Greatest challenges for online publishers

Tomasz Józefacki, the President of OPA Europe, and Vice President and Head of Internet Division in Agora (Poland) spoke today during the INMA/OPA Outlook 2010 conference about the greatest challenges for online publishers in Europe and how they are dealt with at Poland’s leading media group Agora. Highlights include insights and case studies on multimedia, local markets, and monetisation from the company whose fast-growing online brands reach today nearly half of all Polish internet users.Tomasz Józefacki showed main challenges that newsmedia companies are facing nowadays. Those are:

1. Aggregators. How to protect the content and compete with aggregators? There is a strong emergence of online aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo News. But there are also other aggregators that arise in classifieds. They are not only following the path of the content, but also the path of advertising.
2. Free content. How to make money in the free economy?
3. How to make use of video? How to take advantage of growing popularity of online video?
4. Great tools are appearing around. How to compete with online services like Facebook or Twitter for users’ time and attention?
5. How to deal with our users’ deepening advertising blindness? Aggressive advertising lead to ad blindness, so users learn how to skip over the advertisements.
6. How to give users the ads of products, services, they really search for?
7. How to counter media fragmentation? Media fragmentation means more competition.
8. How to effectively deal with calls for regulation?

Agora is an extremely successful newsmedia company in Poland. It has 298 million euro in revenues as of 2008. They exist on different platforms: print, radio, outdoor and of course the internet. They have almost 10 million users, and 58% total online reach in Poland. According to Tomasz Józefacki, this is how Agora deals with the challenges mentioned above:

1. Gazeta.pl is the main portal, aggregating all sites of Agora (around 70). Gazeta.pl focuses on being on top in different categories. They already are number 1 in Recruitment, number 2 in real estate, and in communities, number 3 in sports, and news and opinion. They are the largest online multimedia content producer on the Polish internet, having 70+ online brands under Gazeta.pl umbrella.
2. Free content. Agora is introducing paid content services and applications, and experimenting with e-commerce.
3. Agora does not own any tv station. They produce original news, documentary, entertainment video content and online tv series. For online only. 75% of people in Poland watch online videos at least once a month.
4. They host the second largest online community in Poland. 100 million posts on forums, 143 thousand blogs. It’s not necessary social network, but building community is important.
5. Agora integrates the ads with some none-journalistic content, and events.
6. Agora builds quality focused advertising nnetworks with other publishers. They cooperate with different companies: Glossy Media (for women targetting) or AdTaily (bloggers targetting).
7. Agora is well known for its filling the niches strategy, and efforts to expand the traditional printed brands. The latest one is wyborcza.biz built from the business content of Gazeta Wyborcza.
8. Agora strongly cooperates with local organizations and OPA Europe to promote quality standards and self regulation.

Tomasz Józefacki concluded his speech with a statement that digital is not an easy market place, but newsmedia publishers surely know that challenges are on both sides: print and online.

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