Guide #4 – Facebook News Feed Changes: Impact and Actions, by Ross Settles.

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About author: Ross Settles, MDIF Senior Advisor for Digital Media, is an adjunct professor of digital media and entrepreneurship at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Center. He consults to media and investment firms on business development and marketing strategies. Ross worked with MDIF client Malaysiakini, the largest independent online news portal in Malaysia. His work with Malaysiakini focused on new online products and services as part of a yearlong Knight International Journalism Fellowship. Ross previously managed the online business and editorial operations for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and directed marketing and business development for Knight Ridder Digital. Before Knight Ridder, Ross led marketing and international development efforts for technology media company Red Herring Communications, and worked in marketing and product development with Times Mirror, the owner of the Los Angeles Times. Ross holds a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian studies from Princeton University. He has spent over a decade in China and East Asia, and speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese.

You can contact him via e-mail.

Guide #2 – Launching a paywall: What you and your team need to know, by Tomáš Bella.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

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About author: Tomáš Bella is co-founder and web director of an independent Slovak daily newspaper: Denník N (dennikn.sk), which also develops open-source software for publishers REMP (remp2020). Previously, he was Editor-in-Chief of the largest provider of Slovak web journalism, sme.sk, and co-founder and first director of Piano, now the world’s largest company offering publishers paywall software.

This explains why in many countries, digital journalistic enterprises launched when social media was already mature rapidly run ahead of legacy newspapers, even those that made big cash injections into their digital operations. Of course, successful digital media must produce good journalism, but their true secret is creating a conversation around it.  They are open to their public and easily let them know who they are. In one example in Eastern Europe, despite the traditional formality of many East European media, a new digital outlet had no problem sending a video to their audience of the editor sitting in her kitchen apologising saying she was sorry for a boring newsletter they had sent. In Latin America, new digital outlets have also successfully broken with the formal, ceremonial tone so characteristic of serious media there. Reporters tell the stories behind their best stories; introduce themselves with slang, as if to friends; constantly correct their mistakes; and when they have a conflict of interest about an issue, are candid about it. They let their public know that the media is only human.

These journalists offer their audiences a new, more transparent, and freer horizontal culture. However, sometimes, even those passionate journalists forget it takes two to tango. They want to tell their readers a lot about themselves, but do not care to listen.  Recently I saw journalists from Central America and the Middle East marvel at how little they knew about their readers after taking an intensive “read your analytics” course.  They said that knowing their Google stats and monitoring their following on social media makes a big difference to knowing how their stories are received.

But they, along with other media, including the largest US newspapers, have been realizing that tracking graphs and trends is not the same as talking with your public. (“We can count the world’s best-informed and most influential people among our readers”, said the New York Time’s 2014 innovation report. “Yet we haven’t cracked the code for engaging with them in a way that makes our report richer”).

Media in digital era know now they should invite readers to discover the world with them: open doors so that their audience can check the public discourse with them (like many of the 100+ fact-checking outlets around the globe are doing today); know the experts among their readers so that they bring insight into their news; call upon those with a generous heart to help them go through the millions of documents they just got from a source and build a database; ask the furious and the bullies, who write insults under their articles, where does their anger come from and, listen; open a space to let readers decide which reportage they should do; invite first-hand witnesses to document a problem they are investigating… the list of how much they can enrich their journalism is endless.

For those journalists with blinders who believe that engagement with audience is the business of marketers, Monica Guzman in her great guide about audience engagement  published this year with the American Press Institute proves them wrong. It is not about delivering a product, it is about making sure your readers know you respect and value them, she says, “showing them that together, they have important things to teach each other.”

Around the world independent journalism becomes stronger on the shoulders of the communities they serve.  Eldiario in Spain and Mada Masr in Egypt define themselves as a culture, a way of being, a clique, an idea of the society they want to be. And they build this dream together with a community that feels invited to be part of their world, well-treated, partaker, equal, like in any really good conversation. The “talky” public is here to stay and those journalists who fail to see their luck in this new era are likely to fade away.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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Inviting readers to join one of three tiers of membership, the British newspaper is relying on a combination of readers being ready to pay to belong to a community of ‘diverse, progressive minds’, and the attraction of privileged access to events and a vast new venue, ‘Guardian Space’, where many of the workshops, activities and courses will be held.

