The Standard says that Brenda feels your pain. No, really. . .

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 June 2008 at 15:39
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Media

Journalists and recessions don’t get on well together.

Sooner or later, a downturn becomes an exercise in standing around, waiting for things to get better. The constant drip-drip-drip of negative news is problematic. And the ebbing away of economic activity means less novelty, fewer stories, a national life lived more slowly.

For most people, the downturn is only about two months old. But already, you can see that attitudes are getting a bit brittle in newsrooms. The search for a new angle is becoming neuralgic.

Editors get led down blind alleys under such circumstances. Take, for example, this afternoon’s front page splash on the Evening Standard: “Queen hit by credit crunch“.

Brenda, it seems, has been hit by the spiraling cost of maintaining her many royal residences. Oh, and there’s the doubling of Prince Andrew’s travel bill to £800,000 to take into account, too.

Under such circumstances, should we think of the Queen as a cost on the national P&L? Or as a consumer pressurized by rising costs like the rest of us?

Naturally, the Standard knows where it’s going with this one. The destination is visible in the simpering headline: “Rising costs and not enough cash. . . just like us, your Majesty.”

Almost certainly, a mountain goat with Alzheimer’s would cringe at the parallel. So far as I know, Brenda doesn’t have a mortgage to repay. Or a job to lose. Nor will she ever need to sit nervously in a plastic chair at the local Citizens Advice Bureau and discuss her credit card habit with a debt counsellor.

You could probably add a few differences to the list yourself. Lord knows, there were enough of them the last time I looked.

Trying on the old line that we’re in this together with Brenda and her brood is simply cack-handed. It won’t butter any turnips for Viscount Rothermere on the 5.15 from Charing Cross.

Welcome to The Great Unbundling, Mr Rusbridger

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 June 2008 at 17:11
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, Telegraph Media Group, Times Media

Scientists say that falling in love alters our brain chemistry, and therefore the way in which we perceive the world.

Presumably, it’s the same with losing.

Last week, the Mail Online overtook the Guardian and the Telegraph to become the UK’s most-trafficked national newspaper site.

Now, suddenly, the Guardian is suggesting that it’s becoming increasingly “anachronistic” to compare ABCe data for newspaper websites.

Yes indeed. That’s because the Mail’s great surge in online visitors hasn’t been generated by what Mike Butcher, the author of the piece, would call “news”.

No — it’s all down to Keira Knightley’s “razor sharp” collarbone and pictures of an emaciated and distressed Amy Winehouse wandering around the streets of London in the small hours dressed only in her underwear.

Butcher argues for a purist view. He accuses the Mail Online of playing fast and loose with link bait (which is patently true).

Sites like the Mail Online and The Sun — with its three lane pile-up of tits, bingo and fantasy football — aren’t really news sites at all, he argues. They have more in common with the US celebrity site TMZ.com.

As for The Guardian, well, it seems tempted to pick up its toys and walk away. Now that the Mail Online has bested it, Butcher tells us that:

guardian.co.uk. . . will be more interested in how it is faring against the Huffington Post, a liberal US blog network, than comparing itself to other domestic newspapers.

Of course, tinkering with competitive sets in the wake of commercial defeat has a long and venerable history within sales organizations. It goes on everywhere, and it’s symptomatic of denial.

Commercially, no-one will be fooled. That’s because the web’s animating force is all centripetal, not centrifugal. Competitive sets are getting bigger, not smaller.

In terms of advertising revenues, the Guardian must compete directly with the Mail Online as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo — and a host of others.

In the absence of pornography, violence and racism, the quality of news coverage that brings in the punters simply doesn’t matter to advertisers.

That said, Butcher’s piece does point to something important.

The Mail Online’s successful experiments with link bait are a prime example of what the author Nick Carr calls the “unbundling” of news content.

No longer do we have to pay a set fee to buy a newspaper that contains a mix of highbrow and lowbrow content.

Zooming in from Google in 0.25 seconds, we can get our fix of “+keira +knightly +baftas” and exit just as rapidly as we arrived, leaving any “serious” content undisturbed.

The real question for editors at the Guardian and the Telegraph is how to preserve resources for the news content that Rupert Murdoch calls “boring”. They need to do this in a digital world where 20%-30% annualized growth is a minimum requirement.

The pressure to unbundle, to encourage links with bait, is enormous. It can only grow. For better or worse, it will influence news agendas.

If mentally cordoning off a bit of cyberspace and labeling it “serious news sites only” helps editors to manage the pressures, fair enough.

But let’s not pretend that this will influence the ad market.

Because it won’t.

