Yes, Virginia, there is print growth.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004061230
While Newspaper Ad Revenue Plunged, FSI Coupons Hit Record Levels in 2009
By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: January 22, 2010
CHICAGO Even as newspaper advertising revenue was falling off the cliff in 2009, retailers were ramping up their use of free standing insert (FSI) coupon by eye-popping rates, according to the best-known FSI measuring organization, Marx Promotion Intelligence.
In a year when consumers looked for every shopping advantage and traded down in brands and stores, discount retailers greatly increased their buy of FSI pages with coupons.
Dollar General, for instance, increased its number of pages by 386.2% with more than 885 million pages. It was third among the top ten retailers measured by FSI "pages circulated," up from 10th place in 2008.
Family Dollar, which ranked just 17th among retailers in 2008, took sixth place last year with a 227.4% increase in FSI pages.
Target remained the top retailer using FSI coupons, with more than 1.8 billion pages -- up 43.9% from 2008. It was followed by PetsMart,
Dollar General, Walgreens, CVS/pharmacy, Family Dollar, Kroger, Publix, Safeway Food & Drug and Rite Aid.
Overall FSI "coupon activity" measured by the number of coupons dropped grew 8% during 2009 to more than 272 billion, said Marx, a division of TNS Media Intelligence. The 2009 level of activity surpassed the second-highest annual drop of 257 billion in 2007.
Retailer promotion pages also jumped 37.7% to 9 billion pages in 2009, continuing what Marx said has been a pattern of substantial annual growth rates begun in 2007.
"As consumers adapt to new economic realities, marketers are increasing their use of FSI coupons within their marketing mix to deliver advertising impact, influence consumer behavior, and secure retailer distribution and merchandising," TNS Media President Mark Nesbitt said in a statement. "Leading retailers are also increasing their use of FSI vehicles to drive planned shopping trips and build shopper loyalty."
All those coupons in 2009 amounted to consumer incentives delivered by FSI totaling more than $385 billion, a 15% increase from the year before.
The average face value of an FSI coupon increased 6.5% from 2008 to $1.45. But shoppers were hurried to use the coupons, which on average expired in 9.3 weeks, down about 4% from 2008.
This higher face value with a shortened expiration period -- known as the Fuse in the industry -- shows manufacturers are delivering more coupons with higher value, "but are managing their financial exposure by reducing the length of time that these offers are available in the market," Marx said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Fingers crossed
I wonder what we will think about this New Year's eve 2011 from Paidcontent.org today:
The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) has a year to sell the public on its plans to start charging frequent NYTimes.com users for access but first execs have to sell the segment of its own staff that wanted to stay free. A year of constant carping about how awful it will be—whether anonymous or out front—will be damaging, if not lethal. It helps that Executive Editor Bill Keller is behind the idea of a metered service. Without support at the very top of the newsroom, it would be even harder. But as one newsroom insider told me the other day, during the year-long discussions about whether to charge or not, few, if any, people changed their stance. Those who favored free stuck with it; those who thought pay was the way to go may have shifted on the how. That means a lot of people who don’t like like it will have to work to make it happen. The sell job started this morning with a memo to the staff from the very top, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Janet Robinson, posted here in full. (The added emphasis is mine.)
———————————————————————————
On the Record . . . From Arthur + Janet
Vol. 1 2010: An Important Decision about Our Future
Today we are announcing that we will be introducing a paid model for NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011. As you will see in the press release, we have chosen a metered approach that will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.
The metered model implementation is an integral part of our comprehensive plan for enhancing NYTimes.com. In 2010 we will continue initiatives such as Times Open, Times Topics and our work to develop more active communities and more fully integrate the real-time Web. We will continue to develop new online products and offerings as part of our effort to enhance the user experience for our readers and advertisers.
