Blogs may help newspapers grow revenues
October 2, 2008 by marek.miller
John Wilpers of Innovation Media Consulting spoke today about how good quality bloggers could help newspapers grow revenues.
John Wilpers
According to John Wilper’s speech during the INMA Outlook 2009 conference today, the statement that newspapers are the sole source of information, is no longer true. Nobody can deny the fact that the audience is leaving newspapers (2,37% drop in overall circulation of the newspapers in the European Union last year). The worst part is that readership of young readers is still declining.
The preference of sources of information is very interesting – 46% of young people choose Internet as their primary source of information whilst 3% point at newspapers. Youngsters do not bother with printed newspapers because they are:
- wired
- time-crunched
- creative
- looking for connections
Those are features they cannot find in the printed newspaper. Blogs could be the help for newspapers. Not blogs written by the editors however but blogs created by readers themselves.
The statistics considering the popularity of blogs are impressive. Since the fist blog ever that was created by Justin Hall in 1994, the amount of blogs grew tremendously. By the year 2003 there were 200,000 bloggers. In 2006 there were 35 millions. A year later the amount of blogs doubled. Today there are 113 millions of blogs in the world, not including China.
Also the interest in blogs should be interesting to newspapers. While 184 million people in the world admit they have started a blog, there are 346 million blog readers. This means that 77% of Internet users read blogs. Newspapers should not ignore such force, especially such cheap force (money is the sixth reason for people to start blogging).
Geographically speaking, 48% of blog readers came from North America, 27% from Europe, and 13% from Asia. It does not necessarily mean that all bloggers create a worthy content. But even if 10% of them are specialists in their areas, it still is a huge amount of writers.
According to John Wilpers, blogs on the website show:
- connection with young readers advertisers want
- community involvement and loyalty
- interactivity
The problems with outside blogs might see the editors themselves. They often consider blogs as threat because of bloggers’ low credibility, lack of professionalism and nefarious ulterior motives (what means that it could be seen as the company’s secret way to cut costs). These arguments did not worry the speaker, as he was sure that bloggers would not replace the editors.
Do not forget to read Grzegorz Piechota’s comprehensive interview with John Wilpers.
For more pictures from the INMA Outlook 2009 please visit its Flickr site. Do not forget to check the official conference blog written by our Austrian friends.
Tagged: blogs, conference, INMA, newspaper, Outlook 2009
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