New Media Age Putting More Of Itself Behind Paywall
Centaur‘s online marketing and media mag NMA, which already required a £99-a-year subscription for everything bar “lead” stories and opinion pieces, is now putting those stories from its print edition behind a paywall, too.
Editor Justin Pearse writes that, along with columnists, daily breaking news will remain free for seven days.
The story says NMA has a “phased strategy to introduce a range of premium content and services to add value to bundled subscriptions”.
There’s rarely a perfect paid content strategy to be had by a publisher. NMA’s mimics that of Economist.com, which continues to give away all the new news and its leading voices, while charging for the rest. NMA is placing faith in its bigger-hitting stories being the subscription drivers.
As we reported, Emap Inform is getting ready to throw the pay wall around its trade sites for readers who don’t come via Google.
The media and marketing titles have been amongst the best performing in Centaur’s stable, but the publisher has spent the last year figuring out what to do with them, axing staff from the Mad.co.uk site and turning it in to an sector aggregator for those titles.
Well… good luck to them. Brandrepublic (Haymarket's mad.co.uk equivalent) will go the same way soon.
But I don't rate their chances if they think news, however "big-hitting", will sell. I can't complain because it will only benefit the likes of us (niche) on the one hand and bigger free media players (in particular the BBC) on the other.
If you take a look at the traffic stats for our site (http://econsultancy.com) versus nma.co.uk verusus brandrepublic.com (see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/econsultancy.com+nma.co.uk+brandrepublic.com/ for rough idea) then the outlook looks even more bleak. This is the state *before* they put up the paywall…?!
Meanwhile, Centaur are launching separate sites like http://reputationonline.co.uk/ – a hot area maybe but just further dilutes the brand and SEO equity overall.
The last edition of NMA I had contained 3 ads excluding their own and excluding recruitment ads.
I really rate NMA's content but from where I'm sitting their business model and plans are all over the shop…?
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
Econsultancy
http://econsultancy.com
Nice work Ashley – completely wrong figures and complete misunderstanding of what we are doing.
Andy Oakes
Pubisher
New Media Age
Ah Andy… wondered whether I'd get a reaction. For some reason whenever I try to comment on NMA.co.uk my comments never get published ;)
I'm more than happy to be proved wrong – even in public. And, as I say, I think NMA's content is great. But I can't see the business model working at least as outlined above?
So what are the true figures and what are you really doing? Happy to interview you for our own newsletter if you want…
(this isn't really about NMA, it's about the future of B2B media/publishing. My personal view is that most publishers are getting it wrong)
Ashley
p.s. I read http://www.nma.co.uk/new-media-age-puts-magazine-news-behind-pay-wall/3006211.article originally. Perhaps this doesn't make fully clear what *will* be happening?
My fundamental contention is that people won't pay for "analysis" or "lead news" as Justin describes it. The unfortunate truth is that they are a nice to have. And this is true for our site too.
All you do is destroy your viral/social media/SEO/inbound-link building Google juice by putting up such paywalls to content people won't pay for anyway.
(Read the comments so far on your own story for insight into that).
Now if you were charging for data, tools, services, apps, research etc. that *would* make some sense.
If you'd like to give us your NMA Top 100 data from the last 10 years I reckon we could turn that into a very profitable online data service…
I'm as curious about NMA's strategy as I am anyone who lets the new stuff go free and the old behind a paywall. Isn't the *new* stuff the *valuable* stuff?
How will you decide on what a "lead" story is that goes paid? Is that an editorial decision? Is it that all magazine content will be paid-for, but only at the time it's published on Thursday (a lot of the stories break online as they hit, right?)?
Andy – we're also happy to chat with NMA/Centaur further about strategy.
Ashley, you know any deal agreed here has to give us commission, right? ;-)
Hi Rob
Good to hear from you (Disclaimer: Rob used to write for Econsultancy and very good he was too!).
I don't think it is about 'new' vs. 'old' story/news. It doesn't matter how new it is – people still won't pay for it. Unless you are in a business where there is definite value in the timeliness itself (e.g. financial trading).
The *biggest* stories will increasingly be broken on either "social media" or "very big media" (e.g. BBC) anyway. B2B titles (like Econsultancy, like paidcontent, like NMA) can never really derive real value from "breaking news". Which is why we've never done news. NMA do that very well. But there's no money in it. I can get it any number of ways/places. We can do niche, we can do insight, we can do analysis, but even that is mostly 'marketing' on the Freemium model to drive monetisation elsewhere (research, data, events, training etc.).
But, hey, that's my view.
Ashley
p.s. a great recent example of breaking news / big media / social media is our piece at http://econsultancy.com/blog/4780-social-media-turns-toxic-avenger-for-the-guardian-trafigura-2
It shows how a Guardian web story became a Twitter outcry which became a blog on our site which became a BBC piece which become me appearing on Sky News.
Hi Robert,
We're obviously, like everyone, experimenting. All our magazine content was always for subscribers online.
Not easy this paid conundrum is it! Very interested to hear your views. Excellent idea to talk to Andy more about nma/Cenaur strategy.
and Ashley, thanks for all the comments. It is a tricky area.
i dont want to interrupt this brilliantly entertaining B2B stoush, but i thought Compete's figures were US -only? … making Ashley's figures about NMA's traffic complete rubbish …
…and who's updating your sites while you're all wasting your time in here?
"stoush"… there's a mighty fine word I'd never come across.
@jonathon: yes, fair point, Compete.com's stats are US ones. Those stats probably do BrandRepublic a particular disfavour.
I'm not sure what nma.co.uk's actual figures are as I don't think they are on their site and I can't figure out ABCe's new database/access.
According to Google AdPlanner (not bullet proof but better than Compete) nma.co.uk gets around 50k uniques/month in the UK. Team NMA/Advertising – is this correct? (our site data is on Google AdPlanner coming direct from our Google Analytics so is as accurate as know it ourselves).
I wasn't out to bash NMA so apologies if it comes across that way. But I am frustrated by the publishing world's apparent inability to create business models based around what their readers *really* value rather than the business models the execs think they need to *impose* upon their users to shore up a sometimes dying/broken model.
If a site like NMA were getting 50k uniques a month… Let's say it's not NMA, but let's imagine a similar site… at a conversion rate of 0.2% (realistic) on £99 that's 100 a month @ £99 = £10k a month = £120k a year.
I guess if that's genuinely *incremental* revenue/profit then that's not bad but it hardly sets the world on fire. And you'd have to offset possible reduction in other areas (traffic, data for events etc.) + the costs that come with building infrastructure, customer service etc.
So I'm genuinely interested in hearing the business model. Maybe my estimates are all way too low? But we have been doing "paid content" for 10 years now so I'd hope we know a little about that.
Now if you were talking recruitment, awards events etc. then I'd more than happily take advice from NMA as they do those much better than we ever could.