YULI AHMADA: Nieman Journalism Lab

Kamis, 29 Agustus 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

What kinds of emails are Gmail’s new tabbed inbox hurting?

Posted: 28 Aug 2013 11:59 AM PDT

The essential Danny Sullivan takes a look at what kinds of emails Gmail’s new inbox is disadvantaging.

For the non-Gmail users among you: Google recently split what had been one inbox into five: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. The idea is your random Facebook notifications should end up in social, quasi-spam from your Banana Republic should end up in Promotions, and the like. It’s an interesting idea, but some preliminary data seems to show that emails shuffled out of Primary end up getting read less.

And that’s an issue for news organizations, for whom email newsletters and breaking news alerts can be an important vector for traffic — and whose emails are often ending up in Promotions or Updates these days.

Mailchimp also had a post on this, and asked the important question:

A lot of people have asked how they can get their email delivered to the Primary tab. In response, I've heard several suggestions claiming to have found a solution, but none of those panned out.

I've tested something like fifty configurations of headers, content, and authentication and I've come to one conclusion. The best way to get into the Primary tab is to have your subscribers put you there.

Unfortunately, making that ask isn’t as easy as one might like.

Raising prices and trimming circulation seems to be working for now in the U.K., too

Posted: 28 Aug 2013 09:57 AM PDT

In The Guardian, Roy Greenslade notes that Newsquest newspapers (that’s the British arm of Gannett) has hiked newsstand prices and seen a drop in circulation:

One of the key reasons for that drop was Newsquest’s cover price rise strategy. In September last year, it increased the price from 45p to 65p on weekdays and from 60p to 85p on a Saturday.

At the time, the Argus was selling almost 21,000 a day. Over the first half of this year, the average sale fell to 16,622. And it is still falling. In June, the total was 15,787. And I understand that in July it slipped below the 15,000 mark…

Of course, despite the decreasing sales, Newsquest will have generated more profits. And so pleased is the company with its price rise initiative that, despite the catastrophic effect on sales, it has now imposed increases on four more dailies — the Worcester News, Oxford Mail, Swindon Advertiser and South Wales Argus. They went up in early July from 45p to 65p. Expect bad news with the next ABC release next year.

This is a version of the same set of moves that have been popular among U.S. dailies: hike up single-copy prices, hike up home delivery prices even more, and hope that the math ends up with you making more money on net from fewer subscribers. It’s a bet that the remaining readers of print newspapers (a) are quite devoted to the format at this point and (b) can afford to pay higher prices. The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, and others have played that game.

That said, purposefully paring down your customer base (and aligning it even more completely with an older audience) has obvious downsides as a long-term strategy, even as it juices the circulation revenue bottom line for now. Greenslade takes a dim view of it:

Newsquest editors and journalists be warned. The company isn’t trying to sell newspapers. It is trying to make as much money as possible before it kills off the golden goose.