Our strategy is to build the metered model while we remain focused on making NYTimes.com more compelling, interactive and entertaining, providing many more reasons for online audiences to visit our site and stay longer. In the weeks ahead, we will be adding resources to achieve these critically important goals.
Since NYTimes.com is, by a variety of standards, one of the world’s most popular and successful news Web sites, why are we changing our model at all?
We are doing so because we believe that a second revenue stream will be an important part of our future. While digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web, we expect that online subscription revenue will improve our ability to grow an important part of this business.
Fundamentally, this is an important step in our effort to support The New York Times’s high-quality, professional journalism. Our readers know that The Times brings them the most authoritative news and opinion to be found anywhere. We believe that they are willing to pay for it online, just as they are already paying a significant price for it in print.
We greatly appreciate this loyalty and dedication to what we have to offer. Once the metered model infrastructure is completed, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com.
We also selected the metered model because it offers a number of important virtues from a financial and growth perspective. It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web, which has proven to be an integral reason for why we have become an industry leader in display advertising. This flexibility enables us to create a proper ratio between free and paid content and to aggressively build on our very successful digital advertising business.
As you have already seen over the past few days, there are those who think that such an action is critical to our future success and those who see it as a serious mistake. This comes as no surprise. We know from long experience that significant change invariably breeds controversy; that there will be an ongoing public conversation about what we are doing, and we expect that many of the comments will prove to be helpful.
We know these arguments well because our metered model decision is a product of months of vigorous analysis and debate. There was much we wanted to learn and know. We wanted to get a far better sense of NYTimes.com’s potential over the next decade. We also wanted to understand where the Web may be heading and how new technologies will affect customer online usage. We believed that only by carefully pursuing these and other important issues could we arrive at the best possible answer.
Ultimately, we recognize that the success of our ideas will be judged by how well we execute this effort in the months to come. That is why we are waiting until 2011 to introduce this new system. To pursue this new approach requires that we utilize the full energy and intellect of all of you. All that work begins today. As we said earlier, our goal is to create the best possible user experience, integrating many of our customer management systems throughout the Company. It will take time to get this right.
Moving with appropriate care will enhance our ability to embrace an array of promising opportunities that are at our doorstep. As we look ahead, we see a broad range of end-user devices coming to market that will provide even more mobility, connectivity, rich media experiences and a higher degree of application value, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.
There has also been much speculation in the media and elsewhere about whether The Times will join a consortium as part of the metered model implementation plan. At this stage, our plan is to introduce the metered model as a stand-alone product. At the same time, we continue to discuss alternatives with a broad range of prospective collaborators with regard to bundled offers and other aggregation opportunities.
We will provide additional details about our plan as we get closer to launch.
The creation of a metered model for NYTimes.com is part of a long evolution to expand our presence on the Web and exploit new mobile and social networking vehicles. We are able to take this step today because of the scale and success that we have developed over the past 15 years. NYTimes.com is now widely recognized as the gold standard in online news and information. This decision is a natural next step and we hope that you will be as excited as we are to take on this new opportunity.
The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) has a year to sell the public on its plans to start charging frequent NYTimes.com users for access but first execs have to sell the segment of its own staff that wanted to stay free. A year of constant carping about how awful it will be—whether anonymous or out front—will be damaging, if not lethal. It helps that Executive Editor Bill Keller is behind the idea of a metered service. Without support at the very top of the newsroom, it would be even harder. But as one newsroom insider told me the other day, during the year-long discussions about whether to charge or not, few, if any, people changed their stance. Those who favored free stuck with it; those who thought pay was the way to go may have shifted on the how. That means a lot of people who don’t like like it will have to work to make it happen. The sell job started this morning with a memo to the staff from the very top, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Janet Robinson, posted here in full. (The added emphasis is mine.)
———————————————————————————
On the Record . . . From Arthur + Janet
Vol. 1 2010: An Important Decision about Our Future
Today we are announcing that we will be introducing a paid model for NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011. As you will see in the press release, we have chosen a metered approach that will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.