This is how Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger explained the membership plan and vision to readers: http://www.theguardian.com/membership/2014/sep/10/-sp-guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-welcome-to-guardian-membership?CMP=twt_gu

Ken Doctor in Nieman Lab points out that by building an actual (rather than purely digital) community with a central venue, The Guardian is betting that the answer to newspapers’ digital woes are to be found in the physical world. The newspaper plans to hold hundreds of events a week across the country by partnering with education and cultural institutions to produce and co-produce events. “What makes The Guardian initiative stand out at this point is its sheer scope. Currently, seven to 10 people staff the events/membership business, [Deputy CEO David] Pemsel says he anticipates a ramp up to 30-50.” There are also plans to extend the scheme to some of it 105 million global users in the U.S. and Australia in 2015.

Jasper Jackson in the Media Briefing says The Guardian is “offering access to events and other perks aimed at building a third revenue stream to complement the cover sales, print and digital advertising that currently make up the bulk of its revenue, while also tying a core of readers closer to the Guardian brand.”

The three levels of membership range from free ‘Friends’, through ‘Partners’ at $25/month, to ‘Patrons’ at $100/month, “but will not include any additional access to the Guardian’s journalistic output in print or digital, which is currently available free on the web”.

Converting a 30,000 square foot space in the heart of London will have “an impact on the overall commercial narrative”, but the initiative is projected to contribute revenues within five years. Jackson also quotes Pemsel as saying:

“The revenue from the £15 tier and the £60 tier, in the modelling and all the research we’ve done, breaks even at some point and starts to contribute a quite significant amount of money. The days of legacy print organisations being able to monetise anonymous reach are obviously under severe pressure, therefore one has to look at multiple business models to address that.

“Growing anonymous reach is great for spreading the message but converting that into money is hard. If you don’t deepen the engagement – time spent etc. which are very important benchmarks of how people are engaging with your content – and then through that converting that data into knowing people is very important. Trying to do all three of those things globally is quite an interesting job, but from a commercial perspective, we continually talk about doing those three things equally because you can’t do one without the other two.”

Jackson thinks it’s “a big ask for intangible value … The paid tiers appear to offer limited value for a relatively steep price. Both resemble very expensive loyalty cards (with the added bonus of being able to call yourself a “card-carrying Guardian reader”). And for the moment at least, the events portfolio will mostly appeal to those within easy reach of London.” He compares it with The Times’ subscription scheme at $40 per month, which offers an events programme and exclusive access to digital content.

In addition to the direct revenue created by the two paying tiers of membership, members’ details will be used to personalise ads and content.

Pemsel noted one area where The Guardian is going to have to learn fast – managing relationships: “However, through our multi-platform reach we’ve now got more relationships with more people than we’ve ever had before and we need to try and convert that into something, not just because we want to make money, but because our readers want us to.”

Overall, Jackson’s take on the scheme is that there is too little value in membership to make it work on a rational consumer level, but that isn’t the point – the paper’s strategy is to appeal to emotion: “Yet the way both Pemsel and the wording on the Guardian’s membership site emphasise that Patrons, Partners and even Friends, will be ‘supporting the Guardian’s journalism’ makes it clear this is aimed at more irrational impulses. It’s an appeal to the emotions of those who identify with the Guardian brand. It is reminiscent of the way loyal print readers did, and in small numbers still do, consider the idea of being a Guardian (or Times or Telegraph) reader a core part of their identity.

“The Guardian is effectively saying to its most loyal readers: ‘we won’t make you pay for our content, but we will ask you to in return for a few, mostly intangible, perks, and the knowledge that you are contributing to what we do’.”

In a country where terms such as ‘Guardian-reader’ and ‘Mail-reader’ are regularly used as both badges of honour and abusive stereotypes, “Building a business model around the affection some of its readers feel for that voice makes sense for The Guardian in a way it wouldn’t for most competitors.”

World Newspaper Congress

There were five key takeaways: constant innovation (‘think like a startup’); blending tech, content and development; collaboration (‘why go it alone?’); mobile; leveraging technology and data.

The five takeaways are all driven by one “simple” fact: the digital transition. Speaker after speaker “gave pleas, encouragement and warnings to their colleagues about the urgency of today’s publishing environment”.

