Friday, February 03, 2006

Media_Boss Change

The big boss of our paper will be changed shortly. Mark Clifford, will go to South China Morning Post, the rival of the Standard, as the group editor-in-chief. I wonder if it is always the rule for most people working in the Standard. Standard first, and then bigger one SCMP.

Many reporters in our newspaper left for SCMP in the past day, after SCMP reporter left for news wires or PR companies. Newspaper, to me, has already been a cliche business, where it could just live with the last breath.

But newspaper is still a big part of the media which you could see the real readership. I suggested my boss to open a Chinese news website to attract mainland Chinese who live in Hong Kong that day. Then he asked how it could make money even if the site got the readership. Good questions. Online media couldn't only live supporting by the advertisement, I always believe, but then what could they depend on?

3 comments:

Lutz_W said...

Ok, let me throw in a business-model here:

Such a news-website could sell "time-saving" as a premium content. This could take two shapes, both would be PDFs to be accessed after paying.
First, sell in-depth "article collections". For example there is an important issue about some financial stuff/whatever going on. Such a premium-collection could contain all other reports connected to this issue from previous weeks/months, giving readers a better overview. Sure, they could just search around in the Standard's online-archives -- now people normally don't have the time to do that, but they are still quiet interested in whole complexes of topics. And you could throw in some additional "roundup" that other (non-paying) readers don't get to see.
The second thing: people could save time by getting the hot news even before they are released in print or on the internet. You could even offer some kind of alert-system, so subscribers would get those information send out as emails/whatever. This could be quite useful for business-folks.

Those methods seem to work pretty fine for two of the top-selling newspapers over here in Germany.

And online advertisement does not just have to be paid banners. The two afore-mentioned newspapers e.g. publish advertorials, featuring premium services which they offer together with partners from other trades (mainly management-stuff) -- and I guess they get some kind of commission.

:) <- Lutz

Amy Gu said...

hoho, thanks for the suggestion, Lutz, I should forward it to my editor. So how much the top two Germany newspaper have earned so far on that kind of services? I am still a little doube on how online newspaper makes money though I believed that will be the trend.

Lutz_W said...

Umm, dunno... they didn't gave me access to their bank-accounts. :)))
But I read an article about their situation some 2 or 3 years ago. According to this report, the whole "Spiegel Group" is earning roughly 650Mio EUR per year, with those two websites having a share of roughly 1 percent...

So, that would be around 6 Mio. EUR (or HK$ 60 Mio.) per year for those two websites...

:) <- Lutz