Circulation study: Digital up, print down

Fascination study, with some breathtaking numbers, out from UT-Austin.

Journalism professor there took a look at circulation, both digital and print, at 20 metro papers and, LORDY!

There's some success buried in there, most notably the Boston Globe and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but it is mostly depressing.

For example, the most swinging-dick paper of the 80s and 90s I'm familiar with was the Miami Herald. Name-brand columnists, huge staff, deep bench and bureaus all around the world.

In the third quarter of 2020, the Herald had 23,306 digital subscribers. Okay, that seems not great but hardly shabby when you look deeper and see that number is double what it was in 2019.

Now, lets look at print subscriptions.

28,829

That's down from 33,896 in 2019.

There's only three papers -- LA Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday -- with print circulations over 100,000.

And since 2019, those 20 papers have lost 347,241 print subscribers but gained 321,738 digital subscriptions.

One paper has digital subscriptions over 200,000 in the Globe with 229,027, and the Star-Tribune and Buffalo News are both 100,000.

The point of the study though, was on average, it takes six digital subscribers to match the circulation revenue generated from one print subscription. And never mind the difference in advertising revenue, where print ad money makes digital look like a rounding error.

The Impact of Covid-19 on 20 U.S. Newspapers’ Print and Digital Circulation | Iris Chyi

 

That is an interesting post, to be sure.

But the last graf is really the key -- what, still, is really the only thing that matters: that darn monetizing issue, again...

 

The Globe and Strib are locally owned.

Once again proving that chains will suck every drop of marrow out of those bones and that there is no longterm plan.

I remember talk of McClatchy's digital subscription numbers being dismal. You'd think with the way the Herald used to (still does?) cover Latin America, there would be a demand there.

We should also look at this.

What this says is that a lot of these places are not charging enough for their content. The Boston Globe charges $30 per month for a digital subscription. They've managed to get more than 200,000 subscribers. I hear lots of chatter about how it's a dysfunctional newsroom, but they're apparently doing something right.

I was visiting relatives in the north of Ireland about 10 years ago. One lives right on the water at the edge of the local golf course. It's a beautiful course, right on the Irish Sea, an old castle as the clubhouse, etc.

They charged reasonable fees, and they wondered why they couldn't get American tourists, who always love coming to Ireland to golf, up there.

So they raised their rates. And tourists started hitting it up regularly because it now had the allure of being an "upscale" joint.

I got a digital subscription to my local daily the other week for $1 for six months. $1 total. Will I renew? Probably not, as Gatehouse gutted the place. But if you have that little confidence about the worth of your product, you're wasting your time — which goes to the point above about not caring about the quality of the product and just trying to cash in as much as possible until the joint is dead.

 

Same paper is now sold in Dollar Tree for $1. I think the cover price is $2. That was a first and I get what they're trying to do, but it was really jarring when I saw it.

 

I find the Buffalo News digital subscription a little hard to believe.

 

And Facebook just brought in $26.1 billion in revenue for the first three months of 2021, with 2.85 billion monthly active users. That's up 48 percent year over year. And most of that is selling data.

 

Just bought mine last week, only $29.99 for an entire year.

The WNY diaspora has to number in the hundreds of thousands and they're all still Bills fans.

 

The line about trading "analog dollars to digital dimes" was so spot-on. But on the bright side, still good all these places have a circulation this high. Seemed kind of unlikely 10 years ago, I would imagine.

 

The digital transformation at Gannett appears to be a complete disaster.

Phoenix saw digital only circulation rise to about 23,000, up 62%. The Phoenix metropolitan area has about 1,,800,000 households so the household penetration rate is now above one percent.

Indianapolis and Cincinnati both had digital only circulation around 10,000 and had small declines in electronic circulation. Milwaukee and Des Moines had double digit circulation declines. Louisville was up one percent and now has 5,710 subscribers.

Most of these papers also have digital only penetration rates of one or two percent. But when I eyeball print circulation it seems to be generally running about 5-7% of households. So Gannett is hitting less than 10% of households in thee markets.

Generally if an advertiser buys print they also get electronic advertising thrown in, because the incremental cost to the publisher of putting the electronic ad in the on-line product is close to zero. So when an advertiser cancels his order for print ads because of declining circulation the electronic ads are also lost to the newspaper.

And I wonder how long a paper can last if it is seeing double digit print circulation declines and are not seeing increases in electronic circulation. Audiences are just getting to small.

 

As someone with a history in Milwaukee, this report is incredibly depressing. At one time the paper had one of the deepest market penetrations in the country. Gannett has played a big part in its decline.
I still get the Sunday print edition (the JS WILL NOT DELIVER to my home on weekdays anymore -- not that I would pay almost $900/yr for the product). Yesterday's front page was filled with stories that appeared online during the prior week -- and nothing at all about the Green Bay casino shooting that had occurred the night before. A newspaper without news. Wife wants to cancel the Sunday, and I think it's time. It simply has no fresh content.

 

That is depressing...