Mirror Football Places Value Before Price
Important Details: Amid the swirl of talk about paid news content, Trinity Mirror has zagged while others are zigging. The company, by revenue the third largest UK and 12th largest news publisher in the world (see our report, News Publishers & Providers: 2008 Final Market Size and Share Report, July 27, 2009), has turned its attention to creating trend-setting niche sites.
Among the first launched, on Aug. 6, is Mirror Football. Next up is an entertainment gossip site — 3am.co.uk — building on a popular gossip column.
Mirror Football is an eye-catching site, aimed to feed the passions of football (soccer in the U.S.) fans. Among its features:
- Start with its tagline: “The MirrorFootball.co.uk instruction manual. No assembly required.” The idea: we’ve brought it all together in one place for you. Enjoy.
- A match centre in the business, so fans can follow every minute of every game.
- Club-centered news, opinion and gossip.
- Lots of video.
- Lots of opinion from established voices and at least one new addition.
- “You The Manager” fantasy football.
- Perhaps what distinguishes the site most is how much it put it archives front and center. It makes them a centerpiece, noting that they draw on material back to 1903, and interweaves those archives on its current site. Those archives are led by photos — those moments sports fans have burned in their memories — offering the collection of football pics alongside the match reports “as they appeared in The Daily and Sunday Mirror at the time”.
“The commercial model is diversified and built around several revenue streams,” David Black, group director of Digital Publishing for Trinity Mirror plc, told Outsell. “For advertisers, Mirror Football represents a unique platform – the opportunity to reach a hugely engaged and receptive audience, and to advertise within the most exclusive football image archive in the world.” Sly Bailey, CEO of Trinity Mirror, recently explained the company’s strategy behind Mirror Football — and the other niche verticals planned — and took on the question of “paid content.”
“MirrorFootball.co.uk [is] taking us in to an area where we do have unique content in the form of our archive, and developing an engaged audience who are passionate about that, that is more definable than a general news audience … thinking over time about how we might develop audience and what the pay model might be over time. “The important thing for us is to develop the brand with the right content that engages a passionate audience, and therefore to have a diversified model that isn’t just about advertising. We think that is the next stage, and whether over time that gives you the opportunity to think about whether there are areas you can charge for, that’s an open discussion – but you have to create that content overall in order to have that option…Rather than concern ourselves with what the payment mechanism might be … why would a consumer pay for general news content when they can continue to get that from the BBC for free? If you’re publishing in areas of high-value or well-differentiated content, there are potential opportunities to think about that (pay walls)”.
Implications: Outsell likes the immodesty of the site’s aspirations: “The launch of MirrorFootball.co.uk – the world’s greatest football website”.
The launch couldn’t come at a better time, as most of the talk in the industry has veered from away from how to make better products towards how to get online customers to pay for what’s been free. In the U.S., the Newspaper Association of America’s paid content task has focused its efforts on which pay models enabled by which start-ups may work. Last week, Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, the world’s largest news company, energized new attention when he said, “We intend to charge for our news websites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp. to increase our revenues from all our content.”
Stated as an intention, a direction, the words seemed to emerge from Delphi and speed around the world at the new-fangled digital speed. Would in fact the highly opinionated and diverse news world fall into line behind the aging oracle?
Outsell believes it is far less likely that we’ll see tall pay walls quickly erected in front of the digital news. Instead, we’ll see lots of experiments — Journalism Online, the would-be Paypal of news commerce, claims that will be able to enable 16 different payment mechanisms when it launches this fall. See Insights, Journalism Online, LLC Seeks to Re-Establish Paid News Content, April 17, 2009.
At the core of the paid vs. free content debate, of course, is value. Value to the customer, and that simple fact has been overshadowed in publishers’ urgent rush to find sustainable business models in the depths of The Great Recession. When the haze of panic lifts a bit, publishers would do well to consider Trinity Mirror’s football product.
Look at the ingredients. Mirror Football targets an easy-understandable customer. It brings together a wealth of content assets, from the whiz-bang ones of 2009 multimedia to the wonder of 1903 still photography. Most importantly, it lays the foundation for revenue of all kinds. The Trinity Mirror earnings reports names a number of them, calling it: “a diversified commercial model built around gaming, interactive competitions ie. fantasy football, content and section sponsorship, e-tailing of merchandise from archive football photos, and display ads”.
Outsell believes that’s a foundation for growth, and one that all news companies, large and small, should be focusing on as a hint of recovery beckons.