ABCs: Fairfax’s digital subscribers drop while print subscriptions continue downward trajectory

Fairfax have two types of subscription, print subscriptions which give people free access, and digital subscriptions that may or may not include print.

So what happens at audit time? People with print and digital in their subscription get counted in both buckets.

So we know print declined by 10% or so in these numbers, but since we don’t know if the print customers with digital actually care about/use digital (they may have just registered for it in response to marketing for example) then its all rather meaningless.

This is even before bringing in the subscription costs and advertising revenue from each source – its no wonder fairfax can’t work out if they are a subscriptions or an advertising business.

They are neither

I can never understand why newspaper sales analysis does not mention free copies that are counted towards the audit. It’s not hard to do. The Australian’s bundled copies are now almost 20,000 including 11,000 airline “sales” and 7000 hotel “sales”. That means that one in five people who get a copy of The Australian each day don’t pay for it. Makes the analysis very different.

It’s very clear that digital aggregation is not the business of Fairfax or News. Google, Facebook etc have completely flooded that market. So it’s very hard to understand why they bang on about total reach: they simply can’t compete.
They could perhaps compete for ads if they had excellent demographics, especially in the hard to reach categories. But both appear to have ignored that option (The Oz is hardly a rich demographic) or to have let the quality audience go for the sake of big numbers (The Age, SMH and, amazingly, AFR).
Only the Fairfax titles had any chance of charging significant subscription prices, but they have not had the conviction of their quality rhetoric and so have no core product revenues in digital.

The story says, “with print subs”.

I think you mean total sales, as in all sales (of which subscriptions are a subset).

With that out of the way, can I note how sad it is watch The Age being put to death by mis-management. It is beyond saving now, and will be a slight deduction from the sum of human knowledge when it finally points its Birkenstocks toward the ceiling. If anyone wants pages of dead trees smeared the thoughts of twentysomething recent J-school grads (pick a page, any page), women who are suitable cases for treatment (Daily Life) and business pages that seem actively to detest market mechanisms and the investor class, The Age is the shot.

For anyone else, well let’s just say the Age’s slo-mo death throes reflect the wisdom (such as it is) of a board that includes that egomaniacal goose from Gruen, a few random XX tokens in sensible shoes and Mr Maserati.

If you happened to be a store owner or merchant, would you want Age readers in your shop? ‘Nuff said.

Must be bloody depressing working for newspapers these days.
I’m going to call it but lately I would say Fairfax digital versions have been of a lower journalistic quality than News Limited.

It is clear that the rusted news job is beyond the ken of the once mighty publishers. Both News and Fairax are relying on incidentals (REA Domain) to prop their image as viable businesses. (Not a good look given the evident bubble in property)
People with an understanding of news media and a contemporary view of audiences and technology will be able to fill the gap when these oafish pretenders slide into the sludge. Sadly we have to wait to for the shrill noise and ridiculous self-satisfaction phase to pass.

I understand that newsstand sales account for about triple that of subscription sales at Fairfax.

Print ad revenue is apparently declining more than 10x faster than digital is growing – no wonder since now it’s all cpc and programmatic instead of $20k per page!

When newsagents die print dies with it.

Domain HUGELY props up ffx if you look at their reports. Not a good business.