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Independent eyes acquisitions as it marks fourth year of profit despite Covid-19
The Independent has achieved a fourth year in profit since going digital-only, and is also looking at making its first acquisitions. The publisher has grown overall revenue by 29% year-on-year, and advertising revenue 19%, despite challenging market conditions. They also now employ 115 journalists; up from 101 at the end of September.
Of particular interest in this story is Chairman John Paton’s reasons for why The Independent has struggled less with the decline of advertising than some other publishers. The key seems to be investment:
“We’ve invested in the programmatic teams, we’ve invested in data management platforms, we’ve invested in our data skills and our data team and using all of that to monetise the audience we get with that quality content.”
We like seeing investment in talent and technology pay off, especially during such tough conditions.
French antitrust investigators say Google breached its orders on talks with news publishers
The first round may be over in the Duopoly’s battle with Australia as Facebook has agreed to reverse its news ban in exchange for amendments to the media bargaining code. But in Europe, things are kicking off again. French antitrust investigators have accused Google of breaching the state competition authority’s orders on how to conduct negotiations with news publishers over copyright, after the tech giant agreed to pay $76 million to 121 French publishers.
How Covid-19 influenced publishing revenue trends: “The industry is actually in better shape than many others”
WNIP rounds up key learnings from the latest mediafutures Europe report published by Wessenden Marketing. It examines how key business trends were accelerated and what lies ahead. Subscriptions are a big focus, but so too are new advertising opportunities, overseas revenue and the resilience of print.
Facebook vs publishers: What is really going on? And why is it bad?
Danish media analyst Thomas Baekdal has written a comprehensive two-part series on the bigger perspective around the Facebook/Google/Australia battle. The first part explains the link economy, advertising on the internet and user intent. The second part then explores when the media SHOULD be paid. As you’d expect from Thomas, these are long and detailed pieces, but it’s one of the most comprehensive and clear explanations of what’s going on and why it matters.
