Bradley Howard's Blog

A look at New York Times digital revenues

Oct 25, 2011 at 12:33pm

The New York Times has announced some details of it's online premium subscription (i.e. cash payment) model.

Full details

Digital

Digital businesses include NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, About.com, other Company Web sites and related digital products. In the third quarter of 2011, total digital advertising revenues decreased 4.5 percent to $74.8 million from $78.3 million. Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 6.2 percent to $50.3 million from $47.4 million due to growth in retail and national display advertising. Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 28.6 percent for the third quarter of 2011 compared with 27.3 percent in the third quarter of 2010.

In the first nine months of 2011, the Company's total digital advertising revenues increased 0.9 percent to $242.9 million from $240.7 million. Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 12.2 percent to $162.4 million from $144.7 million. Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 28.2 percent for the first nine months of 2011 compared with 26.3 percent in the first nine months of 2010.

Paid digital subscribers to The Times digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions totaled approximately 324,000 as of the end of the third quarter of 2011. In addition to these paid digital subscribers, as of the end of the third quarter of 2011, The Times had more than 100,000 highly engaged users sponsored by Ford Motor Company's luxury brand, Lincoln, who have free access to NYTimes.com and smartphone apps until the end of the year, and approximately 800,000 home-delivery subscribers with linked digital accounts, who receive free digital access. In total, The Times had paid and sponsored relationships with over 1.2 million digital users as of the end of the third quarter of 2011.

Source: The New York Times Company

My interpretation

In the last quarter, there were 1.2 million registered users, of whom 324,000 paid something, and 100,000 were paid for by Ford (a great subscription model as long as there are no catches for either party) and 800,000 were covered by their print subscription. In other words, they have a churn of about 25%.
The site has 45 million unique visitors per month as of January 2011 - it's interesting that they use comScore to quote that 45 million. ComScore use an estimated data model, as opposed to NYT using their own actual data.
Anyway, 45 million unique users and 324,000 have paid something - that's a conversion rate of less than one percent, however paid for content is still very much in its infancy.
Those 45 million users probably don't include Smartphone users or e-readers (hats off to ComScore if that can get that data, however I suspect they can't).
Doing some extremely rough sums, subscriptions are 99 cents for the first 4 weeks and then $3.75 per week thereafter. Let's ignore the special offer price and let's assume Ford pay a full $3.75 per user. Ignoring the print subscribers who get the digital edition for free, that's a total revenue of $1.59 million per week. Let's assume NYT earned this revenue throughout the entire quarter (12 weeks), that's a total of $19 million for the quarter.
Digital advertising across the group (and this includes a number of other websites and newspapers) generated $74.8 million.

Lessons to take away from this quarterly statement

The premium digital content model still has a way to go - advertising still generated four times the revenue as subscribers.
'Wholesale' or 'sponsored' user bases are key drivers for the number of paid for subscribers - Ford pay for 100,000 users and NYT have 324,000 paying individual subscribers. Think of the effort that goes into the Ford deal compared to the direct to consumer sales effort.

tags:

analytics, business, content, digital media, ecommerce, economy, freemium, news, sponsorship, subscription content,

1 Comment

TV audience figures - the fury continues

Sep 6, 2011 at 1:17pm

My anger with TV audience figures has just been further inflamed. I've just read that Red or Black lost 1.8 million TV viewers last night. It's big news in the media news at the moment.

1.8 million TV viewers. This is calculated from BARB, which distribute TV set top boxes which analyse TV usage in a few homes around the country. These figures are then extrapolated to the UK population - each set top box represents 5,000 viewers.

So 1.8 million fewer viewers is actually 360 people. 360 people didn't want a TV programme last night, which has commercial repercussions across the industry.

I still can't fathom how such an antiquated system is used to define the UK's £9bn television industry (that figure is from 2005).

I propose that all set top boxes - Virgin, Sky, BT Vision, etc. are required to send viewing stats back to a central location, probably Ofcom and actual figures are used, not extrapolated figures. We could go one step further and require all digital TVs to send usage stats back to Ofcom too.

It is unthinkable that a commercial website operation would not implement an analytics provider as a measuring tool - and have to pay for it themself. Quite how this happens in the TV industry is very strange.

