Foo camp 2012 (expressed mathematically)

Foo enjoyment = (W_W+ L_I)/L_y + (N_C*N_P)/S + B^W + D_L*D_M+ C*N_t

Where:

W_w = Werewolves you slew

L_I = Innocent people you lynched

L_y = Times you were lynched

N_C = Number of conversations you had

N_P = Number of new people you met

S = Hours of sleep you got

B = Beer drunk

W = Whiskey drunk

D_L = Debate length

D_M = Obvious drunkeness of debate team (as measured in milliSlacks)

C = Average offensiveness of language (as measured in megaQuaints)

N_t = number of offensive words spoken

A paywall for all of NZ?

Slovakia and Slovenia are both trying something interesting – nationwide paywalls covering all the major publications in each country.

The prices are modest – 3 or 5 euros a month – and while the paywall spokesman in the article talks the usual guff about re-educating consumers so they expect to pay for content (like they’re puppies needing to be house-trained or something), it raises an interesting question – Could NZ’s news sites band together and hoist up their own paywall?

Like Slovakia and Slovenia, NZ is a country set apart from its neighbours, with local news from only a handful of major media outlets. They all have small populations too (Slovenia has 2 million people, Slovakia 5.4 million, and NZ 4 million).

If all NZ major news sites banded together, would people pay $10 a month to read their content?

That’s not the right question, of course. The question is, would enough people pay to offset the lost ad revenue from the people that won’t? The answer to that depends on the publisher and content, but as other paywall experiments have shown, if you only keep some content locked up (or locked up after a certain number of visits) your ad revenues don’t have to be hit much at all.

There’s probably about 1 million people in NZ looking at online news every day (that’s a rough estimate based on the numbers I’ve seen lately). If 5% pay $10 each month, that’s $6m a year in revenue, shared between all the publishers. Not huge numbers, but nothing to sneeze at. Though I should point out that the Slovak paywall only brought in 40,000 euros in its first month (that’s only about NZ$1m annually) – so my estimates may be a bit high.

By major news sites, I mean Fairfax (owner of Stuff.co.nz and smaller sites), APN (owner of NZHerald and smaller sites), TVNZ, and maybe TV3 and RadioNZ. (the usual disclaimer applies – I work for Fairfax)

And if a lot of the more generic popular content – eg Justin Bieber stories, world news, car crashes – is left outside the paywall, ad revenue won’t get hit much at all. All the paywall revenue would be additive.

Of course, Slovakia and Slovenia have one major advantage that NZ lacks – No one outside those countries is producing much content in Slovakian or Slovenian.

In NZ, where everyone speaks something like standard, it’s much easier to get content from overseas to entertain, educate and inform you.

Paywalls also face the HuffPo problem – a quick summary of an article is good enough for many people, which cuts substantially into the proportion of your readership that would pay.

But a key feature of the Slovak and Slovene paywalls is publishers get to choose what stays inside and what is freely available. That means content like breaking news, and commodity content like overseas news, can still be given freely. So can social shares, as the New York Times did with its paywall.

I expect that in NZ “news” as such – that is, the happenings on the day – would large stay outside the paywall, especially national news. Insight, analysis, blogs, local news, and features – the kind of content that’s hard to summarize anyway – gets locked inside. Publishers would summarize their own premium content, using short blurbs and news stories to link to paywalled content that offered more.

There are risks of course. Paywalls encourage cheaters, especially if they’re hard paywalls (meaning no free visits or content). It’s easy to pull a HuffPo and start summarising the competition. But by using metered paywalls or selective paywalls, this risk can be minimised. Also, NZ simply is too small and too varied for an aggregator to thrive.

A bigger risk is from sites that don’t rely on content to draw their audiences – like MSN and Yahoo. These sites are already summarisers, except where they license content from APN or Fairfax.

But the content they’d choose to summarise is exactly the kind of mass-interest content that would likely be kept free anyway. They’d have to summarise the other kind of content, which is much more difficult, because it’s a long tail problem – lots of articles published each day with only a few thousand readers each. That takes a lot of staff, which costs more money for a much smaller increase in page views, which is why summarisers won’t do it.

For opinion/analysis pieces, summarising these is possible but it’s also a marketing tool for bringing readers to the competition – since the original site would have all the aggregators’ other stories for free anyway. We’re not talking HuffPo vs NYT. It’d be more like HuffPo UK vs Daily Mail.

So a metered or selective nationwide paywall for major NZ news sites seems completely doable to me. What’s your take?

Christmas (expressed mathematically)

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy. And maths:

Happy Christmas to all!

Major news events’ effect on web traffic

Here’s an early Christmas presents for my fellow analytics nerds.

In my last post I talked about how the goal of online media during a big story is to draw in lots of new readers, then convert as many as possible into regular readers.

By hacking around with the year’s data, we can get a rough idea of this in New Zealand. I’ll just warn before we go on, this is completely unscientific, and while it can give you a sense of what’s going on, it’s not the kind of data you can draw strong conclusions off. That’ especially true for the small sites, where traffic can swing quite a lot from small events. Correlation does not equal causation.

