Public Radio’s Marketplace Faces Familiar Digital Challenges
Important Details: What do you do if you have one of the most successful and fastest growing business news programs?
You worry about the digital future, just like newspaper and magazine publishers.
American Public Media’s Marketplace is a success story, and a lesson in business news journalism. It has grown its audience and has been able to keep its staff of almost 60 people fully employed, while nipping and tucking on travel and training expenses.
Still, for Marketplace executive producer JJ Yore coming up with ways to manage the opportunities and threats of the onrushing digital future is a chief priority as he thinks about the nature of his product in 2010.
For one, his audience is moving beyond the traditional business. In his case, the traditional business is broadcast radio. Marketplace produces 2132 programs a year. That number includes seven daily Marketplace Morning segments of eight minutes each or so, daily segments of Marketplace and weekly segments of the Marketplace Money personal finance show. That’s his old world, as the staff of producers, hosts, reporters and engineers rush to produce and perfect each program.
Broadcast is still the number one way customers listen to Marketplace. Its national weekly audience (for the daily close-of-market program) is 5,348,300, up 10% year over year.
The second most popular way that listeners tune in is the podcast. The flagship afternoon Marketplace program has seen a 263% increase — to 554,270 downloads per week — year-over-year. Those numbers are undoubtedly greatly aided by the iTunes Apps revolution, as listening to news programs on portable devices has accelerated.
As podcasts grow in importance, they hold a new challenge. Pick up more broadcast listeners, and American Public Media, the non-profit that owns Marketplace, pays no more in distribution costs. Pick up new podcast customers, and there’s an incremental bandwidth charge. Add those charges to the fact that APM has yet to come up with a significant podcast sponsorship model to add incremental revenue, and you see a developing issue.
The third most popular access point is online, with increases in unique vistiors (16%) and page views (3%) annually. Check out the Marketplace site, and you see that is basically the radio programs re-purposed, with several recently added features like Scratchpad, a blog, the Decoder, an explainer, and Whiteboard, a money-oriented video. Marketplace is a place for its listeners to place-shift and get a little more depth, but it’s not a business news destination. That’s a potential opportunity for growth.
Marketplace turned 20 earlier this year. In those two decades, it has honed a journalism philosophy.
“We’re somewhat irreverent, more human-oriented. Our target audience is composed of smart, educated business novices who realize they need to understand business and finance if they want to control their own destinies,” says Yore. That philosophy has built an attractive audience, with 58% of listeners having a household income of more that $75,000 and more than 75% holding college degrees. The audience skews slightly male, 54% to 46%.
In turn, those demographics help make sponsorship — underwriting in public radio lingo — the number one revenue source for Marketplace, which runs a $14 million annual budget. Sponsorship contributes about half of the revenues, with carriage fees paid by more than 300 local public radio stations the second-largest source, followed by foundation grants. Sponsors include Fannie Mae, Thrivent, Reuters, The Economist, Vanguard, Ford, General Mills, Sotheby’s and The American Public Transportation Association.
Implications: Outsell believes the Marketplace experience holds good learnings for print news publishers. While local newspapers have cut greatly back on business news coverage and related staff (see Outsell Market Report, Publishers Re-Target Local Business News Opportunity, June 23, 2008), Marketplace has been able to maintain its staff, build its product and act as a more valuable news source through the deep recession. It actually added a small amount of staff to deepen its reporting and analysis earlier this year.
Significantly, Marketplace has developed a keen sense of its audience, keener than many local newspapers, and that shows in its audience growth and stickiness. In addition, it has smartly used freelancers to contribute more than half of its report; another key ingredient that many daily news publishers have failed to grasp in building a new, more cost-effective journalism business model.
Just as CondeNast’s Portfolio has folded, heralding the difficulty of launching and maintaining a costly, legacy product, we see a blossoming of newer business journalism. Marketplace is the big public radio player here, but it has recently been joined by National Public Radio’s Planet Money website and podcast and Slate’s “The Big Money” website and podcast. All of these ventures make good use of smaller resources and innovative distribution to magnify their reach.
As we focus on the global business news battles among Dow Jones, the Financial Times, New York Times, CNBC and the Fox Business Network, among other players, it’s well to keep tabs on such enterprises as Marketplace, from which the older dogs can learn new tricks.