New figures show UK newspapers thriving online – so why do they keep losing money on print?
All of which raises the question: why do the likes of the Guardian and the Independent continue with full-on print editions (which lose money) when the future is so clearly online? One answer is habit; another may be that the owners still see the print newspaper as an effective embodiment of the brand.
Turning this online torrent into money is another matter entirely of course. A recent study from the Internet Advertising Bureau claimed that people seeing an ad for a second or less counted as an impression – but it doesn’t leave much time to be impressed. Viewers of Mail Online may be expected to scroll down the long list of celebrity doings without paying too much attention to the ads. And, in the case of the Mail and the Guardian anyway, a huge proportion of the online readership comes from the US, which isn’t that helpful to most British advertisers.
Still, we can probably expect some changes to the print/online balance soon. You do wonder why the Indy owners the Lebedevs bother with a print edition selling far fewer than 100,000 copies. They also have the cut-price i which is doing pretty well. Why not make that their print flagship?
ABC Multi-platform report: March 2014 |
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Mar-14 | Monthly % change | |||
Daily ave | Total mthly | Daily ave | Total mthly | |
MailOnline | 11,266,272 | 179,822,518 | 0.22 | 8.40 |
Metro | 1,155,504 | 26,629,314 | -12.44 | -3.25 |
theguardian.com | 5,670,062 | 102,286,881 | 5.13 | 12.27 |
The Independent | 1,652,478 | 36,957,760 | 15.83 | 24.04 |
Mirror Group Nationals | 2,516,514 | 51,122,666 | 2.52 | 8.44 |
Telegraph | 3,551,333 | 72,203,591 | 12.58 | 20.94 |
Source: ABC, Monthly Multi-platform report