The report draws on case studies of companies including Schibsted, Gannett, Tribune, Media News Group, the New York Times, Asahi Shimbun, RBS Group and others.
It says that the newspapers profiled in the report have found ways to reach new audiences, increase market penetration and add new revenues, and they’ve done so in a variety of ways.
These include selling advertising across a company’s multiple media assets, increasing the value proposition of online advertising, increasing their understanding of the value of its online audience across the company, exploring paid-for content possibilities on-line, expanding the advertising base by targeting local advertisers through new media channels and changing the metric from circulation to print-web readership.
The report also considers the key questions being asked by newspaper companies around the globe as they develop their multiple media offerings such as which new media channels present a solid investment opportunity, which are a gamble and which have proven to be ’fools gold’?
It also covers the questions on which sales channels will produce the highest return on investment, what sales tactics work best in each new channel and what pricing works for these new products.
“Some new revenue strategies have clearly emerged from the plethora of possibilities in today’s media world,” says the report, the first in an annual series of six SFN Strategy Reports available to WAN members.
“Companies in North America, South America, Australia, Northern Europe and Asia have successfully integrated print, web and sometimes other forms of revenue, creating diversified revenue streams that hedge against downturns in traditional revenue makers like print advertising,” the report says.
The Paris-based WAN represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 73 national newspaper associations, newspapers and newspaper executives in 102 countries, 11 news agencies and nine regional and world-wide press groups.
The SFN project has five strategic business partners, Swiss-based PubliGroupe, MAN Roland, international paper producer UPM-Kymmene, Norwegian telecommunications giant Telenor, and Samsung Electronics.