The metered model implementation is an integral part of our comprehensive plan for enhancing NYTimes.com. In 2010 we will continue initiatives such as Times Open, Times Topics and our work to develop more active communities and more fully integrate the real-time Web. We will continue to develop new online products and offerings as part of our effort to enhance the user experience for our readers and advertisers.
Our strategy is to build the metered model while we remain focused on making NYTimes.com more compelling, interactive and entertaining, providing many more reasons for online audiences to visit our site and stay longer. In the weeks ahead, we will be adding resources to achieve these critically important goals.
Since NYTimes.com is, by a variety of standards, one of the world’s most popular and successful news Web sites, why are we changing our model at all?
We are doing so because we believe that a second revenue stream will be an important part of our future. While digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web, we expect that online subscription revenue will improve our ability to grow an important part of this business.
Fundamentally, this is an important step in our effort to support The New York Times’s high-quality, professional journalism. Our readers know that The Times brings them the most authoritative news and opinion to be found anywhere. We believe that they are willing to pay for it online, just as they are already paying a significant price for it in print.
We greatly appreciate this loyalty and dedication to what we have to offer. Once the metered model infrastructure is completed, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com.
We also selected the metered model because it offers a number of important virtues from a financial and growth perspective. It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web, which has proven to be an integral reason for why we have become an industry leader in display advertising. This flexibility enables us to create a proper ratio between free and paid content and to aggressively build on our very successful digital advertising business.
As you have already seen over the past few days, there are those who think that such an action is critical to our future success and those who see it as a serious mistake. This comes as no surprise. We know from long experience that significant change invariably breeds controversy; that there will be an ongoing public conversation about what we are doing, and we expect that many of the comments will prove to be helpful.
We know these arguments well because our metered model decision is a product of months of vigorous analysis and debate. There was much we wanted to learn and know. We wanted to get a far better sense of NYTimes.com’s potential over the next decade. We also wanted to understand where the Web may be heading and how new technologies will affect customer online usage. We believed that only by carefully pursuing these and other important issues could we arrive at the best possible answer.
Ultimately, we recognize that the success of our ideas will be judged by how well we execute this effort in the months to come. That is why we are waiting until 2011 to introduce this new system. To pursue this new approach requires that we utilize the full energy and intellect of all of you. All that work begins today. As we said earlier, our goal is to create the best possible user experience, integrating many of our customer management systems throughout the Company. It will take time to get this right.
Moving with appropriate care will enhance our ability to embrace an array of promising opportunities that are at our doorstep. As we look ahead, we see a broad range of end-user devices coming to market that will provide even more mobility, connectivity, rich media experiences and a higher degree of application value, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.
There has also been much speculation in the media and elsewhere about whether The Times will join a consortium as part of the metered model implementation plan. At this stage, our plan is to introduce the metered model as a stand-alone product. At the same time, we continue to discuss alternatives with a broad range of prospective collaborators with regard to bundled offers and other aggregation opportunities.
We will provide additional details about our plan as we get closer to launch.
The creation of a metered model for NYTimes.com is part of a long evolution to expand our presence on the Web and exploit new mobile and social networking vehicles. We are able to take this step today because of the scale and success that we have developed over the past 15 years. NYTimes.com is now widely recognized as the gold standard in online news and information. This decision is a natural next step and we hope that you will be as excited as we are to take on this new opportunity.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Yawhoo!
The New York Times may part the red sea yet. Quoting:
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: January 20, 2010
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Beginning in January 2011, unlimited access to NYTimes.com will require a paper subscription or payment of a flat fee.
Related
Q.&A. on NYTimes.com (January 21, 2010)
Media Decoder: Dialing in a Plan: The Times Installs a Meter on Its Future Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.
Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.
“This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that’s going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times Company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, said in an interview. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right.”
