Print media face up to online threats

Marc Sands, marketing director of the UK's Guardian newspaper urged publishers to turn threat into opportunity and develop new revenue streams to compensate for losses to purely online rivals.

"You have a captive audience who come to see you every day and the task is to engage them in new and different ways," he said. "The potential exists to create as many as 25 revenue streams where before there was only one."

Sands cited complementary on-line/print strategies and use of SMS and mobile technology as examples of how newspapers could respond to the online challenge.

"You must try everything - forget you are a newspaper and try different things. You don't know what works until you try it."

The workshop on 'Classified migrating online - threats and opportunities to printed newspapers' heard that online advertising was predicted to take 10 per cent of the classified market by 2008.

"That's according to one specific study, and we suspect it could be a lot more," said Eamonn Byrne, business director of the World Association of Newspapers, pointing out that internet advertising revenues grew by 32 per cent last year while total market growth was only five per cent.

WAN's own survey covering 40 countries showed that online now accounts for 7.5 per cent of all classified revenue, with recruitment alone up 27 per cent in 2005.

Although circulations were up by three per cent, total revenues by three percent, and total advertising by five percent, the contribution from classifieds fell by 10 per cent.

"The trend may be slow but it's unmistakable, and newspapers cannot sit back and ignore the problem or they will find that it's overtaken them,"

said Byrne.

"If you've been used to carrying 25 pages of job advertising at twice the display rate, and that suddenly drops to 10 pages, you must find new niches and develop new revenue streams."