Let’s have a fight about web metrics — Part 2

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 23 May 2008 at 19:06
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, News International

I was only joking this afternoon when I said it would be fun to have a fight over the nationals’ traffic figures.

But it seems they’re serious about it.

It turns out that the Guardian, News International and Associated Press are all suspicious about the rapid increase in traffic at Telegraph.co.uk, which this week culminated in the site becoming the UK’s most popular national newspaper site.

ABCe measured 18.6m uniques at Telegraph.co.uk during April.

But the site’s rivals had already raised concerns about ABCe’s March data with the Joint Industry Committee For Web Standards (Jicweb), the industry body that advises ABCe.

Brand Republic carries (reg. reqd.) a bland statement from Jicwebs that we can’t trace to the organization’s site — and which tells us very little about what’s at stake.

But there certainly seems to be a review of ABCe’s methodology in the works. Jicwebs is saying that this has been partly prompted by the rival publishers’ complaints.

Sheesh. We can file this one under: Life, art and imitation of the latter.

Forget about ABCe; let’s have an old-fashioned fight about traffic numbers

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 23 May 2008 at 11:38
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, News International, Telegraph Media Group

The Telegraph.co.uk has ended the Guardian’s long reign as the most widely-read national newspaper website. So writes my colleague Martin Stabe on the basis of ABCe data for April that run like this:

• Telegraph.co.uk: 18.6m unique users
• The Guardian: 18.54m unique users
• Mail Online: 18m unique users
• Times Online: 15.4 unique users
• Sun Online: 14m unique users
• Mirror.co.uk: 4.28m unique users

Now ABCe hasn’t been established as the gold standard of traffic measurement for very long. But already, the new regime has become boring.

Am I the only one who feels nostalgic for the days of near-impenetrable arguments about rival sets of traffic figures propounded by executives who themselves don’t fully understand the data? Surely someone could be persuaded to start an argument?

Admirably, ComScore seems interested in fomenting a barney. Just as ABCe’s hegemony seems to be solidifying, the panel-based traffic counting firm has decided to start publishing monthly figures for newspaper sites for the first time.

ComScore’s traffic analysis of the UK’s nationals for March looks promisingly discordant with ABCe — and (coincidentally) rather positive for News International:

• The Sun: 4.3m visitors
• The Guardian: 3.6m visitors
• Telegraph Group: 2.8m
• Times Online: 2.6m
• Daily Mail.co.uk: 2.4m
• Independent.co.uk: 1m
• Mirror.co.uk: 990,000

OK — more seriously now. . . ComScore’s numbers are scaled up from a “panel” of UK consumers.

The UK bit is important. The Mail Online, for example, ranks high in ABCe, but boasts a large overseas readership. Cut that out influence — as ComScore claims to have done — and the site’s aggregate traffic looks much less impressive.

ABCe’s data is pulled directly from publishers’ server logs. Quite apart from its UK focus, ComScore suggests that its figures are lower than others because:

1) Its panel-based (research) methodology is not skewed by cookie deletion.

2) It counts as one individual the same person hitting a site from different locations (eg: home and the office).

These may well be persuasive arguments. But it’s hard to tell.

As the spat over ComScore’s data for Google’s Q1 clickthroughs proved, ComScore’s problem is a lack of transparency about how its research methodology works in practice.

Coincidentally, the same argument applied to Nielsen NetRatings. The last time I looked at its site, it contained the vaguest of descriptions of its methodology, lost beneath layers of corporate verbiage.

And Hitwise? I like the idea of pulling traffic numbers from ISPs’ servers (which is what the company does). In my humble opinion, Hitwise also does a slightly better job of explaining its methods to the outside world. . .

Of course, all of this is irrelevant if all you need are figures to bamboozle gullible clients during the first 20 seconds of a sales presentation. . .

How to get paid by Lord Rothermere for reading about the death of newspapers

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 14 May 2008 at 17:57
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Media, News International

Lovely column on an unlovely subject by Roy Greenslade in today’s Evening Standard. Greenslade’s piece underlines the failure of price cuts and bulks to stem the The Sun’s long circulation decline.

In what seems to have become a bit of a personal crusade, Greenslade writes:

Enormous sums are being wasted by News International in order to conceal an undeniable underlying truth: the mass market for newspapers is a doomed market.

I’m sure that the bulks and the price cuts and The London Paper don’t look like waste from Murdoch’s perspective.

News International’s aggression is a standing warning to dumb-ass trophy buyers who might be tempted to try it on at The Mirror or Independent before these papers enter their dotage.