Photo courtesy of Stefan on Flickr

tags:

TV, analytics, business, television,

2 Comments

Holiday news

Sep 1, 2011 at 9:05am

This week I've returned from a fortnight's holiday and for what was always considered a 'quiet period', there was a lot of news in the technology world:

Apple's Steve Jobs stepped down. Earlier this year I read the book 'From Good to Great' where one of the requirements of a great company over a good, high performing company, is that the former is able to lose key individuals and still grow successfully. There have been many good companies but when a key person has left, the company has lost it's way. Apple is currently the best of the good companies, and only time will tell whether it's one of the greats.
Eric Schmidt gave a great speech highlighting two key factors - the UK has invented so many high tech products, yet has been unable to commercialise them, and secondly the dwindling number of students studying maths and science. Both are sad positions to be in, and the second one is the worrying trend which needs to be addressed.
HP have bought Autonomy. I've never come across a company that so few people know what they do (Autonomy, not HP). 30,000 people a week probably sit in White Hart Lane wondering what their shirt sponsor does. As for the actual aquisition, I agree with Tech Market View that it's another sad day for British enterprise, and Eric Schmidt's words above simply echo our lack of commercialisation - why can't the UK create companies that buy US companies?
Google buying Motorola was a complete shock. The cynic in me thinks that Google bought the cheaper company, to spark Microsoft's interest in buying Nokia, which would eat up a huge amount of Microsoft's cash reserve and put it in a weaker position. Quite why any company would want to buy a handset provider - customers are extremely fickle and disloyal in the mobile market, and Apple are going from strength to strength. Oh, and there's the subject of huge investment required to knock the iPad off the top perch.

There was some good news while I was away though, I finished reading Lance Armstrong's autobiography and whilst I won't do a full book review like usual, I thoroughly recommend it. I couldn't put the book down and ended up reading it in four days - not an easy task when you go on holiday with four kids.

tags:

HP, apple, book review, business, google, mobile, news,

0 Comments

Digital Media pace accelerating

Jun 29, 2011 at 1:17pm

The pace of Digital Media is still accelerating in what has always been a fast moving industry.

This week’s highlights (and it's only Wednesday!):

New Google styling across their apps (basically it’s all gone darker and neater - it now looks like it’s been designed as a suite of tools, rather than cobbled together by a developer who has a passing interest in web design). I suspect the new styling is all part of the preparation of the Google Chromebooks
And while talking of Google, Google+ has been launched. And they've also launched What Do You Love – a mashup of different Google Searches. WDYL is nice, but it's not immediately obvious how I'll use it usefully
Zynga has announced it will IPO for around $2 billion, valuing the company at $15 billion. Zynga produce a number of online games including the hugely popular Farmville. $15b is a huge amount of money, however Zynga’s revenue is already $850m and as a parent of young children, I can see the industry has got lots more potential
GoDaddy.com, of Domain Name fame is just about to be sold for $2 billion. GoDaddy were also going to go the IPO route a couple of years ago on revenues of $800m but have preferred the route of private investment companies

In other news:

The clocks are ticking for a number of high street retailers with Thornton’s, Carpetright, Jane Norman and TJ Hughes all either making some massive cutbacks or shutting down altogether. Carpetright are blaming the recession – that people don’t want to buy big ticket items at the moment, but that wouldn’t apply to Thornton’s or TJ Hughes and Jane Norman who are clothing retailers. I think it’s more to do with customer’s shopping habits because clothing website ASOS is growing at the same time that the others are shutting down tens of shops.
National Insurance cards are going to be phased out. From now on we’ll get a letter instead. What were the cards ever used for anyway? And why not replace the cards with emails or a mobile app? It’s about time the government hired a CIO from industry and let loose with a clear remit on improving ROI.

I’ve been asked by some other sites to write some blog posts – check out Technorati and Endava's new posts, and I’ll let you know when Sitecore and CMSWatch both publish my articles too.

tags:

Facebook, High Street, business, google, government, news, retail, technology,

0 Comments

Two great leadership quotes from Eisenhower

Jun 11, 2011 at 10:54pm

I heard a great speech today about leadership where a two quotes from Eisenhower were cited and worth repeating here:

"Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."

"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

tags:

business, management training,

0 Comments

Chromebooks are expensive

Jun 3, 2011 at 10:19am

On June 15th, the Google Chromebooks will go on sale.

The price of the new Chromebook is $499. That’s the same as a Windows laptop, only you can’t run Windows applications on a Chromebook, including office apps, games, or use external devices such as video cameras, scanners, etc.

I thought that we’d see a $250 laptop with a Chrome browser. We’ve ended up with an expensive laptop with a Chrome browser. Put another way, it’s cheaper to buy a $450 Dell Windows laptop and install Chrome (plus you get the benefit of a using Internet Explorer for sites that don't support Chrome!).

If the laptop looked as beautiful as a Macbook Air, I could understand a premium, but it doesn’t. To most people the Chromebook looks identical to a Windows laptop.

On another note, Microsoft is required by EU law to ship Windows without Internet Explorer because of its monopolistic position. If Chromebooks [first become cheaper and] become widely used, will Google need to start shipping them without a browser? Or ship them with Windows?

Any thoughts on why it costs so much?

tags:

Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, browser, business, google, legal,

2 Comments

10 years since joining

Jun 2, 2011 at 8:13am

This time ten years ago I joined IMG as the Development Manager to build a new Content Management System.

