Cox Newspapers see audience aggregation as key strategy (Leon Levitt)
Leon Levitt - Vice President Digital Media, Cox Newspapers
New Media Conference & Expo 2008 - Bucharest (live blogging from the event)
Some highlights:
- Newspaper circulation is dropping.
- Cox Newspapers have been profitable in the digital space since 2004/2005.
- Cox wants to aggregate audiences in print and online. This is the key piece of their strategy.
- Thus, if you look at the combined print and digital audience, audiences are actually growing.
- The question we ask ourselves: how do we win in the face of the prevalent "lifestyle wind changes"?
== Discretionary time is precious and competition is for people's time.
== People get information from various sources.
== Barriers to local market protection are diminishing.
- It's all about the engagement of local audiences.
- And the need to re-engage youth and non-"newsies".
- And aligning our online and print business models.
- We learned we had to publish to digital first. This puts the news cycle in context, when the print edition comes out.
- One of our earlier mistakes was to take old print rules and try to apply them to new media. It is a new media, and therefore new rules apply.
- Our journalism is still a core part of our strategy, as well as any content that we can use to "sell around".
- We have adapted to how the media day has changed for our users: in the morning we are more news focussed, in the afternoon, it's more about user serendipity in finding content.
- Money: the key to our long term success is in the display revenue and targeted ad serving.
- We need to learn to manage our ad revenue in a smarter way, a bit like the airline model: if we're sold out, then we are probably selling inventory too cheaply.
- We need to assess ourselves against the digital marketplace, not the newspaper marketplace.
- "Not all pageviews are created equal", for example, slideshows are counted as pageviews, but they are not necessarily of the same value.
- We need to ensure that one-time visitors actually stay longer and give them more content and linking that engages them to stay.
- Need to be conscious of "The clutter issue" - where pages are too cluttered. This comes up in every usability site review, for any news site.
- Our sales strategy, done the right way is the key to success, with appropriate methods, tracking and management.
* Context and disclaimer: reports from the conference were captured in real-time. If anything is well expressed, it is to the credit of the presenter. If anything is not completely clear or could have been put better, it is probably down to me. I didn't try to capture everything, just some of the key soundbites. Anything that is my comment, will be qualified as such, under "DD:"