Murdoch is also sending a clear signal that News Corp intends to dominate the business of squeezing the final drops of value out of the national newspaper market. For market leaders, decline can be optimised, just like everything else.

My own maths suggest that the number of readers willing to pay full price for The Sun will decline to less than 1m by 2015. (There are currently 2.1m of them, down from 2.7m in April 2006.)

Things seem likely to come to a head sooner at the Evening Standard.

Because I no longer commute, I don’t get to read the Standard much these days. On this occasion, however, a representative of WH Smith made me an offer I couldn’t refuse as I walked to the cash till.

“Have you got a magazine costing more than £3 in that pile, sir?”

Yes, I answered. (Actually, I had several.)

“Then buy the Evening Standard and we’ll refund you £1 on your bill.”

I must have looked a bit non-plussed. He clarified the deal with the infinite patience of a Key Stage 1 teacher:

“Take this, and we’ll give you 50p.”

At which point, I grabbed the bundle of newsprint, feeling as if I ought to make a charitable contribution.

Or something.

Never mind Murdoch’s price cuts. Or the freesheets. Chris Anderson will have a coronary when he hears that Rothermere and WH Smith have started paying Londoners to read the Standard.

The London Paper: Close enough to break-even

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 22 April 2008 at 11:00
Tags: Associated Newspapers, News International

On Friday, Media Week, the magazine for ad sales types, followed up the Guardian’s story about The London Paper (sorry about the spelling, I’m bloody-minded that way) losing £16.8m on turnover of £8m during its first 10 months in existence.

This being Media Week, the comments — from a couple of ad sales types apparently familiar with this market — were reasonably interesting, if inconclusive.

Mark Doherty, for example, noted that TLP’s £8m of revenues equated to an average of £33,000 per edition (actually, my sums indicate £38,000, but the difference doesn’t matter too much).

Another commenter suggests that Metro “had its first £500,000 week after only nine months and took well over £20m ad. revenue in it’s first full financial year” — a comparison that makes TLP look seriously pedestrian.

In response, another reader disagrees, arguing that Metro only generated around £4m in ad revenue during its first year. Presumably, this comparison is meant to make us believe that TLP’s sales team is touched by genius.

Such wild disagreements aren’t unusual among sales folk, whose perception of historic sales figures usually resemble a fisherman’s memory of prize carp, or an adolescent male’s perception of penis size.

That said, for a 500,000 circulation newspaper like TLP, £38,000 per issue does sound . . . a bit small. It’s the kind of number that might make the publisher of a mid-sized trade weekly happy.

So how much revenue does TLP really need to break even?

The question is unanswerable. During its first ten months, TLP’s costs amounted to £25m. But that figure presumably includes all sorts of one-off start up items.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that, once established, TLP could break even on 50% of that 10-month expenditure. On that basis, it would need to generate revenues of around £12.5m during the 10 months from July 2007.

That doesn’t sound impossible. But everything depends on how fast TLP’s ad revenues are growing in a depressed market. Predictably, News International says that they are growing rapidly.

As Roy Greenslade suggests, it seems unlikely that TLP will meet its publicly-announced target of breaking even during Year Two.

Year Three, however, will probably be different. And a venture like TLP will get at least three years in which to establish itself. (Metro took four years; and London Lite apparently has a “five-year plan to achieve profitability”.)

The critical question is whether TLP is building an authentic audience that advertisers want to reach.

I’m no fan of free newspapers, but I think the answer to that question is affirmative.

Of course, there are problems with the TLP’s toppy circulation (500,000 vs. Lite’s 400,000). Most agencies know already that they don’t need the “shoppers, trippers and tourists” identified by Greenslade as inflating the paper’s circulation. If the agencies are sensible, they’re not paying for them, either.

The numbers are just launch-time machismo. The broader point is that TLP is carving out a niche. The aggression with which the paper markets itself to advertisers suggests that it is going to be successful.

(Take a look, for example, at the “conference” — called Generation Free — staged by TLP last week. Or head over to the Guardian to take a look at Media City, a supplement fetched up “in partnership” with TLP. The content is crapulous; some of it is risible. But it beats out a consistent message connecting London, youth and conspicuous consumption. This is a message that thirtysomething media planners on £30,000 a year will have no difficulty decoding.)

Somewhat forlornly, Greenslade wants Murdoch and Rothermere to shut down their freebies (perhaps just the afternoon ones?) and focus on their paid-for titles.

If any of this was about quality journalism and editorial standards, this is what would happen.

But it’s not. London’s freesheet circulation wars are about Big Media cannibalizing its own revenue stream before someone else does it.

Nasty stuff. Unstoppable, too.