This post consists of two parts. The first is a follow up to my previous blog post on the Guardian. And the second deals with an idea as to how news sites can monetize traffic that comes for free through social / search sites.
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Last week Ken Auletta of the New Yorker and David Carr of the NYT got together on PBS News Hour to discuss the Guardian. This …
In my previous blog post on freesheets, I had laid out the latest revenue and profit (loss) figures for UK newspapers. Readers who reviewed the same in detail may have noted that the Guardian was one of the loss-making papers (Revenue of £196m and losses of £31m for FY13). Now the Guardian is likely the 2nd most read newspaper worldwide (behind the Daily Mail), having recently overtaken the …
Sometime towards the latter half of 2012, the Metro, a free newspaper launched relatively recently in 1999, became the most profitable title in UK’s uber-competitive newspaper market. See table A below.
In absolute numbers Metro trails the Daily Mail and even The Telegraph, but in profitability it pips them. How is that for a free newspaper? One heavily reliant on short snippety lifestyle + entertainment stories, national + …
Long radio silence there. My apologies for those who checked out the site and didn’t find it updated. I am blaming a holiday, a relentlessly crowded work schedule and attention to a couple of exciting personal projects for the lack of posts (No, I wasn’t feeling lazy, really! ;-).
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Frequent readers may recall that I started my blogging journey citing my fascination for the digital transformation underway in the …
In a recent post, I explored the growing move by brand owners away from Paid Media towards Owned Media, highlighting how Brands and Publishers were exchanging roles – even as brand owners undertook greater interest in content marketing, their media counterparts were undertaking a reverse journey of extending their media franchise into consumer brands or even selling the very brands they were covering in their media vehicles. Prominent examples …
On July 30, 2011 the Captain of the visiting English cricket team, Michael Vaughan set off a firestorm when he tweeted
Vaughan was implying that Indian batsman VVS Laxman had applied Vaseline to the edge of his bat, in order to mislead the Hot Spot infra-red imaging system, used to determine faint edges. The tweet set off a predictable mini-controversy as Indians (and the rather thin-skinned Indian Press) leapt to …
Recently, AXE, a Unilever brand announced its “biggest and most ambitious” marketing campaign to date. To create buzz around its Axe Apollo sub-brand, it is planning to send 22 people into space through an elaborate 60-country marketing campaign.
If the experience of Red Bull, with its audacious space jump watched by 8m simultaneously on youtube is anything to go by, Axe too stands to gain tremendously from the excitement that …
Last week, INMA, the global newspaper (or newsmedia as they prefer) trade arm released its 2013 Outlook. The Outlook too, as all INMA’s publications do, has an intensely digital focus. Quite natural, when the print product is in free fall in the West, and more specifically in USA, where INMA is based.
But for those of us in India, where the print industry is still growing (now in …
Sometime in mid 2011, Nick D’Aloisio became the youngest person ever to raise venture capital (!), when his news summarizing startup Trimit attracted the attention of Horizons Ventures, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s investment vehicle.
Rebranded as Summly, and having attracted $1.5m through more celebrity investors such as Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, Ashton Kucher, not to mention tech stars such as Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Marc Pincus of …
In a previous blog post, wherein I had analyzed NYT’s venture investing approach, I had promised to contrast this with the approach adopted by similar prolific peers – primarily Hearst, Conde Nast / Advance and Gannett. In this post, I plan to do just that. Here you will find details on all the current ventures they have invested in, as well as a brief look at the …