COMMENT
IBS Journal October 2016
37
Coming to a screen near you: The changing face of media consumption
Carl Beetham, Business Advisor, Tibit
Look around, right now. You may be sat at your desk, or en-route to somewhere special but you are probably ‘consuming content’ on your smartphone or tablet. On my own daily grind, I very rarely see anyone struggling with a broadsheet or flicking through a ‘red-top’ as the only newspapers commuters appear to read are Metro in the morning and The Standard in the evening. The common denominator is they’re both free.
So, it’ll come as no great surprise that paid-for newspaper circulation is plummeting. We’re all aware of the recent, sad demise of The Independent and this year’s anticipation is Rupert Murdoch will flog only 1.6 million copies of The Sun (from a high of more than double this), the Telegraph a lowly 500k and The Grauniad a mere 166,500. Particularly worrying as I’ve always taken it. And Private Eye. Obviously.
An ol’ print ‘father’ of a Fleet Street ‘Chapel’ once elegantly explained to me that the cover price of the newspaper covered the cost of the PIP (paper, ink and printing press) but that advertising paid for everything else, including everyone’s salaries. But ‘cover price & advertising’ no longer equates to either turning presses or happy newsrooms. With the onset of t’internet, where news is as likely to be published for free, sales have fallen and advertising revenue is on the move. Ask yourself where you’d go to buy a car, your next house, seek out a lonely- heart or a spell in the sun? Once upon a time it would’ve been the classifieds and the displays, now it’s online. Today, online advertising contributes in the region of as little as 10% of overall revenue to the newspaper publisher. Factor in the phenomena of adblocking, which is decimating eye- ball, impression and click-through revenues, and it ain’t rosy in the garden.
The press has always faced challenges from innovation and
changing social trends – and they’ve been particularly adept at proving to be rivers of gold in brave new worlds. Several titles have successfully placed their premium content out of reach of the great-unwashed behind non-negotiable paywalls and tightly controlled subscriptions. However, for the majority of news providers, it simply doesn’t work.
The manner in which we read the news has changed forever: online readership is sporadic, irregular, often spontaneous and impulsive, and the way we wish to pay for it needs to replicate this. Micropayments have never (yet) worked and $1 billion has been wasted establishing precious little, but are events now conspiring to change this?
Analysing the expansive 20 years’ research of Shirky, Szabo & Isaacson, and appreciating why the overwhelming majority of micropayment companies have gone to the wall, we now realise the decision to purchase news needs to be binary: yea/nay, and the consumer should be trusted to set the payment amount at a level both sides are happy with. Three seconds, one-click and people will do the decent thing. Ask Radiohead. Go check out Tibit and you’ll see what I mean. A very novel take on all that has gone before.
Think we don’t need high quality, investigative journalism? Cast your mind back to All The President’s Men, Spotlight and The Guardian’s unearthed phone- hacking and WikiLeaks scandals. Journalism’s not broken, but the model that pays for it, is. If this isn’t changed, all future generations will have on their small screens will be ad-swamp, click-bait, paid-for-content and churnalism, and our ‘daily rag’ will be no more than a quaint, poignant anomaly of the 20th century.
www.ibsintelligence.com
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