As George Nimeh, Chief Digital Officer for Kurier in Austria, put it: “If you don’t start every day by thinking about your digital journey, you are in deep trouble.”

Constant innovation

“Innovation is day-to-day business,” said Thiago Madeiros Ribeiro, Digital Product Manager of Brazil’s RBS Media Group. Newspapers must break away from the assembly-line approach. Instead they need to make it possible for staff with different skills to come together to solve problems and get new products to market.

“The days of launching a product, letting it just sit there, and then moving on to another product are over. Everything needs to be tested, evaluated, developed and refined… constantly.”

Blending tech, content and development

Publishers need to blend tech, content and development. Tech isn’t an end in itself, it’s the means of telling a better story. Developers have to be at the same table as developers. Newspapers need to involve developers and designers in the news meetings and strategy discussions – “they are just as much storytellers as journalists are”.

Collaboration

To prosper, the media industry has to be as good at collaboration as it is at competition.

“Whether it be mobile, video, analytics, the upcoming onslaught of wearables, etc., it’s obvious that collaboration and partnerships are a key part of any publisher’s digital strategy, particularly when going up against goliaths and especially if you are a smaller publisher.” Collaborating enables publishers to access skills they don’t possess in-house, while at the same time saving costs.

“Although we often say that small and nimble is better, most of us are about as nimble as a big cargo ship.”

Mobile

In the current environment, mobile is first, last and everything in between. Partnerships are essential if you’re to succeed in that format – news publishers aren’t mobile companies and app development talent can only be found in specialist companies. Focus on what you do best and collaborate to do the rest.

“If you want to figure out social, then you have to figure out mobile. If you want to figure out video, you have to figure out mobile.”

Leveraging data

Data ‘oils’ the digital news business. You need to collect and analyse as much relevant data as you can to get the best out of your products and services. But for most it still has only potential value. “The actual monetisation of data is a much more involved process even after the not-insignificant work of collecting it.”

World Editors Forum

Key themes of the editors’ meeting were: the ongoing transformation of the newsroom; the impact of Edward Snowden; press freedom; video; pushing the boundaries of globalised journalism and digital journalism.

Ongoing transformation of the newsroom

“Stories under 500 words do well. Stories longer than 800 words work well. And in the middle there’s a deadzone.” – Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Professional Practice; Co-Director, Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship; Director, Future of Journalism at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, USA

“We still get people saying ‘we should hold this for print’ and I say ‘why not just throw it in the trash?’ Convergence is the only way forward. You cannot keep print and digital separate. It won’t work, not even in developing contexts.” – David Callaway.

Press Freedom

“This Golden Pen [of Freedom award] …materializes the support and shows that he is not forgotten. That he is one of us. That an attack on one journalist is an attack on us all and that jailing a journalist is a crime against humanity.” – Swedish journalist Martin Schibbye, accepting the 2014 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), on behalf of imprisoned Ethiopian publisher, journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega.

National security, liberty, regulation and the role of a free press in the post-Snowden era

“It’s created a very real chilling effect among our sources. They’ve become nervous about talking with us. They don’t want their phone numbers associated with us. And government employees who previously routinely talked to us, now won’t.” – Gary Pruitt, President & CEO, The Associated Press, USA.

“Journalism may have to be moved ‘off shore” to avoid creeping surveillance” – Janine Gibson, Editor-in-Chief, theguardian.com and Deputy Editor of Guardian News and Media, UK.

Pushing the boundaries of global journalism and digital journalism

“I believe we are at the beginning of a major movement in cross-border, collaborative investigative journalism.” – Rosental Alves, Professor, Knight Chair of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin, USA.

“Geography in the newsroom is the most important: having coders, designers, product people in the same room.” – Aron Pilhofer.

“Consistent revenue comes from a combination of both short, sharp video and long, evergreen content.” – Marie-Noëlle Vallès, Head of Video, AFP, France.

“Younger generations are increasingly interested in news but increasingly cynical about sources of news.” – Jason Mojica, Editor-in-Chief, Vice News, USA.

World Advertising Forum

The trends that have been shaping the industry in recent years show no sign of slowing, though digital revenues from tables are encouraging. The key takeaways were: print is in decline, but still the main source of revenue; accountability, ROI essential; new ways of measuring impact; programmatic may save digital advertising; and tablets offering good yield.

