E-business Briefing: September 2004

Last week the The Sun newspaper (for those of you in the US, think supermarket tabloid meets New York Post, with a picture of a topless model on page three), decided to scale back the content available on its site, in order to improve the paper's falling circulation.

A quintessentially brutal part of British culture, if a highly finessed product, The Sun is famous for headlines like "Stick it up your Junta" (Falklands War headline), "Freddy Star ate my Hamster" and "It's the Sun wot won it" (Conservative election victory). Ok, so you had to be there...

Managers at the newspaper conducted a survey which discovered the paper was losing about 90,000 readers a day to its website, which offers the same content as the paper but for free.

Perhaps alone among the online newspapers in the UK, The Sun is one of the few where online has not had a particularly positive effect on print circulation. Notably the Guardian newspaper, the UK's biggest online at around a 100 million page impressions a month, has been enthusiastic about online publishing. Its web title has helped reinforce the brand's standing amongst readers, attracted an international audience and even made readers more likely to purchase the paper when offline. But that's in the quality market.

It seems that in the pure entertainment field where The Sun largely operates, online content of the nature that appears in the paper - celebrity stories, kiss and tells etc - is too perishable to make people bother to buy the paper as well. Most of the editorial will now vanish, along with the famous Page Three site, which gets phenomenal traffic for too a obvious reason to bother elaborating on here.

Online "popular" tabloids in the UK do not appear to be feeling the pinch across the board however. The Daily Mirror, The Sun's bitter rival, has made no such move so far. But then, its web site is not as comprehensive as the Sun's and it features many more promotional devices not specific to the paper. It is also not as lavishly funded as The Sun online.

In addition, The Mirror has not been stuffy about producing only-online content such as the iBlog section, a slightly painful rip-off of the blogging phenomenon, re-jigged for a non-blogging audience, which looks at technology and gadgets. Fine - it works.

So what hope is there for the online "popular" newspaper?

Perhaps the answer lies in the dim and distant past.

Back in the day (1997), Express Newspapers, owners of the The Daily Star popular tabloid, had a thriving new media department. They developed the concept of Megastar.co.uk, a site which extended the paper's appeal almost into the realms of the sassier monthly Lads Mags like Loaded and FHM.

One of their biggest draws was the Friday afternoon online chat session with a page three model, which attracted normally non-Star readers like titillated businessmen. These FT-reading chaps would never have been caught dead reading The Star, but here they were, happily hitting the site to read the latest throwaway celeb news, catch up on the party antics of their favourite footballers, and, of course, look at the page three models.

The site thus enabled Express Newspapers, a highly conservative organisation then and now, to attract an entirely new audience of young, professional men with cash to spare.

What happened? Porn publisher Richard Desmond bought the Express, closed the department and sold Megastar in early 2001 to the Entertainment and Sports Agency Group, based in Lancashire. Megastar.co.uk continues to this day and now has no relationship with the Daily Star newspaper or Express Newspapers.

My point? Online tabloid papers need to do something different to what they do in print, whether that be a place to buy the products pushed in the paper or for live events where you can "virtually" meet the celebs they write about.

Or instead, just shovel all the content online and pay the price in circulation.

Mike Butcher

Mike@mbites.com

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- Internet travel firm Ebookers said it was in talks with over its possible sale.

- High street retailer Woolworths plans to launch a digital download service that complements its existing in-store music selection.

- glue London has been awarded the Grand Prix winner in a new online advertising awards set up by MSN.

- MSN.co.uk has partnered with financial website Moneyextra to provide a new financial services comparison tool.

- Publishing firm Hollinger International may sell or merge assets at its new-media business

- Two fifths of all UK Internet users now use broadband, lured by falling prices for high-speed internet access, according to new research from leading agency NOP World.

- Shazam Entertainment launched a new mobile music service, in partnership with Mean Fiddler, the UK live music organiser.

- Ofcom published its approach to new voice services, including Voice over Broadband (VoB) phone services, which deliver calls over the internet rather than via traditional telephone networks.

- A US judge ruled that Google and Overture could be sued for selling keyword adverts based on trademarked words.

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4. Affiliate Marketing - Roundtable Output [August 2004]
5. Online PR - Roundtable Output [July 2004]
6. Extending Entertainment Brands into the Digital Space
7. Usability and Accessibility: Roundtable Output
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10. Web Accessibility Guide [April 2004]
11. Search Engine Marketing Buyer's Guide [March 2004]

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