Nieman Journalism Lab |
| MinnPost ends 2011 in the black Posted: 26 Jan 2012 03:00 PM PST
MinnPost, the nonprofit regional news site in Minnesota, ended 2011 in the black for a second year in a row, according to its annual report published today. Its year-end surplus — a bit more than $21,000 — isn’t exactly retire-to-the-Caymans money. But in a sector where so many nonprofit news outlets are struggling to find sustainability, the four-year-old operation is demonstrating that it can support itself. MinnPost makes money from public radio-style memberships, advertising, grants, and events, including its annual MinnRoast. CEO Joel Kramer told me he is most pleased with the growth of individual and corporate support, which now represents a majority of the revenue pie, about $815,000. Grants made up about a fifth. Altogether, MinnPost raised $1.5 million. Kramer said he expects foundation money to shrink to 10 percent of revenue, but that’s a projection, not a goal. “We’re happy to get all the foundation support we can get, but our long-term goal from the time we launched was to become steadily less dependent on foundations,” Kramer said. Foundation money is more volatile; the money usually comes with strings attached and an expiration date. And as MinnPost enters its fifth year in operation, it’s no longer really a startup. “Many of them are more excited about you if they see you as asking for seed money, startup money, early-stage development money,” he said. MinnPost in 2011 also opened up the option for donors to auto-renew their membership. (Inertia is a powerful force for donor retention!) About 700 of MinnPost’s 3,300 donors are now sustaining members, he said. Individual gifts start at as little as $10 per year and go as high as $25,000 a year; the typical donor gives $100 to $150 per year, he said.
As far as how many people used the site versus how many supported it, Kramer said there are a few ways to slice the numbers. “It’s not meaningful to make the denominator unique visitors,” he said, because that number includes hundreds of thousands of people who land on MinnPost from a search or a link but are “not really interested in MinnPost.” Kramer’s preferred denominator is people who visit MinnPost at least twice per month, which is roughly 55,000. That means 6 percent of MinnPost users are contributing members. Kramer wants to see that rise to 10 percent. For comparison’s sake, the site most similar to MinnPost is probably Voice of San Diego, which had its struggles in 2011. The organization laid off four people at the end of last year, saying it raised $1.1 million but spent $1.2 million. VOSD projects its revenue will fall in 2012. And as I wrote Tuesday, the more government-and-policy-focused Texas Tribune raised $3.71 million but ended 2011 in the red. (It expects to be break-even or better by year’s end.) Traffic to MinnPost.com grew, too. Pageviews rose 20 percent over the year before. The number Kramer prefers, though, is visits from Minnesotans: 3.7 million in 2011, versus 2.8 million the year before. “Our advertisers and sponsors, what they’re interested in is communicating with Minnesotans. Also, our donor base overwhelmingly comes from Minnesota,” Kramer said. “So we actually believe, strategically, that a visit by a Minnesotan, a pageview from a Minnesotan, is worth far more than us than a visit or a pageview from elsewhere.” Those figures come from Google Analytics and publicly available Quantcast data, he said. The brief and very brief presidential campaigns of Rep. Michele Bachmann and Gov. Tim Pawlenty might have given MinnPost a boost. One goal for 2012: Improve the stickiness of the site, Kramer said. (The average MinnPost reader views two pages per visit.) MinnPost is moving from a proprietary content-management to Drupal, an open-source CMS, which will free up developers and designers to make user-facing improvements more quickly. |
| The newsonomics of global media imperative Posted: 26 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST
Let’s elevate, for a moment. Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet. The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global. The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning. As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw:
This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles. For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”:
Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers. Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.) It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market. There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies. You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues. News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live (“The newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature. A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions. |
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