Print in decline, but still the main source of revenue

“The real money in newspapers is still in print – digital is our future, but it is a future not yet realised.” The situation isn’t helped by the fact that “advertising fatigue” is growing, with more people turning to ad blockers for browsers, mobile and TV.

Accountability, ROI becoming essential

Today’s advertisers expect return-on-investment (ROI) and a much higher level of accountability than in the past. Businesses are buying into ROI, and it is increasingly governing decisions.

New ways of measuring impact

The industry needs to look at new ways of measuring its impact. “We need to stop thinking in terms of how many people read us every day and focus on how many people we influence every day”.

Programmatic is saving digital advertising

Programmatic advertising isn’t a passing phase, “it’s very much a stable part of the digital ecosystem”. “It’s no longer a question of should publishers get involved with programmatic, but how do we get involved?”

Tablets offering very good yield

“Tablet advertising is giving a very, very good yield. That is something that is similar to print in giving good value for us,” with tablets showing responses of up to 40 times higher than online ads.

“A significant portion of your newsroom is hiding from you. They’re not openly resisting the push toward ‘digital first,’ or even disagreeing with it. They simply don’t know how to proactively step out of their comfort zone.” What journalists need are newsroom leaders to engage them one-on-one to share the strategic vision of the company and explain how they fit in and can help deliver the changes that are needed.

Putting digital people in charge won’t bring about effective recruitment, put ongoing learning at the heart of the organisation or help staff embrace change. What will is appointing someone who is “devoted to managing human capital, specialized in journalism and the challenges journalists face today”.

Here are some of the reasons why:

Shrinking newsrooms – as newsroom numbers fall, management need to be able to manage poor performers up or out, while also ensuring that top performers don’t jump ship.

Career counselling – “The best way to bring newsroom staff out of hiding is to engage them in a very personal dialogue about how your organization’s needs and priorities mesh with their own performance and career path.”

Constant change – However much change you’ve led your organisation through, you can be sure there’s more to come. Newsrooms need leaders who can identify and hire the right people and enforce change on staff who are struggling to adapt.
Read more:  Newsrooms need HR specialists, not just technologists, in top leadership

Strategy, structure and culture form an interdependent triangle for change. “Any attempt to change culture without developing a strategy and structure is doomed to failure. And any attempt to implement a new strategy without working on structure and culture is also unlikely to succeed.”

Strategic change drivers: Faced with disruptive competitors such as search engines and social media, print businesses have to develop new strategies and products. Websites, mobile sites, apps, social media channels – the pace of product changes and modifications has increased tremendously. Publishers are in danger of being left behind.

Structural change drivers: Breaking the focus on daily deadlines for the printed paper is important in supporting the strategic shift to digital. So are agile product development and an adoption of improvements in technology, platforms and collaboration.

Cultural change drivers: Sometimes cultural changes demand structural change and even strategic change. For example, news types of employees: “young graduates (Generation Y or Millennials) are bringing different value sets and expectations to the workplace… And organisations must adapt to this trend.”

Dr Knoll says you should always “sweep a staircase from the top”. Trying to change culture from the bottom up will not work. “The simple fact is if managers — whether they’re in editorial or commercial areas — do not believe in a common change in vision and goal, it will not work.”

In times such as these, “transformational leaders are needed to share an engaging vision and navigate people through unsteady waters. But, first, we need managers who really understand the changes taking place.”

Read more: Sustainable culture change for media companies must start at the top

The two charts above may seem contradictory. Yes, global online ad expenditure has multiplied tenfold since 2004. Yes, digital spend will surpass the printed press worldwide (in many countries, it already has) in 2015. But despite this impressive turnaround, the newspaper industry still gets most of its rapidly diminishing advertising revenues from print, not from digital. Indeed, many traditional news brands have reached huge audiences online but just a tiny amount of the global digital ad revenue cake. Why is that? Just a lack of vision, or is it an unfinished digital transformation?

The advertising paradox

The slow transformation to digital has indeed played a role for many traditional media, but unfortunately it is not the main factor behind this paradox. The most important cause is competition and this cannot be fixed. Media have moved from a world where ad revenues were shared among a very small bunch of papers, TV and radio stations in each country to a world of limitless competitors, from the huge new arrivals like Google or Facebook to the myriad bloggers. It’s almost a perfect market, awash with inventory, that is now getting even more ‘perfect’ with the development of programmatic buying, where machines (not fallible or emotional humans) match supply and demand in real time.

