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.

The Independent: Leader of the reactionary party, and loved by the City

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 5 June 2008 at 14:17
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Independent News & Media, Johnston Press, News Corp, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror

At the World Association of Newspapers congress in Gothenberg, Independent News & Media reconfirms its web-wary credentials.

Here’s Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, deploying a line that’s at least a decade old:

“I have the impression that the internet is like going into a bar where everybody is shouting, whereas when I read a newspaper it is much easier.”

Not to be outdone, Gavin O’Reilly also reached into the store cupboard of web scepticism to describe printed newspapers as the “ultimate browser” (oh dear). O’Reilly went on to add:

I find it rather remarkable how unsophisticated the commentary is on our industry today. They [media commentators] seem to support the conventional wisdom that newspapers are soon to become a relic of the past and that opportunities only exist in a digital sense.

For good measure, he compared bloggers who criticize ACAP to the perpetrators of drive-by shootings.

If you work at either of the Independents, frustration would be a legitimate response. And no matter where they work, Digital Bolsheviks who work tirelessly to bring about the dictatorship of the digerati will shake their heads sadly.

But hold on a second. Take a look at activist investor Denis O’Brien’s criticisms of IN&M. Is he worried about a lack of investment in digital publishing? Apparently not. Instead, O’Brien complains that the IN&M board isn’t sufficiently independent.

Is the City concerned about IN&M’s lack of enthusiasm for digital?

Nope. Nine analysts follow IN&M. Seven of them are currently advising investors to hold or buy, or expect the stock to “outperform” the market.

Only half of the 16 analysts that follow Trinity Mirror analysts think similarly. Fourteen follow Johnston Press, but only nine attach a hold, buy or outperform rating to the stock.

Although some of IN&M’s popularity is attributable to the presence of Denis O’Brien on the shareholder register, it’s also true that the City likes IN&M.

It likes the fact that IN&M isn’t very interested in the future of news organizations.

And it likes the company’s exposure to the developing world. Overseas adventures are a tried-and-tested method of generating new revenues. You can’t say that about digital investment.

In a recession, the public markets are no place for revolutionaries. Trinity Mirror has been hamstrung by its quoted status for years. Johnston Press is no longer using its quoted status to consolidate the industry. And IN&M has emerged as the leader of the reactionary party.

Among UK-based quoted news organisations, only DM&GT seems to enjoy some freedom to manoeuvre. News Corp enjoys something similar — largely because, like DM&GT, it has diversified intelligently and is still run by a shareholding figurehead who is more than a creature of the markets.

But for the next couple of years, and possibly beyond that, the best way of fomenting a digital revolution will be to do it privately.

In this respect, the Telegraph and the Guardian are both object lessons. Both are shielded in their own ways from short-term investor demands. Not surprisingly, both sit the top of the online traffic rankings for national newspaper sites.

Conicidence? I don’t think so.

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. . .

Spectator Business: Champagne editorial — but the publisher is drinking something different

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 May 2008 at 12:58
Tags: Press Holdings

Andrew Neil has been celebrating the success of Spectator Business. Apparently, the first edition attracted £75,000-worth of advertising — off the back of a “free” circulation of 42,000.

Who are the lucky 42,000?

I had a good look around, but The Spectator’s web site seems to be silent on the matter. Likewise that bit of the site reserved for Spectator Business.

But here comes Media Week, with the suggestion that 12,000 copies will be distributed to, er, people travelling first-class on Eurostar and staying in five-star hotels in London.

Bulks, in other words. Mysteriously, a further 30,000 will be sent out to “targeted customers”.

Who they? Beats me.

Could some of them be drawn from The Spectator’s subscriber base? Possibly, but if that’s the case, advertisers might start opting for cheap pages in Spectator Business (rather than expensive ones in Spectator proper).

Cannibalization isn’t pleasant. And perhaps this explains why Spectator Business has been so indistinct about its circulation strategy.

Of course, it’s never been the done thing to look too closely at the circulations of British business magazines. Even so, Neil’s efforts to sustain upmarket products off the back of weak circulation arguments strike a bum note.

Demented circulation wheezes were a speciality of [The/Sunday] Business, which itself went through more incarnations than the Dalai Lama.

Now, apparently, Spectator Business has inherited some of the same genes.

But if this spin-off starts out with a flimsy circulation, the aim — presumably — is to sign up lots of honest-to-goodness subscribers, and quickly.

(Or is it? Having just visited the Spectator Business web site, I find I can’t subscribe online. All it would take is a little bit of HTML and a Google Checkout account, but no — Instead, I need to call Axis Media Ltd on 0141 335 9062. Like lots of potential subscribers, I suspect, I’ve postponed doing this. Probably indefinitely.)

But let’s assume that Spectator Business has a run of luck with subscribers. Let’s assume — generously — that it manages to accrue 10,000+ of them.

What then? A good deal more will be needed to credibly challenge the market leader — Haymarket’s Management Today, which has been plugging away successfully for 40 years.

MT distributes over 50% of its 100,000 circulation for free, but tops up that number by sending copies to 42,000 members of the otherwise unremarkable Institute of Management.

For years, it’s been MT’s link with the Institute’s self-selected audience — plus some excellent content — that has allowed it to trounce competitors with that big six-figure circulation.

