Milking mature business that have tipped into decline for maximum profits is an age-old strategy. We have been watching it for some time in newspapers but I have seldom seen it put so clearly as by Alan Ruddock in the Observer today who describes it as, “probably the only sensible approach“.
Ruddock, who is standing in [...]
Trinity Mirror’s newspapers are getting close to worthless but the web business is worth buying, Peter Kirwan argues in the Press Gazette’s Media Money blog. From the company numbers he arrives at a figure for digital revenue and then makes a five year forecast on the basis of current projections for the growth in online [...]
With reports that the New York Times is to pull down the pay wall surrounding its op-ed columnists, and suggestions Murdoch will head towards all free content at the Wall Street Journal, the question is whether the idea of paid text content is dying.
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 argues that it is. The web and [...]
It is fairly obvious when you think about it but Dan Gillmor at the New Media Age Forum summed up the problem of online MSM advertising neatly. He said: "Advertising is being systematically separated from journalism because there are companies that do advertising better than journalism companies. I don’t know how to solve that problem. [...]
The last item in the Media Diary in today’s Observer reads (sorry, I can find the link):
The Daily Express inteviewed Chelsea’s Sean Wright-Phillips last week, and included a blatant plug for the Nintendo games console he promotes in the story. Has the line between editorial and advertising now become so blurred it’s barely visible?
For the [...]
Media researcher Jim Bilton, in a review of the latest ABC figures for the nationals, adds to the gloom with a startling figure on advertising revenues. He says, in a Media Guardian article, that advertising now makes up 51% of the revenues of national newspapers, down from 60% in 2000.
Bilton points out that this drop [...]
I have always liked research which confirms what I have always believed. So I am delighted that a study by the University of Missouri-Columbia finds: “Newspapers are under spending in the newsroom and over spending in circulation and advertising.”
The full report is to be published in the spring (with convincing methodology, I trust) but one [...]
Shock horror! The Wall Street Journal reveals that “Britain’s famously competitive newspapers” are advertising themselves to prospective online readers.
The story, behind the pay wall, reveals that the Times and Telegraph are buying search words on Google which means they appear at the top of relevant searches as sponsored links.
An example, from the Telegraph which has [...]
There is a growing realisation that print media’s ideas of moving towards a form of internet journalism that could be as profitable as print are doomed. That is unless something can be done about increasing online advertising revenues very substantially.
Peter Cole in the Independent on Sunday writes:
The company [Google] which has made fortunes for its [...]
It will be 30 years before online contributes half of newspapers’ advertising revenue, according to a Merrill Lynch analyst, Lauren Fine. That is the simple bit from a report at Paid Content.
Fine says online now contributes 6-7% of ad revenue and she makes an assumption of double-digit growth for the next six years followed by [...]