The laws of economics are ruthless. With an increase in competition/supply comes, inevitably, a decline in prices: so digital advertising has always suffered and will always suffer downward pricing pressure. This is why news outlets all over the world are searching with renewed passion for complementary revenue lines. And the main focus is now on ‘user generated revenues’, either traditional revenues based on editorial content or revenues based on new services.

Revisiting ‘editorial revenues’

Only five years ago, almost every news outlet in the world was banking on an open-web-pure-advertising-revenue model. But the global economic downturn and the low prices of digital advertising described above convinced many of the dangers of ‘single crop farming’ in digital. Only two international business brands – the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times- were previously pursuing a subscription-based model, based on the exclusivity of their contents and the predominance of companies among their customers: WSJ as early as 1997 and the Financial Times 10 years later. But it was only in 2011 that a major general news property, the New York Times, dared to put its contents behind a paywall.

Three years later, the NYT has grown to 760.000 digital subscribers, an impressive number that has encouraged many to follow suit, even if The NYT’s journalism and singularity are difficult to match. Just in the US, there are already 450 national, regional and local news outlets (out of 1,380) that have introduced a digital subscription model according to the Pew Research Center. Are the models all the same?

No. Indeed, the discussion around ‘paid content’ and its presumed nemesis the ‘open web’ became so heated (creating two quasi-religious factions), that no one wants to talk about ‘paywalls’ any more. The forbidden word, as in Harry Potter’s ‘Voldemort’, is now replaced by ‘membership’, ‘club’, or anything else without ‘pay’ in it. And in most cases the offer does go beyond a pure payment for contents, offering users access to extra services, apps or discounts, and – of course – a special engagement with their favorite news brand. In any case, all offers include one or many of the following features:

• Hard paywall

It’s the oldest and usually simplest mechanism tried by publishers online. Users can only visit the homepage for free (sometimes also the sections’ homepages and/or ‘soft’ contents like photo-galleries), while most of the content online is reserved for subscribers. This was the system used by the Wall Street Journal in 1997 (now, fine-tuned) and by some general news big brands around the world at the turn of the 21^st Century, like El País in Spain in 2002. But most of them reverted to open websites after a disastrous drop in audience and very limited digital subscriptions. Surprisingly, Rupert Murdoch announced and put in place a hard paywall at The Times of UK as late as 2010. Last year, The Times and The Sunday Times totaled 130,000 digital subscribers, with a massive fall in online traffic (also affecting the paper’s audience) of more than 60% and a similar drop in digital advertising revenues.

• Soft paywall/Metered paywall

Introduced in 2007 by the Financial Times and popularized by The New York Times in 2011, this scheme tries to ‘square the circle’ of subscriptions and advertising revenues. The idea is to design a paywall that is porous enough to allow a very big number of free visits (and, therefore, a large enough digital advertising inventory), but not too much so as to discourage subscriptions.  The logic behind the system is the fact that loyal and very active readers are more willing to pay than casual users – though the latter massively outnumber the former. So the system relies on a ‘meter’ counting the number of times that a user visits the site and, from a set number of visits per month, the paywall pops up asking the user to log in or subscribe.

The Financial Times launched its paywall with a limit of 10 visits per month, excluding the homepage that is always open. Four years later, The New York Times took a much more cautious approach, because it had a much larger audience and advertising revenues to loose, and because the ‘exclusivity’ of a general news outlet is always more questionable than that of a financial one. So, the Times opened the limit to 20 free visits per month, excluding homepages and photogalleries which are always open. And to allow the virality of the internet to continue its magic (the main ‘collateral damage’ of paywalls), the NYT decided to keep access open to any visit coming from search engines and social networks.

All in all, this metered paywall only reduced the number of online visits by 5% and page views by 10% when it was launched. And to the surprise of many who thought this was too open an approach,  the number of digital subscriptions grew to the current 760,000. In the meantime, the NYT has reduced the number of free visits per month to 10 but, on the other hand, has completely opened access to video, whose ads are especially lucrative, and to some areas of content outside the US, where the rate of loyal users is lower. Indeed, the key to ‘metered paywalls’ is precisely this: they give publishers the ability to tweak the system on-the-go, depending on usage results and the need for inventories.

