News media lags behind TV, music and gaming digital subscriptions, says Deloitte
Only a small portion of digital media subscribers are currently paying for news media, showing that the industry has a lot to learn from the booming growth of the streaming video on demand (SVOD) sector in particular.
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Deloitte’s TMT predictions took a look at the state of digital media subscriptions to learn what UK adults are actually paying for across the SVOD, music, gaming and news sectors.
The report found that in 2018, half of UK adults will have at least two media subscriptions on average, but by 2020 this will increase to four. The fragmentation of the linear TV market into numerous SVOD services and the news media’s pursuit of sustainable subscription services are just two of the trends that will drive this.
The report estimates that there are 26 million subscribers in the UK. Globally there will be 580m subscriptions, these will be split across the sectors as follows. 375m will be in SVOD, 150m in music, 35m in online gaming and only 20m in news.
The price of news media subscriptions – in comparison to SVOD and music offerings, was blamed for the lower uptake.
"This is a seemingly modest total relative to SVOD television and movie services. However, individual services, often costing tens of dollars per month, and there are also many tens of millions more subscribers to printed newspapers and magazines," it said,
"We expect news providers to focus increasingly on generating revenue from subscriptions, typically as a complement to advertising, given the challenges they have encountered during years of reliance on ad revenue alone."
This drive has been linked to publishers' attempts to market the quality of their news offering, particularly in the face of fake news allegations from the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump.
The media subscription offering is particularly diverse, with Business Insider Intelligence, CNN's tiered packages and Conde Nast's subscription gift boxes cited as some of the ways publishers are distinguishing themselves.