to have that option”

I think this a way of avoiding having to think about the ultimate doomsday scenario: that digital distribution has revealed the true worth of content (and it’s not very much); that the value of the newspaper business was actually sustained by a virtual monopoly of distribution rather than valuable content; that content without a distribution monopoly has ceased to be a stable basis for a profitable business; that it’s time, in other words, to get out of the content game!

Digital distribution has driven down the cost of producing content such that even your 14 year old cousin can reach 1m people through his Youtube channel, blog or Facebook group. By now you’ve quite probably seen this great graphic which shows that bloggers produce enough content every day to fill the New York Times for 19 years straight, and they do it all without asking payment.

With this limitless sea of content on the internet, how can it be considered ‘king’? The answer, of course, is that it can’t. The long tail of online content is so far from being king it’s ridiculous.

Critics of new media from the world of publishing often bemoan the quality of internet content – ill-informed blogs, inane twitter, narcissistic Facebook updates, dumb Youtube videos, ‘loser-generated content’. I actually agree with this – comments on Youtube are usually pretty idiotic – but it conceals an important point. The barriers to content production and distribution are so low that producing inane and stupid content of interest to hardly anyone has now become a relatively economic activity. It wouldn’t make sense to spend millions printing and distributing a national newspaper to tell someone ‘OMG u r gay’. But not on the internet.

And that’s why distribution is the real king – that’s where the competitive advantage lies. Being the best (or the only) distributor/aggregator/indexer of content is what confers value on content, since it enables your users to find the gems they do value in the functionally infinite universe of rubbish. Hence Google.

And distribution has always been king, even in the heyday of newspapers. Newspapers currently like to position themselves as virtuous content creators compared to Google’s piratical and parasitic content distributors. They produce content; Google just aggregates, distributes, and profits from it. What this ignores is that newspapers are in fact significant distributors of third party content themselves. TV listings, obituaries, sports results, crosswords, weather reports, agency and syndicated copy, and lots of commercial content. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever surveyed newspaper readers you’d know how important this third party content is. A surprisingly large proportion of buyers claim that TV listings, sports results or crosswords are their ‘must have’ bits of the newspaper, while the other stuff (i.e. the news) is very much secondary).

So what newspapers have really lost is their grip on distributing this third party content, since Google clearly does this better. Newspaper content without the benefits of a virtual distribution monopoly is worth almost nothing. So I really fear that keeping your head down and investing your content is a hapless strategy – you’re better off focusing on the real issue of the distribution and monetisation of that content.

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January 19, 2010

2 big things for the FT to think about

Financial Times’ chief exec John Ridding has been in smug mode recently, talking about his paper’s success in making the paid content game work. In his words, progress from the FT’s online paywall and £2 cover price has been such that “[this] year will be the first year that revenues from content overtake revenues from print advertising. The way things are evolving, content revenues should overtake all advertising revenues by 2012.” (Yeah … if things just keep evolving in a predictable straight line. Which obviously happens all the time when talking about online media…)

Lots of commentators have sagely contributed to the discussion, noting that there is a “healthy market for business-critical information [such as that delivered by the FT and Wall Street Journal] … it’s the kind of unique information decision-makers will pay for.” So it’s assumed that niche, specialised publications like the FT are virtually immune from the whole paywall kerfuffle.

(Even Clay Shirky gets in on the act, claiming that WSJ paywalls are working because “financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.” Balls. Plenty of people want to share what they read in the FT. It doesn’t contain super secrets that help you make millions (unless I’ve been reading it wrong – I only read on weekends), it’s just an authoritative source of news that business-types read so they have something to say to each other…)

Now, the FT is doing OK, since it’s cushioned by (a) a wealthy audience and (b) corporate customers who are way less price sensitive than average newspaper readers. But the pressures that are being exerted on newspapers still apply to the FT; if not right now, they soon will be, screwing up John Ridding’s profit predictions. Here’s 2 big reasons for the FT to be cautious:

1. Competition. At the moment the FT is virtually unassailable in its position as the country’s most authoritative business publication. This places it in a strong position amongst an audience that wants the most authoritative voice with which to impress their friends, and makes it difficult for new competitors to emerge (look at City AM…).

But it’s not impossible – consider this example from Australia. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) used to be the only game in town for daily business journalism in Australia. They also operated a fully paywalled website, afr.com, with lots of corporate subscribers. 2 years ago a free, online-only competitor launched: Business Spectator. The key to BusSpec’s appeal is in its talent – if you were to ask the man in the street who the top 3 business journalists in Australia are, in all likelihood the answer would be Alan Kohler, Robert Gottliebsen and Stephen Bartholomeusz. These three, led by former AFR editor Kohler, leveraged their own personal brands to launch a significant competitor to afr.com that is currently heading towards profitability, employing 2 dozen journalists and giving afr.com an absolute bath when it comes to traffic. (it’s also a great site).

Of course, traffic is not the only measure that matters, and afr.com would no doubt prefer to have their paying visitors than BusSpec’s free riders. And to be fair, I would assume they’re making much healthier revenues than BusSpec. But when authority and prestige rule this market niche, how long can you maintain your position when twice as many people are reading a competitor? How long until readers start to regard BusSpec as the most authoritative voice in business journalism?