For years, publishers banked on a digital future supported entirely by advertising, dismissing online fees as little more than a formula for shrinking their audiences and ad revenue. But two years of plummeting advertising has many of them weighing anew whether they might collect more money from readers than they would lose from advertisers.
Financial analysts and writers who follow the media business had mostly qualified praise for the decision of The Times. NYTimes.com is the most popular newspaper site in the country, with more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online; analysts say it is the leader in advertising revenue, as well, giving The Times more to lose if the move backfires.
“You can’t continue to be The New York Times unless you find” a new source of revenue, said James McQuivey, media analyst at Forrester Research.
Mike Simonton, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, said, “We expect that The Times will be able to execute a strategy like this,” adding that other papers will try it in the near future, but few are likely to succeed.
But the response was far from universally positive. Felix Salmon, a respected writer on media for Reuters, wrote, “Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.”
Others endorsed the idea of a pay wall generally, while criticizing the approach of The Times.
Thousands of readers sent e-mail messages to The Times or posted comments on the site Wednesday, with those saying they supported the move outnumbered by others who vowed not to pay.
Shares of the Times Company fell 39 cents, closing at $13.31.
All visitors to NYTimes.com will have full access to the home page. In addition, readers will be able to read individual articles through search sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing without charge. After that first article, though, clicking on subsequent ones will count toward the monthly limit. Among the nation’s largest newspapers, only The Wall Street Journal and Newsday charge for access to major portions of their Web sites. A few smaller ones also do, including The Financial Times, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Albuquerque Journal, and more are expected to join their ranks this year.
The Times Company has been studying the matter for almost a year, searching for common ground between pro- and anti-pay camps. Company executives said the changes would wait another year primarily because they need to build pay-system software that works seamlessly with NYTimes.com and the print subscriber database.
“There’s no prize for getting it quick,” said Janet L. Robinson, the company’s president and chief executive. “There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”
Within the newsroom of The Times, where there has long been strong sentiment in favor of charging, the primary criticism was about the wait until 2011.
“I think we should have done it years ago,” said David Firestone, a deputy national news editor. “As painful as it will be at the beginning, we have to get rid of the notion that high-quality news comes free.”
The Times has tried and abandoned more limited online pay models. In the 1990s it charged overseas readers, and from 2005 to 2007 the newspaper’s TimesSelect service charged for access to editorials and columns.
Company executives said the current decision was not a reaction to the ad recession but a long-term strategy to develop new revenue. “This is a bet, to a certain degree, on where we think the Web is going,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “This is not going to be something that is going to change the financial dynamics overnight.”
Most readers who go to the Times site, as with other news sites, are incidental visitors, arriving no more than once in a while through searches and links, and many of them would be unaffected by the new system. A much smaller number of committed readers account for the bulk of the site visits and page views, and the essential question is how many of them will pay.
The Times Company looked at several approaches, including a straightforward pay wall similar to The Journal’s, which makes some articles available to any visitor, and others accessible only to paying readers. It also rejected the ideas of varying the price depending on how much a consumer uses the site, and a “membership” format similar to the one used in public broadcasting.
The approach the company took was “the one that after much research and study we determined has the most upside” in both subscriptions and advertising, said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations. “We’re trying to maximize revenue. We’re not saying we want to put this revenue stream above that revenue stream. The goal is to maximize both revenue streams in combination.”
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: January 20, 2010
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Beginning in January 2011, unlimited access to NYTimes.com will require a paper subscription or payment of a flat fee.
Related
Q.&A. on NYTimes.com (January 21, 2010)
Media Decoder: Dialing in a Plan: The Times Installs a Meter on Its Future Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.
Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.
“This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that’s going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times Company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, said in an interview. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right.”
For years, publishers banked on a digital future supported entirely by advertising, dismissing online fees as little more than a formula for shrinking their audiences and ad revenue. But two years of plummeting advertising has many of them weighing anew whether they might collect more money from readers than they would lose from advertisers.
