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The Leading Global News Brand
I was at breakfast last week with Dan Gillmor and we got to talking about the leading globals news brands.
I said they aren't CBS news, NBC news, or ABC news.
And they aren't MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News.
And they aren't Dow Jones or Reuters.
I said for english speakers, they are The New York Times and the BBC. Dan added The Guardian and I agreed with him. That was just breakfast talk between two people who care a lot about news and its distribution and consumption.
But I've been thinking about that conversation since then and tonight I went to Comscore Media Metrix and did a query for the top news services on the Internet on a worldwide basis.
Maybe this is a well known fact, but I am not sure people realize how big The New York Times has become.
The New York Times, my hometown paper, is the leading global news brand with an audience of 74 million unique visitors a month. That compares to a circulation of the paper edition of 1.1 million daily and 1.6 million on Sundays.
Online, the NY Times gets 50 times the audience that it gets in paper form. Wow.
Yahoo News is next with 67 million unique visitors a month, but they are aggregating news. The New York Times is not, but I wish they would. That would only add to the power of their brand, particularly if they did it intelligently learning from what I read in their pages every day.
Next is The Weather Channel with 44 million unique visitors per month. I wonder how that compares to their TV audience?
MSNBC and CNN are next, about tied with 36 million unique visitors per month.
Then we start to get to the international news organizations with the India Times at 22 million, and Sankei and Asahi at roughly 15 million.
The BBC is harder to figure out because there are multiple entries for the BBC. When you add them up, the BBC's audience is about tied with MSNBC and CNN at 36 million uniques per month.
The Guardian, possibly the best english speaking online news service, is in 32nd place with an audience of 7.5 million uniques per month.
I have two reactions to this. First, I realize how big of a mistake it was to sell Flatiron Partner's minority interest in The New York Times Digital back to the parent company. We bought the interest in the spring of 2000 and sold it back in late 2001. I have no idea how valuable it would be right now if we held onto it, but it sure seems like something we should not have sold.
Second, what The New York Times has done with the Internet is truly amazing. They have turned what was an important but essentially a hybrid local/national newspaper into the leading global news service. They are reaching 11% of the global internet audience and they have the 18th highest reach on the entire Internet.
That is an incredible accomplishment and I believe the Internet has made The New York Times Company a much more valuable business than it was 10 years ago when it first saw the power of the Internet and started investing in it.
So for all the handwringing about how the Internet is destroying the newspaper business, we can point to at least one well positioned newspaper company that took advantage of the Internet to add significant value to its business.
All market disruptions bring both risk and opportunity. The Times Company accepted the risk and grabbed the opportunity and look what they have to show for it now.
I only wish they'd make the opinion columnists available to all 74 million of their worldwide audience and not keep them behind a wall that makes them available to something way less than 1% of that number. Even an organization as successful as The New York Times doesn't get everything right.
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Tracked on May 3, 2006 9:52:51 AM
Posted May 1, 2006 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Tha the Weather Channel gets so much traffic shows only that quality web pages don't matter. Theirs is the worst piece of **** I have ever seen.
Just google "weather 10025" etc. to get all the pertinent info. Or weatherunderground.com.
Just because something is popular does not mean it is good (one could say the same thing, of course, about the New York Times, crappy paper that it is.)
Posted by: Dave | May 1, 2006 10:18:22 PM
quality is in the eye of the beholder Dave
audience is not.
Posted by: fred | May 1, 2006 10:36:32 PM
Well, I don't know - or care - about trends and such, but I do know that the only news source I trust is the BBC, and when I'm trolling for anti-GOP blog material - which I am often wont to do - I find plenty of amunition at CNN.
Posted by: jackson | May 2, 2006 7:44:58 AM
Fred-
Another thing to think about--the NYT assembled that audience while maintaining a registration scheme that keeps NYT content from showing up in Internet searches. Imagine if the NYT had clicks coming its way from Google searches!
One thing to ask yourself--could the NYT have built a brand with that kind of online reach if they did not already have a 100 year old globally identifiable brand?
