Going Up! Newspapers and the internet

“The Times” is set to end its free online service. It’s a gamble, but for readers in places like Mallorca, who might otherwise pay an exorbitant price for the daily paper, two quid a week is extremely good value. Not that this is necessarily the point. Free should be free, say many, and a cover price for the online version will simply cause readers to go elsewhere. We’ll see. The new site is actually pretty good.

The “Diario de Mallorca” is not “The Times”, nothing like it of course. But there is something interesting about this paper. It has a good website – free – which has enjoyed increased traffic recently. At the same time, the printed version has also increased its circulation. Its main competitor, “Ultima Hora”, has experienced a decline in circulation, and its website is not as good but is improving. Of daily papers in Spain with a circulation over 10,000 (not huge admittedly), the “Diario” has registered the second greatest increase in physical circulation among the 39 papers with circulation over this number.

On the face of it, the two increases seem illogical. As the website beefs up its traffic, so, you would think, the circulation of printed version would decrease. So how to explain the apparent contradiction, as evidenced by the “Diario”? Maybe it’s all the free publicity I give it, but probably not. Perhaps it has something to do with its local nature. Despite the plans by “The Times” to create its own online “community”, it is, like all big papers, rather removed. A paper like the “Diario” isn’t. There is a far greater sense of reader “ownership” of the different formats; they are complementary, even if their content is basically the same.

I confess that I am casting around to find a reason. I don’t know the answer. But answer there must be, and if the experience of the “Diario” is echoed elsewhere, the doomsday predictions for newspapers and/or their websites would not hold up. What will be interesting is whether the circulation and the site traffic continue to increase. If they do, then someone should try and discover the paper’s secret. I should be at the paper’s offices today, so maybe I’ll ask.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Set Me Free

Astute observers amongst you might have noticed that I do, from time to time, make reference to the “Diario de Mallorca”. To be more accurate, it is to the paper’s website, a well-designed, well-archived facility, the only irritant of which is an occasional tendency towards intrusive adverts for the likes of SEAT. The “Diario” has been blowing its own internet trumpet, revealing traffic figures which would seem to establish the newspaper’s site as the premier (Spanish) news site on the island, itself not a hugely difficult task, given the small number of competitors, but an achievement nonetheless. The paper would appear to have made the announcement at least in part as a response to a claim – “fictitious”, it says – by the Balearics part of the “El Mundo” site that it was the leader in terms of visits etc., a claim rebutted by OJDinteractiva, the online tracking version of the OJD press circulation audit body. 

 

The figures show, for instance, that the “Diario” claimed over 350,000 unique visitors in August, a number boosted to some extent by those following the news of the bombs. The degree, of course, to which anyone much of a non-Spanish background uses the site I wouldn’t know, and nor presumably do they, except by geographical location, which, in itself, wouldn’t mean a lot. 

 

One of the things the “Diario” has going for it, in its internet incarnation, is a pleasing enough design and appearance. Compare this with, for example, the site for “Ultima Hora” and also “The Bulletin” (the same stable as “Ultima Hora”), and there isn’t really a comparison. The “Diario” is the premier site, not just in terms of appearance but also content, far outstripping “El Mundo” for local news. 

 

Good though the site is, it is, like most newspapers’ websites, just a digital version of the actual paper. The site clearly comes into its own at times of breaking news, such as with the bombs (as do other media sites), but the volume of traffic is not, in itself, necessarily a cause for massive celebration. As with other newspapers, the “Diario” faces the same challenge of generating revenues from something that is free-to-air, so to speak. Of the 350,000 unique visitors in a month (the average daily circulation of the paper is around 22,500 – OJD audit), a question is, how many of those visitors also see the newspaper or only go to the site, and as importantly how many of them take any notice of the ads. You can’t always avoid them, but click them away as quickly as you can physically move the cursor. There are ways and means of evaluating effectiveness of advertising via the internet, which are far more robust than many for print, but quoting numbers of visitors demonstrates potential and little more. This said, it is evident that advertisers with the budgets to do so are investing increasing amounts in techniques to evaluate internet advertising effectiveness, diverting these budgets from more traditional channels, be they print, radio, television or direct. 

 

The good news for the newspapers should be that advertisers are willing to make such investments, but a further question is – and has been since the internet really took off – how to be viable financially and to offer excellent copy if there is no cover charge. They have made a rod for their own back by being free in the expectation that ad revenues would roll in. With the exception of mixed-model sites like the “Financial Times”, newspapers are free and where they are slimmed-down versions of the actual paper – as with “The Bulletin” – they are barely worth the effort. Newspapers cannot avoid the internet, but once the free genie was let out of the lamp can it be put back in again? News International, for one, believes that it can be, but will others follow? Only perhaps by differentiating the content of the print and online versions can such a policy succeed. 

 

The internet has the power to subvert, in many ways, and one is to disrupt the normal business process of customer purchasing. The democracy of the internet has largely demanded that stuff be free. It’s a lousy model if it undermines, for example, journalistic integrity and investigation for which there is a resultant insufficient funding. In the same way as file-sharing has attacked the returns of record companies and artists, so free-to-air newspapers threaten to attack good journalism and therefore good newspapers. The analogy, though, is not strong. The newspapers have sanctioned the free use.

 

I see no reason why one shouldn’t pay. To cite another example – the BBC. Overseas, notwithstanding streaming for sport that cannot always be obtained, the BBC is free. No licence fee. Why don’t they charge? Yet even here, it would be a case of charging for something that already exists, despite innovation that makes it one of the best of all websites. And it is in innovation that the future lies, as does the possibility for generating new or additional revenue streams. But this comes back to those figures – the ones for visitors and so on. As soon as a charge is made and therefore a password needed, Google cannot set its robots to work. Bingo, the rankings optimisation goes to pot, or even to bot. A challenge is to work around the Google tyranny and the misguided notion that numbers of visitors is the be all and end all. It isn’t. Content is. It so happens that the “Diario” wins on both counts. But so long as the branding is strong, and most newspapers benefit from this, then the opportunity exists to create niches of content and therefore readerships within the framework of the newspaper and its website. And to charge, regardless of what Google might have to say in its rankings. 

 

I could go on. It’s a huge subject, and one that I am involved with in working up something new – of which more at some point in the future no doubt. Meantime, I shall continue to visit the “Diario” and add to its traffic numbers. Also meantime, I will pay not a centimo for the privilege and nor will I take any notice of the adverts.