Financial analysts and writers who follow the media business had mostly qualified praise for the decision of The Times. NYTimes.com is the most popular newspaper site in the country, with more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online; analysts say it is the leader in advertising revenue, as well, giving The Times more to lose if the move backfires.
“You can’t continue to be The New York Times unless you find” a new source of revenue, said James McQuivey, media analyst at Forrester Research.
Mike Simonton, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, said, “We expect that The Times will be able to execute a strategy like this,” adding that other papers will try it in the near future, but few are likely to succeed.
But the response was far from universally positive. Felix Salmon, a respected writer on media for Reuters, wrote, “Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.”
Others endorsed the idea of a pay wall generally, while criticizing the approach of The Times.
Thousands of readers sent e-mail messages to The Times or posted comments on the site Wednesday, with those saying they supported the move outnumbered by others who vowed not to pay.
Shares of the Times Company fell 39 cents, closing at $13.31.
All visitors to NYTimes.com will have full access to the home page. In addition, readers will be able to read individual articles through search sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing without charge. After that first article, though, clicking on subsequent ones will count toward the monthly limit. Among the nation’s largest newspapers, only The Wall Street Journal and Newsday charge for access to major portions of their Web sites. A few smaller ones also do, including The Financial Times, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Albuquerque Journal, and more are expected to join their ranks this year.
The Times Company has been studying the matter for almost a year, searching for common ground between pro- and anti-pay camps. Company executives said the changes would wait another year primarily because they need to build pay-system software that works seamlessly with NYTimes.com and the print subscriber database.
“There’s no prize for getting it quick,” said Janet L. Robinson, the company’s president and chief executive. “There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”
Within the newsroom of The Times, where there has long been strong sentiment in favor of charging, the primary criticism was about the wait until 2011.
“I think we should have done it years ago,” said David Firestone, a deputy national news editor. “As painful as it will be at the beginning, we have to get rid of the notion that high-quality news comes free.”
The Times has tried and abandoned more limited online pay models. In the 1990s it charged overseas readers, and from 2005 to 2007 the newspaper’s TimesSelect service charged for access to editorials and columns.
Company executives said the current decision was not a reaction to the ad recession but a long-term strategy to develop new revenue. “This is a bet, to a certain degree, on where we think the Web is going,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “This is not going to be something that is going to change the financial dynamics overnight.”
Most readers who go to the Times site, as with other news sites, are incidental visitors, arriving no more than once in a while through searches and links, and many of them would be unaffected by the new system. A much smaller number of committed readers account for the bulk of the site visits and page views, and the essential question is how many of them will pay.
The Times Company looked at several approaches, including a straightforward pay wall similar to The Journal’s, which makes some articles available to any visitor, and others accessible only to paying readers. It also rejected the ideas of varying the price depending on how much a consumer uses the site, and a “membership” format similar to the one used in public broadcasting.
The approach the company took was “the one that after much research and study we determined has the most upside” in both subscriptions and advertising, said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations. “We’re trying to maximize revenue. We’re not saying we want to put this revenue stream above that revenue stream. The goal is to maximize both revenue streams in combination.”
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Cutting through the fog
Individuated news -- self-chosen stories and ads on any platform -- could cut through the fog of all the new platforms. Although this new platform is long-awaited and if history is any precedent should be exciting.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
Payday maybe
The arrival and soon onslaught of e-tablets and apps for smartphones that present branded content upon subscription hold out the hope of a payday for news organizations, unlike websites never have. Read this insightful piece: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8414725.stm
Saturday, January 2, 2010
We're a tribe
In the modern-day lingo of Seth Godin's book "Tribes", those of us interested in personalizing web content onto all platforms from print to mobile to shower curtains, are a tribe, who get together once a year for the Individuated News Conference. If you haven't read Godin's wonderful book watch this. This year the conference will be in Denver June 21-23.
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