Archive | August, 2010

Posted by: Matt Shanahan In an interview with Robert Andrews of paidContent last week, I reflected on findings from our research on publishing business models. One observation in particular piqued Robert’s interest. From client engagements as well as reading 10Q’s, S1’s, conference presentations, and press releases, it appears a $10 ARPU is a turning point for most digital-only business models into viability. As I am always on the hunt for publically-available information to crunch, Ken Doctor’s recent blog posting on the Texas Tribune prompted me to dig deeper into the their business model. From a quick search through Google, a case example of the Texas Tribune was found in the summary report for “Seeking Sustainability: Nonprofit News Roundtable.” In the case example, […]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan In my previous post, I was shocked by the revenue per reader for People Magazine ($408 revenue/visitor/year). That revenue production is fantastic. With the recent announcement of the Demand Media S1 filing, I thought it would be interesting to see where their model would have to get in order to produce the same revenue at their rate of $1.60 revenue/visitor/year. The answer is over 918M uniques (3.6M*408/1.6).

Posted by: Matt Shanahan The publisher’s challenge of preserving at least the profit per reader in the changing media landscape is daunting, so it is interesting to watch particular strategies. Take People Magazine as an example. People Magazine in 2009 had a $408 Revenue Per Reader in their print business. It came from nearly $1B in ad sales, $284M in one-time sales, and $235M in subscriptions with an average weekly distribution of 3.6M readers. This week, People Magazine announced that it print subscribers will receive bundled access to their digital edition on iPads. The bundling of their print and digital offerings will assist in migrating $1.48B revenue stream from one channel to another one. People Magazine made what looks like […]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan Any publisher faces price limits on what they can charge advertisers for impressions and/or visitors for access. Each of these revenue streams is also limited by the maximum potential size of their audience. Part of my investigation into RPV, is to understand how RPV affects business decisions. Between their investor fact sheet and press releases, TheStreet.com provides good insight into their business model. The content provides information about uniques, breakdown of revenue, expenses, and more. So it seemed perfect to delve into the question about revenue per visitor (RPV) versus number of unique visitors (uniques) to achieve profitability. As of the close of Q2 2010, the 6-month revenue for TheStreet.com was $28.1M generated from an audience of […]