Newspaper Digital Editions - future or futile?

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content |

Following on from the Roy Greenslade post on newspaper Digital Editions - “Is PDF an acronym for Pretty Damn Futile?”

Digital Editions are indeed an easy leap for old word print editors / execs to make - amazing that they are still going for it with such enthusiasm really.  Half an hour of research would tell them that it simply isn’t going to meet their objectives - if  those objectives include significant subscription or ad revenues.

It ticks the “digital” box, but in reality doesn’t really do much else in terms of value for the regular user.  Any demand there is comes from those that need to keep a record of how the paper actually looked when it was published - ad agencies, media monitoring companies and there also tends to be a small market for certain types of reader who are out of circulation area.  Even if they were available for free most users would never use them - they will go to the newspaper web site or use Google or Google News to find current or older articles. 

Last time I reviewed uptake of digital editions among newspaper titles (to be honest it was some time ago now) it varied between 0.2% and 1% of actual newspaper circulation - at this rate it was always going to be a struggle to get revenue to justify the cost of production.  Even the NYT who invested in their digital edition provider - NewsStand - and were therefore more incentivised than most to make it work, could only make it to the higher end of this range. It could be that uptake has changed for these services - but I doubt it.  Anyone got any stats on this other than the recent report analysis on Norwegian titles?

One area that does seems to work a bit better is specialist publications and magazines where readers like to hold on to copies for reference purposes and build their own archive. 

As more newspapers digitise their historical material there will at least be some justification for the cost of production as the process of turning the newspaper into a Digital Edition can also populate a Digital Archive - allowing users to search from the first edition of the newspaper to the most recent from a single user interface. 

Even this justification will be short-lived as the goal will be to eventually populate the Digital Archive directly from the newspaper / web site production system - The Guardian and Observer already do this for their Digital Editions.

This is quite old but good overview of the key suppliers and issues from J.D. Lassica in OJR from June 2004 - “Are Digital Newspaper Editions More Than Smoke and Mirrors?“

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  1. Newspaper digital editions or electronic editions « News and thoughts on Internet and Small Town Newspapers June 28, 2007 10:44 am

    […] Newspaper Digital Editions - future or futile? by Alistair Brown  […]

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