This is why your newspaper is dying

Thanks for linking to my little comic strip. I've never been to this site before but I'm really impressed with the intelligent discussion going on here, I'll definitely be back.

The main point I set out to make is it's not just about driving traffic to sell ads but something more near and dear to my heart, user experience. If you put pageviews above building loyalty among your base what you're doing is selling out long term reader loyalty for short term gain. The New York times is a great example of a site that has chosen to adopt the web as its own medium and because of that its paywall is actually working. (or at least the paper as a whole is profitable, maybe someone can provide me with more details about the paywall's profitability). The NYTimes has built a unique and recognizable brand built on quality.

All the tactics I outlined in the comic point to one thing: They care more about page views than the actual human reading the site. It's true most people will not pay for news because it's a commodity but I think there is a large number of people who would pay for news, myself included.

This is true in any industry. Look at Starbucks, look at Apple. They are selling product for 4 times more than their competitors yet people buy them. Why? It's all about the user's experience, they are buying more than just something that works.

In they end your customers will treat you the way you treat them. If you're going for cheap traffic it means you care more about churning out content than building brand loyalty and you will always be chasing short term traffic instead of a long term community that be loyal to your paper. These guys are hurting online because they have failed to build long term loyalty which their print counterparts have (or had).

-Brad Colbow

The Times of London is behind a paywall and doing everything right, but still can't pay the bills. Producing quality news content is expensive and people seem largely unwilling to pay for it.

The newspapers that seem to be hanging on all appear to be cost-cutting like mad, moving from reportage to opinion and chasing the lowest common denominator.

The most successful news website in the UK (and second in the world behind the NYT) is The Daily Mail. Their web content is completely different to their print content. Offline, they're a populist rag specialising in paranoid scare stories about gypsies, muslims and cancer. Online, they rely heavily on linkbaity celebrity gossip and pictures of Pippa Middleton's arse. They've worked out that what drives traffic is different to what sells papers. "Quality" is the least important aspect of a news operation, at least in terms of profit.

While the comic raises some nice points (mainly cheap shots), the final line: "I would happily pay for news that doesn't treat me like an imbecile" (or words to that effect) sounds like hogwash to me.

The NYTimes, Economist, and New Yorker (for example) all provide excellent news through all kinds of channels, and in many cases with most, if not all, of the points addressed. All the crap the cartoonist complains about is purely driven by the need of newspapers to replace lost revenue, and there's no evidence that most readers are willing to pay.

It's not just subscriber revenue. As others have pointed out, for most newspapers subscriptions were/are a minority of revenue.

The fall of newspapers is actually a perfect storm: classifieds (something like 40% of revenues, historically) have been gutted by sites like craigslist, and CPM rates for print have been on the decline because the internet has essentially infinite inventory. In the web world, we think a few dollars' CPM is pretty decent, but the newspaper industry is built around the assumption of much higher rates (i.e. in the tens or hundreds of dollars per thousand "impressions"). You can't build a strong local newspaper with paid reporters, investigative journalism, etc., on a $2 CPM. The market is too small.

You left out another element of the storm: the bread and butter newspaper ad clients were: real estate, finance, auto sales, and national retailers. Guess which industries have cut back drastically on marketing during the recession.