Will Spectator Business’s small audience of foyer flaneurs and Eurostar commuters trump Haymarket’s bigger, more controlled, reach?

In the eyes of media planners who treat business magazines as an optional add-on to schedules, I doubt it.

Andrew Neil’s continuing quest to launch a worthwhile business magazine in Britain is becoming painful to watch.

As the livewire editor of a tumescent Sunday Times between 1983 and 1994, Neil did as much as anyone to condition us to consume vast amounts of newsprint every weekend — and ignore magazines.

Surely, by now, the man has already done enough to atone for his sins?

As for Martin Vander Weyer, the excellent editor of Spectator Business, everyone knows that he is capable of generating champagne for the business brain.

Sadly, his publisher’s circulation strategy seems to be running on Irn-Bru.

ACAP: More reactions

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 December 2007 at 14:32
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, Media, News Corp, News International, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror

Interesting to see that News International has become the first UK publisher to implement ACAP. Absent cooperation from the search engine industry, it’s not quite clear what ACAP v.1.0 actually involves. Here’s Oliver Luft at Journalism.co.uk:

Developers claim that at first not all web crawlers will be able to read the new system, therefore modifying an existing system is the simplest form of implementation.However, using this approach a further modification to ensure specific permissions are understood by web crawling technologies will be required at a later stage.

. . . At this point, it’s not exactly clear whether News International intends this as little more than a gesture. That seems to be the way in which Dominic Young, director of editorial services at News International, frames it.

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan offers up a critique at Search Engine Land. As always, Sullivan’s stuff is worth reading.

Sullivan asks: “What does ACAP provide that robots.txt and meta robots does not? After going through the technical specs, which are pretty dense reading, I’d summarize it this way:

• Emphasis on both granting permissions and blocking
• Support for time-based inclusion or exclusion”

Head over to Martin Belam’s blog Currybet for a critical discussion of ACAP. Belam, who waves the flag for a DRM-free web, is not impressed:

It seems like a weak electronic online DRM - with the vague promise that in the future more ’stuff’ will be published, precisely because you can do less with it.

Belam is a techie. He’s only scratching the surface of ACAP, but already seems to be finding hints of trouble with its technical implementation. My guess is that he will be the first of many.

I wonder whether Ian Douglas’s views on ACAP are representative of official policy at The Telegraph Group. I don’t think he’d have written about ACAP in this way if they weren’t.

Douglas is skeptical. He writes:

The very idea of exclusion is ridiculous to any publisher with an advertising-based model that relies on traffic to pay the bills.

That’s a sensible objection. As it transpires, Telegraph Media Group is not among the members of ACAP. Nor is Guardian Media Group, Trinity Mirror or Daily Mail & General Trust.

The list of members includes Express Newspapers, News International and Independent News & Media.

Historically, Wapping has never liked search engines. The company’s lawyers have lobbied the EU aggressively on the subject. And it’s probably logical to take Anne Spackman’s views as evidence of wider concern.

Aside from that, it’s worth noting that ACAP’s leading proponents within the UK newspaper industry are two of the weaker players. . .

More seriously, there’s a serious lack of involvement from the US newspaper industry.

Google is more internationalist than many other technology companies. But it won’t have failed to notice that The Associated Press is the only representative from North America’s news industry on ACAP’s list of members.

Times vs. Telegraph: The war of Brown’s recession

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 30 November 2007 at 13:58
Tags: Media, News International, Telegraph Media Group

When it comes to the prospects for recession, the whitetop business sections are polarizing rapidly.

At the Telegraph, Ambose Evans-Pritchard appears to be wandering around wearing a sandwich board engraved with the words: “End Of The World Is Nigh”.

By the looks of it, Evans-Pritchard has written his message in copperplate outline and then coloured in the individual characters.

No, more than that. He has painstakingly cross-hatched them, like this.

The problem with Evans-Pritchard is his wide eyes. It’s all just a bit too breathless. Jeff Randall, of course, is a bit different. But even he is talking about a looming social catastrophe driven by household debt.

Meanwhile, the headlines at the Telegraph’s business section headlines include the following: “US economy grinds to a halt” and “Black day for UK economy”. There’s a definite line being enforced here.

And at the Times?

Anatole Kaletsky, economics correspondent, suggests that we ignore the stock market’s impersonation of a whore’s drawers. (Sorry, that’s twice in one week we’ve used that expression.)

All will be well, Kaletsky suggests, because the broader economy is “protected by self-stabilising mechanisms that are much more powerful than the reflexive boom-bust behaviour of financial markets”.

On top of that, here’s business editor James Harding — the man himself — suggesting that we’re in danger of talking down the housing market. Relax, he suggests, it’s just a correction. Not a crash. Really.

Oh, and we loved this bit: “The US economy has a mysterious ability to right itself, particularly in a presidential election year. . . ”

The dichotomy between the Telegraph and the Times is striking. In Victoria, they’ll soon want credit for calling the biggest recession since the 1920s.

At Wapping, there’s a curious sense of civic duty on the City desk. They’re doing what they can to talk down the prospects of a recession. Gordon Brown and Mervyn King will no doubt be grateful.

The FT, since you ask, is heavily inclined toward bearish at the moment. Then again, its perspective is global (ie: US-centric).