Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Newspaper Revenue Down, Yeah!

While most headlines today highlighted the 21 percent increase in online revenue for newspapers online (see here, here, here and here) , the real story is that total newspaper revenues continued to decline by a whopping 7.4 percent over last year.

Leave it to Editor and Publisher to focus on the revenue decline. So why can't digital close the gap? Because some of the biggest money makers -- special sections, classifieds, and circulars -- aren't being monetized online sufficiently to make up for decling print subscriptions.

Yahoo is working with more than 400 papers to promote classifieds, which is helping to stem the bleed. But papers need to find a way to integrate local coupons and sales into their content -- currently almost none do.

Customization is another big feature, and again papers are MIA. Not many offer personalized home pages or integrate news from around the web about a particular region, the way Topix.net does. Papers also should receive more of the revenue from personalized pages (iGoogle and MyYahoo that embed their RSS feeds, which also haven't been mined sufficiently).

Newspapers have to work syndication both ways, by making the website the place to start the day and integrating other content from around the web. The biggest competition is from local TV stations, which are doing just that.

Lastly, geotargeting is also critical. By differentiating ads between local and national readers, papers can serve advertisers and charge higher CPM by guaranteeing the appropriate audience.

Posted By John Gartner at 09:31 AM
Permanent Link: Newspaper Revenue Down, Yeah! | Comments (2)

(2) Comments on Newspaper Revenue Down, Yeah!

Circulations through online, RSS syndications, pod cast will definitely increase the news paper revenue. Most of the people using internet and they are looking for e-editions. I heard about a website www.pressmart.net providing digitization services for news papers. Using these kinds of services will definitely benefit to the publishers.

Comments by Jeff : Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 05:44 AM

Newspaper is a regular published print product containing information, news and advertising. Newspapers are living textbooks and they are source of information and learning. It’s a source to find out whats happening in movies, books, concerts, games, jobs and events. Major advantage left to newsprint is that reading it does not require any sophisticated, cumbersome technical equipment. This offers the reader a high level of flexibility: newsprint can basically be read in any place at any time. The reader can absorb the information offered at his own pace. Even the fact that the reader can touch and feel the printed paper while turning the pages may be of some importance.

Disadvantage of Printed edition of newspaper -
Circulation of the newspaper is one of the principal factors, circulation is not the same as copies sold because many copies are read by more than one person this is a major offset as the number of copies distributed are not read.

People away from their home place would always love to read their regional paper wherever they are in any part of the world. Take my case; I have been hunting for my favorite newspaper Times of India in the heart of New York City but in vain and the only solution I found at this time is e-paper.

E-paper and its advantage -
Will e-paper is going to replace the printed edition in future is the question to be asked? ePaper is the replication of newspaper pages which allows one to get the same experience as reading the hard-copy edition and e-paper has the advantages of being interactive, multimedia, of providing internal and external networks and offering selection functions, the possibility of regular updates, access to archives, rapid access to a large number of newspapers, and being paperless, thus creating no problems of waste disposal.
Not even that it’s more convenient from the customer’s point of view while reading the e-paper, I came across Nokia new model cell phone, and by clicking on it; I was taken directly to the website, where I could compare the prices.

So this has led to some predictions that is newspapers will shrink or even disappear?
All the recent surveys both in USA and abroad indicate that print newspaper readership is going down; there has been a dramatic drop in the circulation of papers.
Full time professional employment at daily newspapers is falling. In a desperate attempt to offset the falling revenues, more newspaper groups are setting them up online.
All of the major news publishers have adopted e-paper technology in order to increase their readers and revenue.

Looking at the enormous growth in the Digital News Publishing Industry, many new media companies are offering ePapers and eMagazines at affordable costing with low or no upfront investment. <a href="http://www.pressmart.net">Pressmart Media Limited</a>, a leading new media services company based out of India and USA provides an excellent Multi channel distribution on Web, Mobile, Podcast, Search Engines, Social Networks, Web2.0 sites and RSS.

I hope you do agree that digital versions of news publications will be an added advantage for publishers in increasing their brand value, customer reach and revenues.

Comments by Raj : Friday, April 18, 2008 at 06:53 AM

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