Up against the paywall

IS IT boom or doom in the news business? Headline-grabbing sums are being invested in online newspapers: Axel Springer, a German publisher, bought Business Insider in September, in a deal valuing it at $442m. And in August NBCUniversal, a film and television studio, invested $200m in BuzzFeed, another online publisher. Yet for those publications founded in the era of hot-metal type, advertising revenues continue to fall, as illustrated by figures this month from News Corp and Tribune Publishing (whose titles include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times).

American dailies lost around $30 billion in ad spending between 2005 and 2014, or 60% of the total. Each drop in revenues is being met, in most cases, with a fresh cull of newsroom staff (see chart). Tribune is offering redundancy terms to 500 employees, 7% of its workforce. The cuts have helped to limit short-term damage to publishers’ bottom lines, but the outlook is bleak. Jim Chisholm, a media consultant, predicts that print-ad revenue is heading more or less to zero at many American and European papers. As for online ads, the ever-widening choice of places to put them means that prices keep falling.

What can newspapers do to save themselves, besides finding billionaire owners able to withstand years of losses? For most of them, one possible saviour, getting readers to pay for online news, has not worked well. Two years after introducing a paywall for the Sun, its biggest British title, News Corp said last month that it would be scrapped. “Metered” paywalls, which let readers see a few free articles before asking for payment, have worked at some large and prominent papers like the New York Times, and specialist ones like the Financial Times (which pioneered the idea). But for most general-interest papers people tend to read the freebies, then leave. Mr Chisholm says a typical American personal-computer user spends just 228 seconds on each visit to a news website.

Some European newspapers are making a bit of money by selling individual articles, typically for a few tens of cents, in partnership with Blendle, a Dutch online firm. But Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis, a research firm, says that as with paywalls, this idea has limited potential for English-language papers, which must compete with thousands of free sources of news for readers’ attention.

For many papers, then, the main hope is to find ways of boosting online advertising and sponsorship. However, the digital-advertising revenue of America’s daily papers was $3.5 billion in 2014, just 11% more than in 2007, according to the Pew Research Centre and the Newspaper Association of America. Analysts reckon that just two digital-media firms, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, will grab around 10% of those revenues this year. Along with Vice Media, they have been far more creative in making money from their online traffic.

The problem for middle-market newspapers is that the most common digital advertising available is “programmatic”—that is, placed in bulk by software that seeks to maximise the target audience without much regard for what sort of outlet it is published in. This is extremely cheap, in part because the supply of space for such ads is near-infinite. The rise of ad-blocking software is also a threat, though Axel Springer’s boss, Matthias Döpfner, said recently that on the website of Bild, the group’s biggest title, the proportion of readers using ad-blockers fell from around a quarter to less than one in ten when it started forcing them to choose between viewing ads or paying for the articles.

Advertisers are keen to spend more on video and sponsored content, two areas in which readers’ attention is easier to hold (and which are not threatened by ad-blockers). But readers are not trained to expect video from their newspapers, and newspapers often lack the experience and resources to make them to a high enough standard. Some are making strong efforts, though. This month the New York Times released a “virtual reality” app, with a series of slick 360-degree videos that the newspaper says kept readers engaged for close to 15 minutes on average.

Two of those videos were advertisements, for GE and Mini. This approach, where ads are served in exactly the same format as editorial content, and intermingled with it, is known as “native advertising”. BuzzFeed and several other “digital-native” publishers make much of their money this way. Starchier papers are giving it a try, too, including the Washington Post (whose online traffic has surged under its new owner Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon), the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But smaller news outlets may struggle to get advertisers interested in creating ads that match their house style.

Mark Thompson, the New York Times’s chief executive, says the potential for native advertising is “limitless”. Some of his readers may beg to differ. The paper has already had to make a change after some of them objected to it labelling sponsored content as “Stories from our advertisers”: it dropped the word “stories”.

One way that newspapers may be able to attract more advertising, or even get more readers to pay for news, is to identify new areas of specialist coverage that people find invaluable. The Boston Globe this month launched a website devoted to health and medicine called Stat, and has another devoted to covering Catholicism, called Crux. Some Sunday papers have long raised a bit of money through such things as gardening and wine “clubs”, in which they sell products alongside related articles—a sideline being looked on with renewed interest by some newspaper bosses. It is still too early to write the obituary of the general-interest daily newspaper, even if many are fighting for life.