Glimmers of hope for paywalls or an optical illusion?
Every newspaper and magazine in the country records a drop in print sales today. But are there a couple of tiny green shoots in digital – or is it just a trick of the light, asks Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes
You know those astronomers who patiently watch the same distant star for months on end because every few months the brightness fluctuates fractionally, letting them extrapolate the existence of an orbiting planet?
When the quarterly audited paywall numbers come in, I think I know how those scientists feel.
Question, Tim. Do you anticipate mumbrella moving behind a pay wall? FWIW, the only papers I buy now are Saturday editions and the Friday AFR. Pay walls have changed my habits, I now expect to find to find the relevant article for free somewhere online. Not very noble of me, but when you look at the ‘front page’ of the mainstream local news sites, I’m not going to pay for inane listicles. The physical papers I do buy have now become an indulgent ‘event’ moment to be savoured slowly.
Hi Me,
I wouldn’t see Mumbrella moving behind a paywall unless the market changed dramatically. We’re in the fortunate position that we happen to be in a niche where there are still advertisers who see the value of paying a premium to speak to our particular audience.
We’re also in the happy position that when we organise events and training, our audience often supports us, which gives us another good reason to be as available to them as possible.
That said, I do believe that high value information justifies a paywall model. We actually offer a product that does just that – The Source, which we launched about a year ago. That’s our subscription service to a database of Australia’s top marketing brands and marketers, along with the agencies they work with. We charge $92 a month for that, and we’re now moving close to breaking even, despite a heavy ongoing investment in researchers to constantly update the data.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim, why do you regard cheaper subscriptions as of less or no value/ is the cost of the subscription at quesiotn on the number of subscripions?
Hi Bill,
I’m talking from the economics side of the debate, so the value to the media owner not the advertiser.
At 84c a year (or even $1 a month), the potential market just isn’t big enough for the industry to survive on that basis. If it’s sampling that leads to somebody paying full price down the track, then all well and good. But if people can;t be persuaded to pay full price in sufficient numbers, then paywalls are not the answer.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I’m also very interested to know how site like The Hoopla are doing.
The Hoopla, a terrific online news, chat and opinion site, switched to a paywall recently, with their prices a bit higher than I would have thought the market would support.
I worry their traffic has gone into freefall.
Thanks Tim and to your team for putting your excellent Newsletter up without a pay wall, as a marketer and now working for the media in Perth I can somewhat appreciate the effort that goes behind putting out a quality read each day.
Hi Tim,
Excellent analysis of the current newspaper paywall saga. I currently subscribe to one international newspaper via digital, the UK’s Daily Telegraph, this has cost me about A$55 for the year. It includes full website access and the mobile app. I also buy occasional individual issues of both the London Times and NYT international via kindle at about A$1.50 per issue. I also buy hard copy editions of the Australian or SMH but most of my written word Australian news sources come from the superb ABC or SBS news websites.
Personally as far as paying for good quality journalism goes I’m quite happy to do this but digitally, out of all my friends, work colleagues and acquaintances it seems I’m very much alone. I have discussed this often amongst my peers and nobody else seems interested in paying for digital news. I’m not sure paywall has that much of future for any major growth, it seems to me that there are too many other sources available. My examples of the ABC and SBS websites are also supplemented by the likes of Sky News, BBC, CNN etc. We live in a golden age of news journalism including written or spoken journalism for radio and television, there are so many options and many are not user pays….
I’ll continue to buy newspapers both the old way and digitally but I’m not sure many other s will!!
Sensible piece Tim. But you miss a key ingredient: incumbents have to sustain the print and digital at once.
In short, you can trick up a web site fairly easily (esp if using lots of click bait). But you need relevant content, ad sales staff, marketers, printers and truckies to make a print product.
My point is that the vast dollars lost in print’s audience collapse are going to carve the guts out of newspapers – as we have seen. You can’t hope to keep the newsrooms unless the strategy is about the newsroom value. No one is pricing that into digital.
So I expect they will follow the AFR’s view of the world, which, as it said, is F*kt. (Unless you think I will pay for the ads to be delivered to my house in print)
I’m glad you mentioned the additional advertising dollars being ploughed into News Corp’s digital subs. Not a day goes by without multiple full page ads in News Corp papers trumpeting some new offer for digital. For the last year or so there have also been constant TV ads for The Australian and rolling outdoor campaigns for the Tele. The total spend must be astronomical.
Fairfax doesn’t come close to matching it (and yet their total digital numbers are much higher than News, albeit slowing). I’ve never seen an ad for Fairfax digital subs outside a Fairfax publication, and even within their publications they don’t go too hard. I tend to agree that Fairfax could surely advertise a bit more heavily, but at the same time News Corp seems to be going way over the top. If I were a News shareholder I’d be asking why the company isn’t getting a better result with such a massive amount of marketing dollars.
When I worked in newspapers there was a simple realisation that the old farts didnt seem to get or were willing to admit.
Money that comes in from digital is nowhere near enough to sustain a company. You’d need 10x the amount of revenue coming in from online to even hope for that to be the case. As that’s never going to happen, the current print industry is not going to be around even 5 years from now. It’s either going to be a lot smaller, or gone entirely.
And nothing of value will be lost.
@ anonymous : you’re right, but unfortunately the publishers’ digital products rely heavily on the work done, and the content produced by the print staff ie the newsrooms which, despite big cuts, are still large and costly. How will the digital business, with its much smaller revenue streams, pay for those journalists and their work?
“work” done? Have you seen the kind of crap the papers are putting out day after day in a neverending race to the bottom to get their mitts on the last vestiges of cash that people are willing to spend reading junk written by hacks for the entertainment of small-minded imbeciles?
“The Ferals Are Revolting” – when describing one of the most significant protests in Australian History.
“You won’t believe what some old fart’s girlfriend wore to a funeral”
time and time again, these drongos show us that they aren’t capable of being taken seriously in the 21st century, enough is enough.