Category Archives: cannibalisation

Reuters: Newspaper paywall datapoint of the day

Posted on by
Reply
Felix Salmon: "The fact is that insofar as printed newspapers compete with the web, they compete with everything on the web, not just their own sites. No general-interest publication can prevent its print circulation from declining simply by walling itself off from the web. Which is why the NYT paywall is so silly: millions of dollars in development costs, and enormous amounts of important management time, devoted to something which will probably end up grossing no more than $20 million or so a year. That compares to $78.3 million in internet advertising revenues in the last quarter alone."

WWD: Thank You, General McChrystal… Bergé Closer to Owning Le Monde…

Posted on by
1
"Rolling Stone has a hit on its hands thanks to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. ... a spokesman for the magazine told WWD on Friday afternoon 'It’s easily shaping up to be the best-selling issue of the year.' ... The success is surprising for two reasons. First, the full article has been free and open to the public on the magazine’s Web site since Tuesday. Rollingstone.com — which keeps almost all magazine content behind a pay wall — saw a substantial uptick in traffic last week as a result."

Guardian: The Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Does journalism exist?

Posted on by
Reply
Alan Rusbridger: "My commercial colleagues at the Guardian ... can't presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. ... They've done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded."

SteveOuting.com: Statistical evidence: many newspaper execs not seeing reality

Posted on by
Reply
Steve Outing: "I find much evidence that newspaper leaders remain delusional about how charging for online content (some or all) is going to become such a big revenue stream that it will save them. ... the graphic shows that 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case ... "

paidContent: Taking The Plunge: How Newspaper Sites That Charge Are Faring

Posted on by
Reply
PaidContent surveys the results so far of smaller US newspapers that are experimenting with paid-for online content: "online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition ... where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5 percent); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions."

Transforming the Gaz: Take 2 on newspaper executives’ secret meeting

Posted on by
Reply
"Clayton Christensen, [the] Harvard business professor who has studied and written extensively about disruptive innovation in dozens of industries ... taught us, and we taught the newspaper industry, that two common failures by established industries facing disruptive innovation are fretting over cannibalization of the core product and cramming an existing business model into a new technology. This paid-content effort makes both of those mistakes and everyone in the secret meeting has almost certainly heard and read Christensen’s advice and is choosing to ignore it."