Ever since the NYT launch, hundreds of news outlets worldwide have introduced a metered paywall, including titles as different as The Telegraph in the UK, Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil, The Onion in the US and El Mundo in Spain. Most are very recent developments, so we do not have meaningful numbers yet, but it will be interesting to see whether they are able to reach similar conversion rates to such an iconic brand as the NYT and whether they also manage to keep advertising revenues almost untouched.

• Freemium model

Freemium models are almost as old as the basic paywall. Their logic is straightforward: you cannot charge users for the same contents you were offering for free just before. So the basis is to keep the existing web open, while creating separate contents and/or products only for subscribers; i.e. a Free area + a Premium area. Indeed, this is a very typical model for software or mobile apps, which provide a basic service free of charge and a paid premium for accessing advanced features.

Many media outlets, old and new, have tried this model, including the New York Times previous ‘Select’ offer, Le Monde, Slate (very recently) and even the champions of the open web, The Guardian, with its premium tablet and mobile apps only for subscribers. But many ditched this approach after trying it out because it didn’t trigger a large number of subscribers (most users are fine with the free part) and because it usually involves an extra effort/cost from the newsroom or the publisher to create additional content/services for the premium area.

• Membership

Membership usually brings a set of advantages to the subscriber in addition to the editorial contents of the publication – such as free or discounted prices for conferences, exhibitions, theatre and concerts; or special events with the newsroom, etc.) to make him/her feel like they are a member of a ‘club’. As noted above, most paid offers from publishers – be they paywalls, freemium models or some other form – are also marketed as memberships. The emotional and ideological link with the news brand is indeed one of the – if not the only – most important factors for readers entering a paying scheme. Importantly, the New York Times realized recently that users respond better to a marketing campaign focused on the survival of the quality journalism they represent, than to other campaigns focused on the many features and advantages of their offer.

New media properties also use this emotional link with their readers/users as a key to their survival. New brands all over the world are being launched thanks to crowd-funding campaigns among their potential readers: people willing to pay to enjoy the type of journalism the brand promised. And many of them are inviting these readers to become subscribers or ‘members’ as a way to avoid a heavy reliance on advertisers – especially dangerous for small companies – and to support independent journalism. As the new Dutch kid on the block, ‘De Correspondent’ (famous for raising more than 1 million Euro of crowd-funding in eight days) put it: “De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, but our business model focuses on selling content to readers, rather than selling readers to advertisers”.

Beyond publishing

‘Diversification’ is the magic word for many media groups searching desperately for new sources of revenue in addition to advertising and to the – always challenging – paid content. The logic behind this model is: if I have a trusted brand and X hundred thousand – or even million – users visiting my website every day, I may be able to offer them other services or products endorsed by my brand. This way, publishers can leverage their own media power to build new businesses more or less connected to the editorial, instead of always relinquishing this to advertisers.

Given the difficulties of moving from the publishers’ trade to the service providers’ or retailers’ one, media groups are typically partnering with specialists or even buying their way into these new businesses. The two most widespread diversifications are online services and e-commerce.

• Services

Many publishers worldwide have been offering ‘collateral’ online services to their readers for more than a decade. Indeed, some of these services – such as classifieds – were a regular and very lucrative offer on print papers, and it was a natural transition to exploit them online too. The main difference between media players has been the size of their stake in this market, and their speed to approach it. While some news outlets have been particularly slow and cautious to enter the online business (for fear of harming their declining print product), others have been fast and assertive. In markets where supply of these services is mature, the late entrants are struggling to earn decent incomes from their affiliations with big players, but those who got in early are earning very significant revenues from their own fully-fledged operations. In some cases, much more than their revenues from the editorial business.

The Nordic champion Schibsted and the German group Axel Springer have been the most bullish in this diversification, and not surprisingly they are also the two European players with strongest digital revenues. Schibsted began as early as 1999 to position itself very aggressively in the online classifieds business in Norway, then bought start-ups in Sweden, France and Spain that are now blockbusters in their respective markets. Today they are shopping for a second round of personal finance services websites all over Europe to replicate the feat.