The digital division within IMG was about four years old at that point, and had bought the digital rights to a number of sports organisations with the hope that the advertising and sponsorship on those sites would cover the costs of writing huge cheques to the sports organisations. 'Hope' is a strong word, because at the time the Internet bubble was at it's height, and we all thought we'd be billionaires by Christmas.

When I joined, IMG was pulling out of a number of these deals, and looking for efficiencies with the tiny development teams.

The Internet was so different back then. Products were very expensive. Vendors and 'experts' were all learning as they were going along - so when we got stuck, we were well and truly on our own. For instance we tried different CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to handle the huge amount of traffic we were experiencing, and ended up creating our own using Cacheflow servers. Just looking up the link just now made me laugh - because these boxes used to be the size of a fridge, and now they're the size of a PC. Once we'd got the Cacheflows stable, we simply migrated to Akamai.

I remember people, including the CTO, would sleep in the office when we expected incidents to happen. I remember arguments with database vendors about licensing - some wanted to charge for every visitor that accessed the website, because they saw that as a database user. I remember running analytics reports on websites that used to take several days to compile, and when we wanted to run the report again with a different metric, all the numbers in the report would change! That same report in SiteCatalyst now takes a second to run and end users run it themselves.

Most of the really difficult stuff back in 2001 is now a commodity. Half of those products now have a freeware solution.

In around 2005/6 I moved to the client side - project management and operations. The CMS was very stable, and it was time to look at a decent off-the-shelf solution because we were losing pitches because of our lack of multi-lingual support, versioning, WYSIWYG editing and advanced SEO support.

We chose Sitecore as the CMS platform, and for the first time we looked at offshoring to India to migrate our sites. Three months of total pain followed. For the first time since joining IMG, we missed deadlines (in sport, although it sounds obvious you can't miss deadlines - most of the time you might as well not deliver anything than deliver a project late). We pulled the projects back to the UK and an army of contractors joined the development team. Some were good, some weren't. We started to offshore to Eastern Europe instead. And it was a revelation:

Being able to fly there and back in a day (not recommended, although possible and sometime necessary);
The cultural similarities;
The push-back nature from developers on some of the requirements.

Then in late 2008 we looked to outsource more work to Romania via Endava. What started off at a simple outsourcing deal changed at the last moment, and the staff TUPEd over to Endava in January 2009.

Since then we've worked on some new projects outside of sport, and the Web has become a stable, maturing, controllable entity. In 2001 we were looking only to stabilise our clients' sites.

Our traffic (bandwidth, visitors and page impressions) have all increased exponentially in ten years, with some exponentially, several times. Social Networks have come and some of them have gone. Do they compete? No, they simply direct more and more traffic to our clients' sites.

And now to the future. In 2011 we are looking at providing data insights, personalised experiences, full integration with back off systems, and providing a true ROI for our client's digital properties.

tags:

Adobe, Akamai, Content Delivery Network, Content Management Systems, Endava, IMG, Romania, Sitecore, business, digital media, future, sport, web traffic, website production,

0 Comments

Ideas.org private social networks breakfast

May 25, 2011 at 4:20pm

This morning I visited ideas.org who work with some orgnisations to run their own private social networks. At Endava we term these on portal communities rather than private social networks, but I'm splitting hairs.

It was worth popping around the corner to their wonderful Smithfield Market office for the hour and a half.

I wasn't concerned with the technology aspect - we run on portal/private communities for hundreds of thousands to millions of users, I was interested in the case studies present how they encouraged users to join and participate. Our clients are fortunate to be able to afford large media campaigns or even automatically appear in the media (such as sports organisations).

After visiting Internet World last week and hearing organisations such as Hilton speak, I'm continuously interested in how organisations succeed in gathering more signups and usage of on portal communities.

My notes are below. Rather than type them up, I'm afraid you'll need to decipher my handwriting.

tags:

brands, business, social media, technology,

0 Comments

Away on Thursday and Friday

May 19, 2011 at 9:00am

This Thursday and Friday I’m in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, with all the Account Managers and sales people from Endava for a Customer Facing Unit conference. We’ll discuss the latest trends and industry observations, best practices (internally & externally), all with the aim of collaboration between clients, and how to help them in their businesses.

It’s interesting that these conferences are almost always held in Eastern Europe. There are several reasons why – the cost including flights is the same as using a London hotel; getting out of the office usually helps creative thinking; and connecting our global offices where we do most of our ‘delivery’ can only be a good thing.

