AFR cuts cost of pay wall
The Australian Financial Review is to cut the cost of online subscriptions in a bid to bring in more subscribers.
From Monday, online only subs will be cut from $1140 per year to $680. Print subscribers will get access to afr.com as part of their sub.
The move, just weeks after The Australian began its paywall project, marks a change of strategy under new Financial Review Group CEO, Brett Clegg. He said: “We’ve drawn on feedback from our staff, the market and key stakeholders that we need to open up and lower the barriers to accessing our journalism. We were one of the early movers in pricing content online and after five years we have a better understanding of how to get it right.”
Clegg also signalled that the change will lead to a drive for greater ad revenue.
He said: “The immediate result of this change is that more people will get immediate access to our content. There will be more engagement with our stories and point of view, while web traffic will grow even faster, in turn delivering greater opportunities for our commercial teams. The payoff will allow us to reinvest in our journalism. Not only in our business and financial markets coverage. Be it federal and state politics, public policy, the arts, or the many other topics we cover in-depth. We are investing.”
He added: “We are a profitable publication with strong commercial underpinnings.”
Clegg said that he had been talking to media agencies and advertisers. He said: “It has been a terrific experience to wear out the shoe leather seeing our key commercial stakeholders. The feedback has been frank and enlightening. It has motivated us to step up innovation, especially across platforms and working with our colleagues within the broader Fairfax family of publications.”
At the beginning of the year, Fairfax revealed it had 6711 subscribers to afr.com. Since then it has declined to update the figures.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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I will still not subscribe and I will continue to read quality, informative, business news online for free.
Evidently the AFR is not making enough money, so yield is out of the window and a sub’s volume grab is the strat… Not a bad strat I must say.
If the price goes back up come eofy 2012 then we will know it worked I guess..?
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Hi two things – there is a lot of pain in this for the Fin, and there’s an error in your story. First the error – You say the subs at the start of the year where 6711 and that Fairfax had declined to update the figures since. In August this year the AFR published in Q2 online circ numbers which the Australian reported on August 15.
Here’s a quote.
“However, in addition to that, the paper had 7803 paying digital subscribers, said Roger Johnstone, acting chief executive of the Financial Review Group.
“Our fully paid online subscriptions continued to grow this quarter at the long-term average of 1 per cent a week, and we have made concerted efforts to improve engagement and the utility of the site,” he said.
Here’s the link.
http://www.theaustralian.com.a.....6114848210
BTW that’s about a 16% increase in six months.
The really interesting thing in the Fin Review’s news that everyone is ignoring is the announcement around syndication. AFR has been missing from Factiva, AAP etc for years, forcing the big corporate customers to buy lots of fully priced newspapers at $780 a pop. Those corps have all but abandoned all other newspapers in the last few years, due to cost and carbon neutrality.
They will now be able to abandon the AFR as well. Even better for them, they can now buy the AFR’s content more cheaply from Rupert Murdoch’s Factiva than they can from the AFR itself even with the new pricing regime, so guess which path they will take. Well, that won’t do much for the AFR’s print sales among is hard core base, or have anything other than a negative impact on their online sales, both advertising and circulation.
Hmmm maybe they should have thought this through.
And here’s some fun numbers for you. Assuming they can get $100/1000 on the additional page impressions that any extra unlocked content for free loaders delivers (and that’s being generous now that they have diluted their audience quality) that’s an extra 7,000,000 page impressions they need to generate just to cover the circulation revenue they have given up from the subscribers they have added since January – assuming they are averaging $700 per user (roughly the mid way point of their previous pricing and bang on their new pricing) Apply this metric across the full 7800 subscriber base and it starts to look like quite a hurdle just to replace current circulation revenues.
Maths is such a bummer. cheers J.
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I wonder why they think $700 is a better price? Because it’s cheaper than the paper?
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When is Australian print going to catch up with the rest of the western world – FB is where they can get significant readership.
http://goo.gl/o4wsw
One million page views per day and 3.5m monthly readers isn’t to be sniffed at.
Its not rocket science – generate content that people want to read and place it where people go every day.
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@fraser: The Guardian is a not profit trust. Even so it cannot lose money forever. So before you make those statements you really should facts. There is a good reason that paid sites are the new black and its because of the colour in the financials.
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Not to be sniffed at but where’s the revenue for The Guardian from that?
They are serving house ads through a leaderboard and MREC.
None of their usual partnership ads or paid campaigns.
Will get new users but they’ll only bring revenue if they can switch them to The Guardian site or monetise this better.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin.....-year.html
Guardian News and Media (GNM) announced that The Guardian and its sister paper, The Observer, had lost £33m in cash terms last year after failing to staunch losses that ran to £34.4m the year before. Unaudited results for the year ending 31 March showed that GNM’s revenues fell to £198m last year compared with £221m the year before.
Andrew Miller, the chief executive of GNM’s parent company, Guardian Media Group (GMG), warned staff in a series of meetings this week that the group could run out of cash in three to five years if he does not make radical change
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Smart move. The SMH iPad app is sensational
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@fraser
Heh, Facebook … like Apple it’s on the nose. I wouldn’t invest another cent in either platform. They’re the future Myspace and, well, 90s Apple, of the digital world.
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