There isn’t a comparable equivalent to BusSpec in the UK market. It would be like Robert Peston, Martin Wolf and Jeff Randall collaborating an a site. But with journalists-as-entrepreneurs heavily on the agenda, there’s absolutely no guarantee against this happening, which would totally poop the FT’s party.

2. The business audience is growing up. Summed up by Shane Richmond from the Telegraph:

“I think it will become harder and harder for the FT to maintain its audience as the internet generation climbs the corporate ladder. The current audience believe they are getting content that they can’t get anywhere else – and that certainly isn’t available free – but the audience of the future may already have found other, more accessible publishers to meet their needs.”

The people making the decisions about the FT’s valuable corporate subscriptions probably regard the FT as the only game in town for business journalism. They may also regard Twitter as a frivolous waste of time, blogs as poorly-informed and pointless, and think the mobile internet will never catch on. But the people under them, who are on their way to the top, likely don’t share those views. And those people, once they arrive there, will be much more likely to sacrifice their FT subscriptions for free online publishing that fills the gap.

All in all, there is no magic mix of content immune from the economic pressures afflicting newspapers. It doesn’t matter how niche your market is – the internet’s actually a pretty friendly place for niches.

7 comments

January 5, 2010

2010: year of the flow past web

According to Kevin Marks of BT, we should be thinking of the web these days as following a ‘Flow Past’ logic, as opposed to the more popular ‘real time web’. According to Marks

We don’t all see the same flow … it is mediated by the people we choose to pay attention to

This prompted an extremely embarrassing debate from self-styled web philosophers, with someone saying

“Flow past” is still a linear, old-paradigm mindset, compared to what the mind wants … which is total immersion in all dimensions simultaneously

And someone else claiming

It is impossible for me to be upset with Kevin, but this … is the Web of Flow that I have been preaching for years, and he doesn’t mention it.

Whatevers. In any case, all of these conversations about the best heuristic metaphor for the intertubes point toward something big and important that has changed in the way we behave online. New platforms and features being widely adopted this year do, in fact, ‘flow’: Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, Google Wave, even RSS blog feeds, and plenty of others.

I like the Flow Past Web (FPW) metaphor because it exactly reflects my own experience over the past year. I have found myself less and less searching for pages, and more and more relying on the content that flows to me through Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and Digg. What I do online is less about what I can find through search, but is instead mediated through the people I choose to follow.

This might seem like a hopelessly esoteric discussion for epic nerds, but it actually has some big implications for the businesses of online publishers. The idea of the FPW is a decisive move beyond the ‘page’ metaphor, where the internet is seen as essentially a series of publications in which the user jumps from one to the other through search. In so doing, this represents a huge challenge to online publishers, whose content delivery business model is very much wedded to the ‘page’ metaphor. That is, getting visitors to your destination pages, and then serving them with lots of ad impressions. And publishers thinking of paywalls are even more invested in the ‘page’ internet, as you need consumers to be consuming your content within your walled environment, rather than on facebook.

This is (one of the) biggest issues facing publishers online. All the talk in the publishing industry is about boosting engagement, boosting loyalty and perhaps even having people pay to read. In other words, driving people to the site, keeping them there and getting them to come back. Meanwhile, consumer preference is moving away from this kind of deep, direct engagement with content providers, and towards engagement with each other, with socially-mediated content helping to facilitate that.

So how can publishers adapt to the FPW? Well … here’s a couple of ways:

1. Facebook Connect. One of the easiest ways for content producers to insert themselves into the Flow is adopting Facebook Connect, something the Economist has already flagged up as a key part of their strategy. Users can log into the site using their Facebook identity, have discussions, post comments, and most importantly, share links directly through their News Feed, pushing content directly to their friends. As FB is currently the biggest net destination (flow mediators?) in the UK, with an amazing 26 minutes time on site every month, this gives publishers some opportunity to leverage.

2. Twitter headline feeds and encourage traffic and retweets. Or better yet, Twittering journalists who Tweet their new stories. David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker both do this for their columns in the Guardian. It drives readers and retweets, but it also leads to direct discussion and interaction with their publics, which is far, far more engaging and fun than just reading a webpage and leaving a comment.

3. Living Stories. An initiative from Google described as “an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment.” Essentially, it involves collating new content on a particular subject in one place, which is continually updated: like a blog or an RSS reader. Living Stories re-organises newspaper content into a more Flow-friendly formulation. The benefits are that you leverage newspaper’s point of difference with the rest of the web – expertise – by creating a single, authoritative feed where people can receive the best news and comment on a particular issue.

The New York Times and Washington Post are partnering with Google on the project. I’ve just read through the NYT’s coverage of healthcare kerfuffle, and I have to say it’s the best and clearest thing I’ve seen on the subject. Give it a go: it just makes sense.

(And finally, here’s how not to do it. Thinking about the Flow Past Web has helped crystallise exactly what doesn’t sit right in News Int’s approach: building a standalone social network for readers doesn’t engage with the Flow, it bypasses it and tries to create its own Flow, driven by publishers not by the social graph. I believe the phrase is Epic Fail)

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Month: January, 2010