It’s time News UK came clean on its numbers

As newsbrands experiment with new business models and witness real success, there is one heavyweight owner of top-notch newsbrands which continues to sit on its hands. It’s now time for News UK to nail its colours to the mast with real user and readership numbers says Raymond Snoddy.

When the concept of “newsbrands” was unveiled to a waiting world by an equally strange organisation called Newsworks, more than a few eyebrows were raised.

You could acknowledge the cleverness but such products of marketing brain storming sessions would surely never catch on.

They’re called newspapers, damn it: Have been for hundreds of years.

That was last year and now you can actually hear newspaper executives talking about newsbrands without any trace of self-consciousness or the adding of any metaphorical quotation marks.

The reason that what appears to be at first an ugly neologism is starting to bite is that it is a useful and productive concept.

Stick to the term newspapers and you are saddled with perceptions of decline and failure – exaggerated perceptions certainly, but dangerously self-fulfilling all the same.

Refuse to let the term newsbrands stick in your craw and you are instantly transported to the sunny uplands of growth, promise and hope. How newsbrands should be financed is a larger and darker issue.

But right now sit back and bathe yourself in the online ABC figures showing online unique users going through the roof.

A new global traffic record of 134 million was set in July by MailOnline with an average of 8.82 million a day. The Mirror Digital group also set a record level of traffic with daily users up 76.8 per cent year-on-year.

In its last hurrah before disappearing behind its paywall, the Sun registered 31.8 million unique browsers in July with 1.9 million a day. It will be a very long time – if ever – before the Sun sees such figures again.

Cue the NRS PADD figures which combine normal print readership with digital figures and the figures are positively stellar. The Daily Telegraph’s combined readership increased by 56 per cent; the Guardian’s was up by 136 per cent and the Independent achieved an astonishing 81 per cent rise.

Phew What A Scorcher, as an old-fashioned paper headline writer might have put it.

Amid the industry back-slapping there is one heavyweight owner of top notch newsbrands which continues to sit on its hands. The silence from News UK, the renamed News International, is deafening.

Three years after the Times and the Sunday Times donned the veil we have little idea what their digital – and therefore their combined newsbrand numbers – actually are.

Eighteen months ago the Times said it had 110,000 digital paying customers with 45,000 accessing Times content via their iPads. A year ago in an interview, the then Times editor James Harding lifted the veil a little by claiming that total paid sales of the Times in all forms was up year-on-year by 3 per cent.

Since then, silence – other than to say that the News UK titles continue to show overall growth.

The official line is that talks are continuing on revealing the online figures which are diligently collected every month by the ABC but which cannot be released without permission.

The story goes that talks are continuing and it’s only a matter of process. For the sake of the industry, and above News UK itself, it really is time to sort out this process. The absence of real numbers could lead to speculation that is more negative than the reality.

It simply looks shifty and News UK chief executive Mike Darcey, who is an uncompromising believer in charging for expensively assembled content, should nail his colours to the mast with real numbers.

Mediatel’s Future of National Newspaper conference later this month would be a good venue to set out newsbrand numbers for at least the Times and the Sunday Times. The Sun should reasonably be given a period of grace to come to terms with its change of life.

So far it can be only be a case of two Hurrahs for the wonderful combined impact of those newsbrands which have come clean on their numbers.

The bottom lines are much more opaque. Darcey of News UK – the former chief operating officer of BSkyB, which has never been shy about charging for its content – is in effect challenging the newspaper industry to think again about its business models.

In particular he believes that newspapers, or more precisely newsbrands, can have a long and prosperous future but only if they recant on their vows to give almost everything away for free.

Whatever you think of the Darcey analysis at least there is a very healthy attitude of experimentation in the air.

In the UK you can see it with the launch of News UK’s Premiership goals and highlights for online and mobile. Regular purchasers of the Sun newspaper can collect vouchers and get the service for free.

Video is likely to be part of the future of newsbrands as Viscount Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust, acknowledged at the first Newsworks conference earlier this year.

The experiments in the US – already under way – are likely to be more dramatic.

At the New York Times, chief executive Mark Thompson, fresh from digital and even more profound debacles at the BBC, is chasing money-raising schemes such as sponsored cruises to Europe and “need to know” tiers of special packages.

The New York Times has been busy hiring video staff.

Commentator Michael Wolff has warned that seeing the business as a catalogue of different products designed to sell to new audiences has caused rifts between journalist and executive.

Meanwhile the paper’s publisher Arthur Sulzberger has declared himself “platform neutral”, although it is not clear whether the term newsbrands has made it cross the Atlantic yet.

Even more experiments are likely at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post.

This week he promised in an interview to provide a period of lengthy financial support for the paper’s management as it embarked on a programme of experiment.

They will be pursuing the Holy Grail for all newspapers – finding “a profitable formula for delivering the news.”

Bezos went on to ask a really tough question to which there is no easy answer. You pour energy, sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories and then they are summarised for nothing on websites.

“How do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can’t, it’s really difficult to put the right resources behind it,” the Amazon founder said rather ominously.

At least newsbrands, hard numbers, video goals and being more judicious with the freebees are all steps in the right direction.