Dept of Small Numbers: The Guardian’s analysis of Murdoch’s paywall traffic

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 8 December 2010 at 10:04
Tags: Journalism

The Guardian’s analysis of behind-the-paywall traffic at The Times and The Sunday Times, reported exclusively by Press Gazette this morning, offers something new: an assessment of how many subscribers are actually visiting the sites.
The official numbers for pure-play digital subscriptions from Wapping, published in early November, told us something about conversions. Likewise the recently-publicised survey stats [...]

DMGT 2010: A weak and narrow recovery takes shape

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 November 2010 at 13:31
Tags: Journalism

What’s not to like about DMGT’s final results for the year to October? A few things. Although the overall numbers suggest a welcome improvement, classified ad markets remain broken, online and in print. After the steep declines of 2008-2009, this recovery still feels very weak.
In addition, digital strategy isn’t delivering [...]

Arrogance + hypocrisy = Newsquest

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 11 November 2010 at 22:06
Tags: Journalism

It was the condescension that jumped off the page. When Newsquest, the second-largest local newspaper publisher in Britain, wrote to its employees in early August announcing the closure of its final salary pension scheme, the justifications were vague and the FAQs superficial.
The cost of running Newsquest’s pension scheme, employees were [...]

What would Paul Dacre say if The Guardian became a fully-fledged charity?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 November 2010 at 14:27
Tags: Journalism

In the middle distance, a different kind of Guardian Media Group appears to be taking shape.
The Sunday Times reports that GMG investments like EMAP and Trader Media Group, as well as wholly-owned subisidiaries that operate radio stations and classified websites, will be hived off into “an investment portfolio from where they could be [...]

Return of the prodigal: Why advertising will make or break Wapping’s paywall

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 November 2010 at 12:43
Tags: Journalism

There are reasons why business ventures that make an initial fist of it get three years to prove their long-term viability. In the first year, you make mistakes. In the second year, you correct them. In the third year, you get realistic year-on-year comparatives. These tell you whether the business [...]

What is “sustainable” at a loss-making national newspaper?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 6 October 2010 at 16:19
Tags: Journalism

Like many of the old guard Fleet Street commentators, Stephen Glover frequently talks nonsense when confronted by financials. This is the same man who wrote a 328pp book about launching and running a national newspaper that failed to mention revenue or profit in any substantive way.
Like the rest of us, however, Glover abhors a vacuum. [...]

Peter Kirwan: The rise of the content farms

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 7 September 2010 at 11:42
Tags: Journalism

Is this the year of the content farm?
Last month, Demand Media, which already has a UK operation, published its IPO prospectus. This autumn, AOL plans a UK launch for Seed.com, a platform for freelance contributions that looks a lot like Demand’s. Homegrown entrepreneurs have taken the hint, too: last week, a marketplace for celebrity coverage [...]

Peter Kirwan: Ad revenue recovery - different strokes for different folks

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 13 August 2010 at 14:25
Tags: Journalism

The recovery is starting to remind me of the Tour De France. High on a mountain ridge, the peloton is stretched out along a vast stretch of road. But two groups are visible. The leaders represent consumer-facing mass media — the broadcasters and national press. The laggards come from B2B publishing and local newspapers. Worryingly, [...]

Retailers & national newspapers: Too big to fail?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 11 August 2010 at 12:43
Tags: Journalism

Is the advertising recovery we’re witnessing as unbalanced as anything that occurred in the City of London during the run-up to 2008?
That’s what I’m starting to wonder. Take DMGT’s Q2 numbers, which disclose that retailers once again outperformed the broad advertising market, increasing their expenditure Associated Newspapers by 19% YOY. Overall, ad revenues at Associated [...]

Rupert’s Spaghetti Junction: News Corp now boasts four ways to sell paid digital content

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 15 June 2010 at 11:52
Tags: Journalism

If you needed an indication of where News Corporation is going, yesterday brought it: a £7bn+ bid for 60% of BSkyB, coupled with two smaller deals designed to make newspapers palatable to the company’s shareholders.
A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down; or as the Americans would say: offense and defense. It’s all very reminiscent [...]

The Evening Standard heads toward profit: What does this suggest to loss-making competitors?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 14 June 2010 at 11:07
Tags: Journalism

Interesting to watch Geordie Greig at Friday’s Value Of Journalism conference, organised by Polis and the BBC College of Journalism. (There’s streaming video of his talk here: you’ll need to poke around a bit to find it, though).
Greig seemed tired but spoke well. He was particularly open about the Evening Standard’s economics since the paper [...]

