A couple of weeks ago I hosted a SIPA seminar about search (both search engine marketing and using search to create media products). It was really good.
One of the speakers was Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development at the Telegraph Media Group. Julian gave an overview of what was happening at the Telegraph since the introduction of the audience development team – a team which focused on pushing content out to readers via search engine marketing and interaction with social media. He claimed that since the introduction of this strategy in the summer of 2007 global unique users of the Telegraph’s websites had risen by over 300% in a 14 month period. You may have seen some of the resulting fallout after claims that the Telegraph had overtaken the Guardian in ABC results.
Now, whether the Guardian, Telegraph or Times has the highest online readership is neither here nor there. Sure, it confers some bragging rights for the leader but what commercial advantage does it give? Anyone with experience of search & social media knows techniques for generating traffic – especially if you work for an authority site like the Daily Telegraph. Just take a look at Google Trends information for news, write loads of ‘linkbait’ top 10 list type stories for social media sites or even pay for a wide range of keywords & you can see your traffic soar. But what use are all these extra eyeballs? They mean nothing unless you can monetise this traffic – and hopefully at the sort of premium rates you were able to justify in print.
The reality, however is that CPM rates continue to fall & newspaper groups continue to lay off staff. So where’s the payback?
I would argue that the newspaper groups need to learn some lessons from their B2B cousins. And quickly. They need to capture information about these extra readers and make sure they embrace a multi-platform media environment where advertising becomes a smaller part of their revenue mix.
Where, for example are the Telegraph’s conferences and training courses, shops, sponsored sections, affiliate programmes, books and paid reports, exhibitions etc. etc.? They may be there somewhere on the site but as a newly attracted reader I can’t see them.
Traffic and customers are all well and good but until you have some way of making money from them it means nothing.
5 Comments
December 10, 2008 at 9:26 am
[...] a lot, according to this reality check from Rory Brown. Brown is a marketing man and he argues that newspaper groups need to learn some [...]
December 10, 2008 at 10:19 am
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December 23, 2008 at 3:46 am
I agree with Rory Brown 100% For reall the Newspapers have to learn more how to serve the Communty!
March 25, 2009 at 3:46 pm
[...] this is interesting on a load of different levels. It harks back to a previous post I made about the commercial future for newspapers that were successful in driving a lot of traffic [...]
August 25, 2009 at 11:35 pm
[...] content had better reinvent their business model quickly. In this blog I have suggested a few ways in which they might look to do this but generally I think this involves a fundamental change of [...]