Online omzet dagbladen nog marginaal

Het is inmiddels duidelijk dat traditionele dagbladuitgevers steeds meer inkomsten halen uit de online aktiviteiten. Uit het jaarlijkse onderzoek van de World Association of Newspapers blijkt echter dat slechts een beperkt aantal uitgevers meer dan 10 procent van hun inkomsten uit online aktiviteiten halen. Buiten de VS en Scandinavische landen is dit aandeel in de meeste gevallen zelfs minder dan 5 procent. Zelf heb ik al eens een schatting gemaakt voor Wegener (2,1 procent) en Telegraaf (4,7 procent).

Een paar highlights uit het onderzoeksrapport:

• In the U.S., online revenue now accounts for an average of 5.5 percent of a newspaper’s

  total ad revenue and is on track to hit 10 percent by 2008-2009.

• In Canada, the average is about 3.5 percent for metro dailies, but only half that for community papers.
• In the UK, the most successful online operations owned for the most part by midcirculation

  “quality” national groups are reporting that 10 percent to 2 percent of their ad revenue is now coming from online, while regional papers (even those part of large companies) and lower-circulation nationals are mostly tracing around 5 percent.

• In other countries, the patterns are less clear, except for one trend that seems universal: Higher circulation papers with the least competition boast the highest ratio of online to print advertising.
• There are some major success stories out there: Trinity Mirror more than doubled its online revenues, and the operating profit margin hit 32 percent; Fairfax in Australia now gets 9 percent of its revenue from online, and online EBITDA was 60 percent in fiscal 2006, accounting for 13.7 percent of group profits.
• On average, classifieds account for more than 75 percent of online ad revenues in the U.S. and Canada, but the patterns are different in countries such as the UK that have a large number of national newspapers (higher proportion of national) and also for groups that own mostly community papers (mostly classiffeds).
• Recruitment remains the dominant online classiffeds vertical.

Op de vraag naar de inkomsten werden diverse online bronnen genoemd:

• Paid search (all over the map, from “negligible” to over 30 percent);
• Gross revenue from upsells (also all over the map, from very low to extremely high in the case of smaller community/regional papers where online strategy was basically built on print/online bundling);
• Mobile/PDA revenue (not much though some respondents identiffed this as a key growth area).

Op de vraag wat de belangrijkste ontwikkelingen zijn voor de komende 12-24 maanden kwamen de volgende antwoorden:

• More demand for multimedia ad platforms;
• More locally focused advertising solutions;
• More competition;
• Rapid product development;
• Fragmentation of the industry;
• Faster move to multi-channel delivery, namely mobile, video, print and online packaging, and other offerings;
• Google’s move into display and classiffed markets.

Bron:

Benchmarking Newspapers Online Revenues 2007