The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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Striking a balance in an evolving media market

By Gordon Young, Editor

June 22, 2012 | 3 min read

The Online Media Awards took place in the Emirates Stadium last night.

Organised by The Drum, it gave a fascinating insight into the frantically evolving media market.

The event may only be in its second year, but it has already highlighted a number of trends, not least of all in terms of how fast the sector is growing in influence and scale; the event itself for example saw entries increase by 100 per cent.

But it also demonstrated how domestic UK media owners are increasingly seeing the world as their oyster. Perhaps underlining how impotent national Governments might be in regulating this industry in the future, many media owners no longer see geographic boundaries as a restriction on their ambition.

Prime examples are the Mail Online and the Guardian. The former is now the largest website of its type thanks to an expanding US base, and the latter is making serious inroads by pursing a similar strategy.

Online may not deliver the same profit per reader as traditional newspapers. But it can deliver volume. And they must hope the increased scale a global strategy offers will ultimately make up for a decline in domestic newspaper sales.

Of course this brings us to the other trend which is evident – the growing debate on how best to monetise the web explored by Online Media Awards chairman Noel Young. The Guardian and the Mail Online both currently believe in a free model – build audience and the revenue should follow. Meanwhile others most notably The Times believe that since news is their primary product, then some form of paywall is the most appropriate way forward. My instinct is that simply transferring traditional business models to a digital environment is doomed.

The model which will prevail is likely to be built around an ability to attract a specific audience to a site and then sell specialised products when they get there. And these products could range from anything to information, data, consumer products, events and even newspaper subscriptions. But I suspect the real value of certain types of editorial – such as breaking news – will be its ability to drive traffic as opposed to direct revenue.

Another feature of this new digital age is that it is no respecter of age, seniority or heritage. Take the Huffington Post UK for example. Only one year into the game and it is already ahead of institutions such as mirror.co.uk, metro.co.uk and snapping at the heels of the thesun.co.uk.

Performances like that underline just how much pressure traditional media owners are under. As well as building short term revenue, they must also ensure they maintain long term influence in order to survive. And that will mean making sure they get the balance between a high readership base and a paid-for readership base absolutely right.

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