When Rupert Murdoch earlier this year announced his plans for creating a so- called “pay wall” around the web sites of his company’s media operations, commentators ran amok in a race to predict the future outcome of the plan.
“Our website does not threaten our paper – it protects it”
Personally I think the idea has had failure written all over it from day one, but much as many other bystanders with an opinion I did not have any numbers or facts to back up my predictions – now I do.
On April 19th 2010 DMGT, the company behind the most visited online newspaper in the UK, The Daily Mail, announced their experiences at their annual investor day meeting. Martin Clark of Daily Mail told the audience what many spectators, knew all along, that “People pay for the convenience of print in recognition of the special cost of production and delivery of a tangible product and because they purchase it WHOLE.” He went on to saying that people expect news to be free except for print, and at the same time acknowledging that even though the journalists provide content to both the offline and the online platform, the ball game is very different indeed.
So How Does the Daily Mail Make a Profit?
Not much of a surprise here – they make their money off ads. Actually they are up 131% in ad-revenue from last year. Size does matter in this game, and it appears that the Daily Mail is winning at the moment. Giving away content for free is the key to success in this case. By focusing on creating repeat visitors they have created a loyal audience – 78% of whom does not buy the print paper, but the readers who actually buy the paper AND visit the website buys twice as many copies as the reader who does not visit the website. In other words the free content on the website is helping their print business.
“Our website does not threaten our paper – it protects it” – Martin Clark
You can read all the slides from the meeting in the pdf linked below