v-Fluence Blog

The Death of Print

What's really endangered about newspaper publishing?

For more on these topics, be sure to visit Jay Byrne's blog. 

Predictions of the death of the American newspaper are appearing with greater and greater frequency, along with the actual demise of several well known dailies. The Rocky Mountain News recently ceased publication altogether and the Christian Science Monitor will move to an all-online publishing platform next month. The Web is the accused assassin and cause of this mainstream media crisis. It also is the primary driver behind traditional media's search for a sustainable way to exist profitably online.

What many newspapers don't realize is that they have yet to perfect the basic mission of successful Web publishing: Link relevant content with relevant audiences for increased ROI opportunities for relevant advertisers. When they do, they may staunch their current hemorrhage and - gasp - perhaps make money online.

Time Magazine has taken up the apparent demise of print journalism with a cover story and recent report predicting the potential demise of eight to 10 of the most endangered papers in the country. Time suggests these once-powerful media mainstays are close to shutting down or moving to online-only publications. But will just a shift to online publishing save them?

The decline in newspaper circulation did not begin with the Internet. In fact, newsprint's decline took its first big hit in the 1930s with the mass introduction of broadcast radio and on a per capita basis, it never recovered. In terms of gross numbers, daily print circulations started crashing after they peaked in the 1980s, well before the 1993 public introduction of the World Wide Web.

Newspapers today appear to be acting much like the railroads in the 1960s - they fail to recognize what their business (if it's to succeed) actually is. The railroad "business" and its competition were not insular, and the same is true of newspapers. Where a focus on effective conveyance of people and goods may have saved some of the railroads, a focus on effective delivery of valuable content to consumers where and when they seek it will be a starting point for salvaging some mainstream publishers.

Whereas newspapers' competition for advertising dollars and subscribers stopped being solely other newspapers once radio came along, competition today could be broadly defined as all content providers online, including consumer-generated media. Given that more content is now consumed online than radio, television and print combined - the Web is where your content needs to be consumed first and foremost. Yet, even with the significant name recognition and credibility advantages the mainstream media publishing icons enjoy today, of the top 50 circulation newspapers in the U.S., only 15 appear to have more online daily visitors than their current print circulation.

Here are the top- and bottom-five major dailies when comparing daily online visitors with daily print circulation:

Top Five	Percent online daily visitors over print circulation	Bottom Five	Percent online daily visitors under print circulation
1. Cleveland Plain Dealer	86%	1. Cincinnati Enquirer	-640%
2. San Francisco Chronicle	64%	2. Wall Street Journal	-297%
3. Miami Herald	47%	3. Orange County Register	-210%
4. New York Times	45%	4. Louisville Courier Journal	-187%
5. Seattle Times	45%	5. Newsday	-132%

(Daily circulation figures from ABC compared against the average of high-low daily online visitors estimated by Quantcast.)

As more people turn to the Web for information and entertainment, that shift is not directly converting to online visitors for most newspaper Web sites. The combined daily print circulations of the top 50 newspapers are just under 30 million readers. The combined daily Web visitors to these papers' Web sites are less than 20 million. While this is just one data point to consider, it's instructive to see who is extending their reach via the Web and who is not.

Ranking the combined owners of multiple publications within the top 50 daily newspapers reveals most holding companies appear to be consistently ineffective online, others have mixed results, and only a few are positive across all publications:

Publisher/Owner	Average	Low	High
New York Times Company	38%	30%	45%
MediaNews Group	-1%	-47%	37%
Hearst Corporation	-2%	-68%	64%
McClatchy Company	-14%	-73%	47%
Advance Publications	-24%	-100%	86%
Tribune Company	-36%	-46%	-14%
Gannett Company	-158%	-608%	-22%
News Corporation	-184%	-296%	-72%

As such, shifting to online only may lower costs, but absent other shifts will also lower their eyeball count and thus the value of their content to advertisers. More importantly, the real end point of the Internet is not about eyeballs (visitors), anyway. It's about relevant visitors and converting those visitors into participants - whether it be involving them in the content itself or having their experience with the content bring them closer to a sale or desired opinion formation. (See this recent article on a Skittles social media marketing ploy for more on traditional-versus-new media conversion metrics.)