The key points for this conference from my point of view are as follows:

The future of System Integrators (aka “IT services” in 21^st century language) are to add value. The future is to provide domain expertise and help propel our clients forward. Not just answering our clients' current needs but helping them with their future roadmap.
Our clients need to collaborate with one another. They have something in common – Endava, and most can work in conjunction with each other rather than compete. This might be working practices. It might be efficiencies learned through one client and able to be transferred to another.
Working with product vendors more, mainly because product vendors [unsuccessfully] try to fit their products into an organisation (and often through the wrong route) rather than understanding a client’s requirements and then seeing if their product will help.

tags:

Endava, IT, Romania, business, future, insight, trends,

0 Comments

12 Pieces of Advice for Professional Social Media Consultants

May 13, 2011 at 9:54am

I've always been interested in small businesses. Maybe it's because of the Napoleonic statement of Britain being a nation of shopkeepers, or something like that. It's very British to like the underdog. It's more likely to be the fact that my grandfather started a small shop in London which grew to become the successful family business.

At Endava we help some small businesses out from time to time mainly through personal contacts. This week I met a number of people who have started their own social media businesses. Businesses is quite a loose term because they're one person, trying to earn a living from one project to the next.

Having worked with some of the multinational agencies who have social media expert practices and listening to some others at Internet World this week, here are some recommendations for the smaller sole consultant businesses out there:

Create a methodology. This helps you to sound more credible, and helps you keep some traction with clients. Everyone wants to do the first few steps of a process if the first step goes well. If you have a 4, 5 or 25 step methodology, you'll get longer term revenues if you can demonstrate those steps. You might already have a methodology without realising it (chances are you always do a specific activity for each client and then do something else, and perhaps something else regularly).
Stop doing stuff for free. Yes, your mate who runs the local chippy wants some advice. Great. So don't charge any money, but get a case study from them instead, and lots of links from them
Have a Twitter feed. Yup, I met someone this week who claims to be a social media consultant and doesn't have a Twitter feed. The conversation didn't last long
Have a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is used by sales people in 1 man businesses to 100,000 man businesses. You don't necessarily need a Pro account. Have an account and for each free piece of work, get a recommendation from the 'client' on your LinkedIn profile. Your client doesn't have a LinkedIn profile? Create one for them
Don't just concentrate on Facebook or Twitter. Social media includes TripAdvisor, Blogger, and any review site out there. Act like a typical customer and search for the business on Google - Twitter and Facebook won't be the top results [yet], so where else is the client being reviewed?
Work with a techie. Chances are (because you'll probably be quite specialise) that you'll find a gap in the market for some social media tools and need a techie to help you. Build a new tool and you'll have the next Radian 6.
Learn to cold call. Not just on the phone but the local businesses (offices just as much as shops). Tough - yep. Demanding - yep. Depressing sometimes - yep.
Learn about RSS, build an iGoogle page, use Google alerts, work out repeatable iGoogle page templates and notifications. Use those for customers. It will help you scale quickly. Even the very big agencies set dashboards up for clients to self monitor. As soon as the client sees something of interest it will be you who will get the credit.
Collaborate with other consultants. Probably unimagineable. Social media is 24x7. You can't sit by the computer 24x7, so if four of you can handle a shift pattern, it will make a very cheap 24x7 service. And if you share some of the stuff above (e.g. you methodology), you'll become more efficient.
Work out the best charging model. I spoke to four independent social media consultants within two days this week. They all had very different charging models ranging from hourly to "whatever" to [random, from what I gathered] specfic costs for specific activities. Work out a proper pricing model and be prepared to either walk away or discount on condition of references, case studies and other points in #2.
Personally I wouldn't recommend getting into the moderation scene. There are expert agencies out there who do this very well. If you feel you want/ need to do some moderation, definitely take out the appropriate insurance policy for your own protection.
Create a blog. Leak your skills/ recommendations carefully and slowly. Point customers to the blog in order to build your credibility. Ask your discounted customers to comment on the blog to say what a wonderful job you did for them (if that was the case). Only one of the four independent consultants I met this week had a blog. How are you going to expect your customers to take social media seriously enough to part with their cash if you don't do it yourself?

So the really simple checklist for the really simple minded.... make sure you have the following and keep them up to date:

Public Twitter account - update very regularly
Facebook account (non public) - doesn't matter how often it's updated
Facebook Page for your own business (public) - update reasonably regularly
LinkedIn profile - kept up to date
Blog - updated regularly
iGoogle dashboard of your clients
Cold call list (prospects, sales funnel, etc.)
Methodology

Good luck and please let me know how you get on. For any other small business advice please comment below or contact me on Twitter at @bradbox.

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, business, social media, twitter,

4 Comments

Tags

A look at New York Times digital revenues

TV audience figures - the fury continues

Holiday news

Digital Media pace accelerating

Two great leadership quotes from Eisenhower

Chromebooks are expensive

10 years since joining

Ideas.org private social networks breakfast

Away on Thursday and Friday

12 Pieces of Advice for Professional Social Media Consultants

Bradley Howard

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