Strategy and Accounting: The paywall strategy in the English and French newspaper market (strategy recommendations)

Thèmes abordés

GMG, News Corp newspaper market paywall strategy hybrid model

Résumé du document

In June 2010, News Corp decided to extend the paywall phenomena, and, as it did with The Wall Street Journal in 2008, News Corp put its "mainstream and non-specialist UK newspaper" behind a paywall in June 2010. News Corp released the first figures for the number of subscribers accessing 'The Times' paywall regarding the June-September period, on November 2.

Now, the French online press, as well as the English online press, consists of :
A· Paying offers (behind a "total" paywall), which generates more subscribers but less readership,
B· Free press, which generates readership, but little ad revenue,
C· and "freemium" offers (half and half, 'paying offers' and 'free press'.

Extraits

[...] To sum up, News Corp's strategy for the next two years will be to takeover BskyB and to create new partnerships so that it can reach more customers, by “bundling” the subscription to its online newspaper with other Sky services On the basis of your analysis, make recommendations to GMG as to how they should respond to the paywall challenge, and use your recommendations to spell out what you consider is the optimal strategy for them to develop their UK business over the next two years The circulation level of the Guardian and the Observer are well under those of the Times and the Sunday Times. However, regarding the online traffic, the trend is otherwise. In December 2009, the Guardian News&Media's website network attracted a bit less than 37m unique users (12,6m unique British users, meaning that it has built an important international audience), which is an increase of 62% year on year and a record for a UK newspaper website (the Times only ranking 5th for online traffic, even before the paywall was implemented). [...]

[...] So a pay-as-you-go reader might actually represent or more sales per week. Possible issue, because in an other source (The Times UK lost 4m readers to its paywall experiment, TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld), those represent the number of “paying subscribers”. Impact on UK revenues and profits at News Corp It is not an easy task to evaluate the success/failure of the paywall experiment because the figures are only estimates. Thus, for some, this experiment is profitable and for others it is not. [...]

[...] Another model is the “metered” model, which offers readers to have access to a certain numbers of articles before being charged for extra articles (like the Financial Times) Personal view of how and how far a paywall strategy might work in a foreign newspaper market: the French newspaper market The French market will be taken as an example, to show GMG how and how far can a paywall strategy work in this country, and if it can be successful in this newspaper market. First, some facts about the French newspaper market. Compared to the English press, press in France doesn't play such a big role in people's daily lives. Their newspaper industry is characterised by lack of mass-market national dailies, a lack of the kind of heavyweight Sunday newspapers that one finds in English-speaking countries”. [...]

[...] If we calculate the online subscriptions revenues with the given fares: monthly subscribers pay an average of a month a week and thus a month for full price, and for the iPad app). This means per month, or per year. The other pay-as-you-go customers between June and September, who are paying per day, generated during this period, which would mean a revenue per year. Thus, our estimate of the annual paywall revenue would be approximately (those of the Virtual Economics). [...]

[...] - For many specialists, a paying model, would not work in France, especially for less specialised websites, such as le Monde, le Figaro, or Liberation. Indeed, if we consider the continuous development of free information websites, and the speed of information exchange, non-specialist newspapers have no other choice but to be free online. If they want to start charging their audience, they must add customer value (like more specialised and accurate information, special documentaries, access to old articles, access to archives, etc That is why this model does not exist in France. [...]