To effectively monetize content, the first step is connecting that content with relevant audiences: getting content linked to targeted audiences, i.e. people interested in that content, via Web 1.0 (search) methods or more sophisticated Web 2.0 social interaction. For those who fail to even successfully convert their current print subscribers and extend beyond using the Web, it seems a simple shift to online publishing as a solution to their problems will be a stretch for them, at best.

Where advertisers (should) want to be online

Monetizing content via advertising and sponsorships requires at a minimum effectively connecting that content with relevant potential customers. Broadcast and/or broad-circulation models are less important than targeted reach and narrowcasting when it comes to the Web. Simply put: Link relevant content with relevant audience for relevant advertisers.

For example, let's say you are a healthcare company selling products or services to people with asthma. You want to connect your offerings with people in the places and at the times where they are seeking and consuming information about asthma and making treatment-related decisions. In this example, like others, we know that the Internet has become the primary starting point for information-gathering on health issues. We know that the vast majority of online health consumers also start at a search engine to find the information they seek. Analyzing the language used (more than 30,000 terms) and corresponding visibility of destinations found for all asthma-related searches, we see which content providers have the highest value to potential advertisers in this space. Mainstream media sources, in spite of publishing and placing asthma-relevant content online, rarely effectively connect that content for maximum visibility where it matters.

Top new media content  publishers	Percent influence - Asthma	Top mainstream media online	Percent influence - Asthma
Drugs.com	10%	New York Times	0.14%
RXList.com	8%	US News & World Rep	0.11%
MedicineNet.com	7%	Fox News	0.08%
WebMD.com	6%	USA Today	0.07%
FamilyDoctor.org	1.4%	MSNBC	0.03%

This visibility and influence is not due to a lack of available content as much as ineffective positioning of content. The New York Times online, for example, has more than 1.8 million pages of asthma-related content available online - that's 7,700 percent more than the 23,000 pages available from top-ranked Drugs.com. Yet Drugs.com enjoys a nearly inverse 7,000 percent more influence in this space. Drugs.com also appears to pay more attention to contextual advertising placements. In other words, Drugs.com is apparently succeeding at doing what newspapers need to do online: Visibly link relevant content with relevant audience for relevant advertisers.

Top asthma drug makers AstraZeneca & GlaxoSmithKline ads appear on Drugs.com asthma pages

Rotating ads for Verizon Wireless, Levy Jeans, Monsanto and an identity theft protection service appear on NY Times asthma pages

We see similar results in online environments for other, similar health spaces as well as those in energy, food and other topic areas online. In dozens of areas analyzed, the mainstream media, newspapers in particular, are remarkably lacking in visibility and influence, especially when compared to other online destinations that enhance and monetize their content with contextual ads. Mainstream media content visibility and influence rarely exceeds 5 percent overall influence; whereas, topic-specific portals and reference sites that monetize their content through targeted advertising linking issues-focused consumers with relevant advertisers, frequently command greater than 25 percent visibility and influence.

This is not to suggest that simply increased visibility and a few tactical improvements will resolve content monetization challenges. For those successful in garnering better-than-print-circulation visitors online and topic-targeted visibility, creating real value for advertisers requires first embracing a more sophisticated approach to integrating targeted and effective advertising linked to relevant content. Running mortgage ads juxtaposed to health content and drug ads within real estate stories, as is largely the random online advertising placement schemes seen today on most traditional media sites, will need to shift as well. Those who engage in successful partnerships with advertisers to help them get beyond simple visibility (eyeball) metrics to real consumer engagements that result in sales or related conversions, will emerge from this latest transition.

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