While the Tories produce yet another vague manifesto pledge to deliver “media sustainability” in the digital era, newspapers are having to fend for themselves. And nobody fends harder on the Conservative side of the street than the Daily Mail, with some notable half-year results. Not just 15 million-plus online browsers a day now, but nearly 20 million finding it on mobile.
More significantly, digital revenue – ads, because Mail Online is free – rose from £44m in the first half of 2016 to £60m this time round. Expect notable full-year figures crowning too many efforts to burst the £100m barrier. After a long, grisly period where digital ads didn’t grow or provide better value, is this a magic moment of hope?
The Mail’s city editor, Alex Brummer, certainly thinks so. Notably independent – he was a long-time city editor of the Guardian and writes for the New Statesman – Brummer hails “the remarkable job” of the FT, Guardian and web-only Indy, as well as the Mail, in “colonising online news” and finding “success in the US, where there is still a lack of genuinely national media outlets and where local journalism has been decimated by the digital revolution”.
Alex looks at the Mail’s 19% rise in digital revenues (substantially offsetting the drop in print ads) and reckons that UK papers competing in a global arena ought to be more valued by the City for innovation and market worth. (Contrast and compare $18bn raised by the Wall Street float of the embryo Snap empire.)
It’s a solid point. Silicon Valley doesn’t make the news weather. Indeed – see Facebook and Google – you can see only storms ahead. But steady on: and don’t hail Mrs May’s sustainability ambitions too soon.
The difficulty, over a decade since it launched in its current form, is that Mail Online still doesn’t make a profit. Growth figures are great, the dominance of the celebrity middle market almost complete, but the costs of building the enterprise – a separate newsroom in London processing then supplanting Mail print news, plus a network of news and picture hubs across the States – are also high.
Factor in pay for over 500 journalists, plus sales and technical staff. That’s a mountain of money to climb before you hit the sunlit uplands, and it exposes one crucial difference as news organisations set out to conquer the globe.
Some – say the New York Times and Washington Post – are marketing their American news and views with only a few local twists, because readers everywhere want to know what the core Post or Times says. But others – the Mail, the FT, the Guardian, BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, for starters – produce more editions, which means more staff, more offices, more costs. Having one claim on world attention is easy: if you need many, the problems grow in proportion.
Sustainability, in short, is not yet a two-way street. The battalions of Britain can make signal advances, and hope for more. But big, booming America, all muscle and status, will still strive to shout them down.
