Tag Archives: Financial Times

04.22.16
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Noted: UK print headwinds and growth v. revenue

As a media consultant, I am asked all of the time to point out models that actually work. I have almost always included the Financial Times in that list because they set the trend that others are trying to follow — building a reader-revenue driven digital business model. The FT was one of the early pioneers of the metered paid content model, and they have hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. 

Now, Politico is reporting is that not even the mighty FT is immune from what most likely is the beginning of the end of print newspapers as a premium advertising platform. It might be, or it might just be a sign of Brexit uncertainty. We’ll know a lot more after 23 June. 

More worrying for the publishers in the long term is that some of the downturn is because companies are pulling out of newspapers altogether, putting their money into other formats such as the Internet and TV. The fear is: Many of those companies won’t come back.

I think in some sectors of print, they won’t come back. If they don’t come back to the FT, that would be a much darker turn for the industry and herald the beginning of final collapse of news-“papers”, at least in the Anglo-sphere.

I’m going to go out on a limb: Over the next two years, across large swathes of the English-language newspaper business, we will see widespread adoption of lower frequency printing — two or three days a week. Print will quickly become uneconomic as a platform.

Print represents the majority of the revenue for newspapers, yes, but also the majority of the cost. The economics will get ugly rapidly. The FT is lucky. It has digital revenue to fall back on, but for those newspapers that haven’t built digital businesses or other sources of revenue, the future will be bleak.

Growth v. revenue: The tension of the VC-backed model

I have to admit that I had never heard of live-streaming service Katch before Medium flagged up that a friend, Sue Llewellyn, like this post on Medium. For those of you like me, it looks like they came in second to Periscope, and I say that with no disrespect to what is obviously a small, passionate team. I do not mean to rub salt in their wounds.

In their post-mortem, something leapt out at me:

With a team as small as ours, taking the time to build out the revenue features for Katch would take away from building the growth features. When we got down to brass tacks, no matter how we ran the numbers, a premium version of Katch didn’t represent a venture-backed opportunity. 

With funding becoming more scarce, we’re entering a time where start-ups will rely much more heavily on founder, angel and seed funding. The VC’s are going to be suffering from a case of self-inflicted unicorn impalement for a while — taking the time machine back to 2002. Lots of innovation happened, but the dot.com crash was painful for a lot of people. Anyone got a fund shorting Silicon Valley real estate that they can recommend? 

03.20.14
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Paid content, data and knowing your audience

I remember back in the day a number of news websites, the New York Times and the Washington Post included, added registration to their sites. It was long before commenting was common, but the strategy was all about capturing some information, some data, to know more about their audiences.

The Financial Times understands this, which is one of the reasons that it is killing it, and the FT’s CEO John Ridding explains to Poynter how their paid content strategy has helped them capture more data and how that data is helping them deliver more to their audiences.

I don’t think we really understood the power of the data and the audience understanding that came with the subscription model. We’ve been able to build a system of understanding our readers.

They do now, and it is allowing them to add new features that adds value for their readers. If you add value for readers, then they understand the value of paying for content. For traditional media, as my friend Steve Yelvington says, we need to find new ways to add value, and data from subscription services is a powerful way to do that.