With that warning out of the way, here’s Average Daily Unique Browers, NZ only, which gives us a good estimate of how many people are checking a site each day. All data publicly available from Nielsen-NetRatings Market Intelligence, and the usual caveat – I work for Fairfax Media, which owns Stuff.co.nz.

First, here’s the traffic before, during and after the Feb quake (week starting Feb 21). Watch in particular the % change after and % change during.

2011 – the year in online news traffic

2011 is drawing to a close and boy howdy, what a smacking year for New Zealand’s online media.

First off, there was the Christchurch earthquake. Then there were tsunamis, more earthquakes, crazy weather, Rugby World Cup, and, of course, the tragic, tragic tale of Kim Kardashian’s marriage breaking up.

Commercially, this kind of “big news” matters less in the short-term for online media than for print newspapers. That’s because when people buy more newspapers, it’s a direct boost to the bottom line. But getting a flood of visitors to a website isn’t nearly as valuable, because you’re usually serving up cheap, low quality ad impressions on page views above what you’ve forecast (because you can’t sell inventory to advertisers ahead of time that you don’t know you’ll have).

But long term, these events are actually more important for online media. Because the barrier to switching  your news source is so low (no subscription to cancel, and rival sites are just a click away), a news website that has strong coverage during a major event stands a good chance of winning new regular readers, and winning regular readers off its rivals. In the end, it’s these regular readers that matter.

So that’s the goal of any news site during a major news events – get lots of new readers, and convert them into coming back.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how NZ’s news websites did during 2011. To recap, here are the weeks of major news events.

Week starting	Major event
Feb 21	Christchurch earthquake
March 7	Japan tsunami
May 2	Osama bin Laden killed, Auckland tornado
June 13	Big Chch aftershock
Aug 15	Crazy weather
Sept 12	Rugby World Cup, ScarJo nude pics
Oct 31	Kim Kardashian files for divorce
Nov 21	Auckland chopper crash, election

And here’s the traffic of the major news websites, starting from after the Christmas break last year. This is domestic average daily UBs (ADUBs), as always from Nielsen-NetRatings Market Intelligence, with the usual disclaimer that I work for Fairfax Media, the owner of Stuff.co.nz.

ADUBs are a good measure of how many regular readers a site has.

Online business news in NZ

People who read business news tend to have more money and want to do things with that money, compared to people who tend to be more interested in this or this or this. For this reason, business is one of the most sought after audiences for advertisers. So let’s have a look at how NZ’s business news sites are doing.

One of the only online paywalls in New Zealand is in the business niche, at the National Business Review (NBR). Though a lot of content – 80% – sits outside the paywall. It charges about $180 a year for “premium” online content, with a half-price subscription if you stump up $475 a year for a print subscription too.

Running since mid-2009, it’s a solid freemium model, offering a large chunk of its page views outside the paywall so it can keep earning good ad revenue, while still trying to develop an online subscription base to offset any declines in its print business. The paid content is occasionally promoted on the homepage but more commonly I see it in the Paid section.

Any treatment of online business traffic has to take the NBR’s paywall into account, because a page view just isn’t worth as much to the NBR as it is to a free news site like the NZHerald.co.nz or Stuff.co.nz (full disclosure – I work for Fairfax, owner of Stuff.co.nz). A page view is much more a conversion game to the NBR than it is for Stuff. The NBR’s goal is much more to get you to subscribe, rather than simply see more page views. Plus it doesn’t need as many page views if it’s monetising them more effectively.

Alright then, how is the NBR doing since it put up its rather porous payfence? Not as stink as you might think. Hit me with some sweet sweet numbers.

Rugby World Cup web traffic

It was the largest sporting event ever in New Zealand. How did the country’s media sites do? Let’s take a meander through the metrics.

The short answer is “not as well as you’d think”. While the sites’ sport sections did quite well, sites overall didn’t really budge much from normal.

You can see that in these category report numbers showing average daily UBs  (all metrics from Nielsen NetRatings, NZ traffic only – and the usual disclaimer, I work for Fairfax NZ, publisher of the Stuff.co.nz website).

	Newspapers & Magazines	Publisher Home Pages	Sport
Average RWC week traffic	545,942	1,053,571	353,585
Change from previous average	24,654	7,989	106,403
% change from previous average	4.7%	0.8%	43.0%

Wow. The Sport category went bloomers, nearly doubling in traffic. But homepage traffic? About the same as before (Stuff and NZHerald tended to perform the best here, recording low but significant percent increases). And traffic to news sites overall only budged a bit.

So it looks like news sites as a whole didn’t actually win many more regular readers as a result of the RWC, unlike in other major news events. But their regular readers were reading a ton more sport stories.

Average Daily UBs have their sins, like any metric. But in general they’re a good indicator of regular audience. And if you run the same numbers looking instead at UBs, PIs, Sessions, UB Freq and Average Session Duration, you see exactly the same trend – negligible change on the category as a whole, but a big lift for Sport.

Let’s look at the major media sites now, still average daily UBs.