I'm increasingly curious about so-called "secondary markets" in media--for the movie and tv biz these markets have begun to significantly outstrip "primary" ones in terms of generating revenue. The primary markets seem primary only temporally, not fiscally. But movies and tv shows made to exploit a direct to secondary market model or a near direct to secondary market model (like the last Soderberg movie) don't seem to do so well. Could it be that the marketing and social experience that go along with the first run of movies and traditional airing of tv shows is a necessary prerequisite for success in the secondary market? And does this suggest for net media that an offline brand is necessary to drive the online component? Certainly that's the case with the Times, which I suspect makes most of it's money off line despite the disparity in audience size.
One further point to consider. Just like the music business--in which the audience is shrinking for traditional platforms, the audience for traditional newspapers continues to shrink (that's why investors keep running away from the newspaper biz despite margins of 20%+), but the industry doesn't seem to consider the growing online audience as a successful counterweight. Why?
Posted by: Jason Chervokas | May 2, 2006 7:53:19 AM
I am happy they keep the opinions behind closed doors - this is precisely why the Beeb is what it is, and the NYT is what it is.
As a very neutral reader, when bias is so transparent as theirs, it sours the enjoyment of eloquent writing.
Posted by: mark s | May 2, 2006 10:23:09 AM
An alternative measure of media properties (independent of medium) is "effective yield" of properties, which is a blend of audience (reach) and eCPM (sell-through). That might put a different lens on the "leading" news brands/properties, especially from an investement standpoint (and to further close the loop on Flatiron's sale of NYT Digital).
The Times' efforts towards subscription-based relationships (TimesSelect) with its viewers is a reach (pun intended) for higher yields, where my sense is that WSJ Online (for example) is killing the times with almost a million subscribers at $100 annually. Subscription-driven yields dominate ad-based yields, since ads require so much more "work" to drive the same yields.
This data is harder to come by than Comscore lookups, but it is a more accurate measure of how well-managed the risk/opportunity quotient is handled by media firms, independent of their mediums, disruptive or otherwise.
Posted by: Chris | May 2, 2006 12:34:56 PM
From the usage patterns of WSJ, FT, NYT, Guardian, Telegraph, etc links, I think that the important factor is the kind of readers they are getting. What are people looking at the various sites for?
Times Select has afected this, but the intention mix is much more favourable for FT, WSJ and Guardian, where people go for news, comment, and then lifestyle, while the NYT's big attraction is its lifestyle coverage. People frequently link to pay articles at WSJ and FT, as the community of interest overlaps so much with the subscriber community. Why do you need to go to NYT.com, never mind pay for an article?
The product at the biz papers and the Guardian is much different from what people in the US will run into in their basic media consumption. NYT is hampered by the wide syndication of its articles and imitation of articles in regional/local press without syndication agreements (either in general or for the specific article).
So much of the traffic for the NYT is magazine-like, as their lifestyle/real estate coverage is what doesn't get spread around and is their only real unique coverage. Combine this with a highly questionable product mix covered by Times Select, and you get a much lower incentive to pay for online content and a much lower attention to the supposed main information product.
Personally, I prefer even the lifestyle coverage in the FT and WSJ, as the authors feel no need to put a class war spin or mock outrage into the article, as the Times does. This despite the fact that the Times' lifestyle coverage overlaps with its reader demo to a dramatically lower extent than that of WSJ/FT, and the business press tends to focus on items that are actually more affordable and mass than the NYT does. WSJ/FT have lots of wine coverage, high quality suits, business travel items focused on frequent fliers, interesting public golf, and business restaurants, while NYT focuses on 4 stars that you can't get into, couture furs, and Manhattan townhouse sales in the $10-30M range (see this TNR article: http://tinyurl.com/o8ecg).
NYT needs to listen to Jarvis as much as The Guardian is doing if it wants to be a news source rather than simply a lifestyle pr0n magazine in broadsheet drag. The per eyeball value of their audience is very low, and I think that the total value is much less than that of CNN's given its rather incoherent story mix and mismatched demographics.
Posted by: annextraitor | May 2, 2006 3:32:19 PM
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