Reasons For Saving Radio 6, No.158: Shaun Keaveny on Adrian Chiles & GMTV

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 11 June 2010 at 12:38
Tags: Journalism

The reasons for saving Radio 6 keep piling up.
This morning, I found myself listening to the station’s presenter Shaun Keaveny playing Velvet Underground and The Gang Of Four. . . before the 9am watershed.
As if that wasn’t good enough, Keaveny does media analysis, too.
This morning, the laconic Northerner picked apart ITV’s announcement that it would [...]

Guardian Media Group: How City fund managers and cost-cutting saved Mr Marx’s cash cushion

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 June 2010 at 13:26
Tags: Journalism

Tomorrow, when Guardian Media Group publishes its annual accounts for the year to March 2010, those who regard The Guardian as a perverse charity that distorts competition will argue that not much has changed.
They might even point to an increased pre-tax loss at GMG — courtesy of paper-based write-offs — as evidence of deterioration.
The truth, [...]

Mail blasts BT for “eavesdropping” on Facebook users, but fails to mention its own Big Brotherish efforts

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 7 June 2010 at 13:43
Tags: Journalism

The Daily Mail let fly with one of its periodic complaints about Big Brotherism on the world wide web this morning.
Jason Lewis, the paper’s security editor, accused BT of eavesdropping on the comments of disgruntled customers who use Facebook.
A source had described BT as “a bunch of unaccountable, business shafting, useless b*******” on the social [...]

Best case scenario: editors to start hiring by Christmas

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 2 June 2010 at 09:02
Tags: Journalism

If anything stops the cuts, and prompts new hiring, it’s going to be advertising (not slowly declining circulation revenues). Or as Peter Williams, the finance director at DMGT, put it last week: “Advertising is probably the thing which is going to move the numbers at the margin.”
So what do DMGT’s half-year results, published in the [...]

Mail Online prepares for digital revenue lift-off

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 May 2010 at 14:00
Tags: Journalism

Mail Online remained the UK’s most visited newspaper site during April, pulling in 40m unique users. Here’s the league table, measured by daily average browsers during the month:

Mail Online: 2.37m (Up 74.5% YOY)
Guardian.co.uk: 1.84m (Up 22.4% YOY)
Telegraph.co.uk: 1.58m (Up 28.5% YOY)
Independent.co.uk: 0.46m (Down 2.1% YOY)
Mirror Group Digital: 0.44m (Up 11.4% YOY)

It has become fashionable to thumb [...]

DMGT: Revenues down, profits up, Tigger goes AWOL

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 May 2010 at 10:11
Tags: Journalism

Here’s an odd one: Daily Mail & General Trust reports a 10% YOY decline in revenues but operating profits rise by 20%.
How come?
The answer is simple: at the end of every downturn, there comes a point when cost cutting starts to outpace revenue declines.
Traditionally, this is the point at which media companies and their shareholders [...]

Stop the presses #2: A long way to the all-digital future

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 26 May 2010 at 13:45
Tags: Journalism

To say the least, the notion of “switching off the presses” is simplistic. There will be complicating factors we can only vaguely imagine. Here are a few that might emerge:
1) Print could generate profits after digital revenue streams mature
Fickle investors who buy shares in the likes of DMGT, News Corp and Trinity Mirror on the [...]

Stop the presses #1: FT could ditch print by 2015, too

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 26 May 2010 at 12:44
Tags: Journalism

Last week, writing elsewhere, I did the maths on the Guardian’s surging digital revenues.
During an interview/conversation broadcast by Radio 4’s The Media Show, Alan Rusbridger suggested that online ad revenues at Guardian News & Media are growing by 100% YOY. He also suggested that online revenues as a whole would rise by 30% to £40m [...]

Up, down & sideways: Boom time at The Sun, stability at Trinity Mirror and cuts at The Times

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 13 May 2010 at 16:36
Tags: Journalism

So Sly Bailey’s regionals experienced an 8% decline in ad revenues between January and early May. This mirrors the 7.1% decline at Johnston Press over the same time period.
There was no forecast of a return to growth among the regionals in this morning’s trading statement from Trinity Mirror. Management expects “month-on-month volatility” to continue across the company.
Turn [...]