Springer initiated its diversification a little bit later, 2005, buying startups also in classifieds, affiliate marketing, price-comparison and women’s communities. In 2012, the German group was already earning more revenue from its digital operations than its print publications (that includes the 3 million daily copies of Bild!). A little bit further behind, the Guardian Media Group also relies on its dating and jobs classifieds online services for more than half of its digital revenues, and has recently sold part of the family silver – its 50.1% stake in Autotrader – for more than £600 million to finance its money-losing editorial operations. Last year, Autotrader made £252m in revenues and £32m in pre-tax profits.

• E-commerce

“Retailers have been very good at being publishers for a long time, it’s time for publishers to be good retailers,” the commercial director of the Daily Mail Group, Marcus Rich, said last year. DMG consumer media division is undoubtedly pushing e-commerce as a key strategy for the Daily Mail brand extension; they already make £5 million in direct cruise sales alone. Pure players like Gawker Media are also keen to run this race and, according to its founder Denton Memo, will make around 10% of their digital revenues from E-comm this year. Even media power houses like the Italian RCS-Corriere della Sera are swiftly moving from taking their first steps in e-commerce (selling ‘extended editorial content’ such as books or movies) to the second step (partnering with retailers around editorial topics such as travel or beauty) and even third steps (integrating pure e-commerce offers in the editorial content), according to RCS’s CDO, Alceo Rapagna.

But most publishers are still in the early infancy of an e-commerce strategy, even if they consider it important.  According to a Forrester Consulting survey of 106 media companies in December 2012, more than 70% thought that having an online store was important, and about the same number said that having a separate deals site was important too. Indeed these two options were ranked third and fourth for driving audience and revenue only after an ‘Advanced website functionality’ and ‘More online advertisers’. But 30% of them added that they didn’t have the budget for adding real e-commerce. Are we in Year One of e-comm for publishers, just as 2000 was for services?

He told The Drum that buzzwords like ‘mobile-first’ have become ‘meaningless’: “If you think about mobile first you are thinking of a specific-point solution, which is only one way of dealing with your audience, and if you start to think about it too much you forget about the other pieces.”

Instead of obsessing about specific platforms, the FT follows a ‘universal publishing’ strategy, making content available across the multiplatform landscape.

Since it launched on 8 January, commentators have been falling over themselves to review it. Most have been quietly impressed by the changes, though many see it as evolution, not revolution.

Easier navigation, more white space

Jeff Jarvis thinks it is “neither revolutionary nor terribly disruptive … Still, The Times does much right”. He highlights its introduction of scrolling rather than clicking through longer stories, moving between articles by ‘next’ arrows rather than through a homepage, and its accommodation and clear labelling of native advertising (see below).

Like several others, Mashable points out that the redesign leans heavily on the newspaper for its inspiration: “…the site feels more like the New York Times than NYTimes.com”. It also notes that its “emphasis on visuals gives the site the chance to capitalize on the growth of lucrative video ads”.

Slate welcomes the injection of white space, created by folding the sidebar and toolbar for navigating among sections into a ‘hamburger’ – a pull-down menu accessed by clicking a triple-barred navigation icon. The public’s reaction to it has been, ‘Yeah, looks pretty nice’ – mainly because it’s more of a refresh than redesign.

Business Insider identifies three major changes: cutting the right rail, getting rid of the swathes of internal links that create clutter, and bundling most of its ‘newspaper section’ links to the ‘hamburger’, as noted above. This leads to a much improved reading experience.

Transparent with native advertising

Ad Age gives a cautious thumbs up to its treatment of native advertising, which runs against the current trend of dressing up sponsored content as editorial. Instead, it protects its credibility and brand through greater transparency, with its first sponsored content clearly marked with the notice: “This page was produced by the Advertising Department of The New York Times in collaboration with Dell. The news and editorial staffs of The New York Times had no role in its preparation.”

Examiner.com explains what marketers should know about how The New York Times now handles native ads, including that The Times’ ad department pitched story ideas to Dell. Dell approved the ideas that the paper subsequently contracted out to freelance writers.

Tech changes underlie reader experience

For a tech insight to the changes, Reed Emmons, the project’s development lead, explains that the redesign is “more than a fresh coat of paint — it’s built on a new framework and codebase to run faster while making future changes easier”.