Related post: At Almost 400,000 Digital Subscribers, Inside the New York Times Pay Strategy, Year 2

• 390,000 digital subscribers overall.
• Growth rate of 20% fourth quarter over third quarter.

Those are the public numbers. We’re left to extrapolate the dollars. My extrapolation is that the run-rate for the Times’ new digital revenue is about $86 million a year. We take the 390,000 digital subscriber number and assign an average revenue per digital customer of $221 a year. At its four-week (or 13X a year) billing rate, that’s a little less than $17 every four weeks. Full all-access (tablet + smartphone + online) costs $35 each period, tablet access $20, smartphone, $15. So let’s take the differing price points, rolling intro offers (99 cents for the first month), special deals and cancellations into account. Let’s believe that it’s the lowest price point digital product (online + smartphone) for $15 each four weeks generates the majority of buys. Let’s then use a $17 average.

That produces $86 million a year, or more than eight times what the Times took in annually from Times Select; time to bury that ghost. If we compare it to some other Times’ yardsticks, it takes on more meaning:

• It’s 12% of the New York Times overall circulation revenue for the year. That puts the annual circulation number in positive territory — up 3% for the year, and a lively 8% for the fourth quarter – reversing the 2010 trend.
• It’s $100 million less (about $186M for New York Times itself) than the amount of digital advertising revenue for the year. So it’s important, but the digital ad number still is more decisive in making up for the print revenue decline. Despite 10% digital ad growth for the News Media group (without About properties), the NYT property still saw a 3% decline in ad revenue for the year. One more way to look at it: the Times took in $22 million less in advertising overall in 2011, so new digital circulation revenue exceeded that decline by 4X.
• It’s 1.1% of the Times’ 33 million U.S. unique visitors, once we take out international buyers. That one percent seems like a tiny number, but it’s 34% of its print circulation. Anyhow, “total unique visitors” are getting to be close to an irrelevant number. Paid readers who also consume a majority or strong plurality of page views are the customers the Times’ care about.
• It’s four times ousted CEO Janet Robinson’s good-bye payout. That’s small consolidation to outraged staffers, dealing with their own 1% issue.
• It’s four times the dividend family members are hoping to see reinstated. The dividend paid out $20.8 million in 2008. Even they need to be kept happy to keep the Times out of public play, there are few new dollars to assuage them.

So, overall, the Times digital circulation seems to be an increasingly important part of the next-gen publishing model, but not an earth-shaking one. I think much of the story — and import — here is behind the scenes. As we look at the mechanics of selling digital access, we see a business model with birthing pangs, and one that may lead to anticipated and unanticipated healthy development. In talking with Paul Smurl, VP of paid products for the Times, this week, I picked up some related datapoints that help us understand what this first year may lead to:

• 70%+ % of the Times’ print subscribers have now “authenticated.” That’s hugely important. Several years ago, the Times began exhorting its print subscribers — through direct mail and e-mail — to sign up for online access to the Times, laying the ground work, intentionally and unintentionally, for the model of All Access that it introduced a year ago. In August, 2010 the Times had only 50% of Times subscribers registered. That didn’t mean that only 50% read the Times online. It meant that a significant portion didn’t read the Times online and that those who did, but didn’t register, didn’t associate much value with their print subscription payment. Why register, when anyone can go to nytimes.com and read for free?

Now, with three-quarters of print subscribers registered, the Times has climbed a major mountain. Paying customers increasingly see value in both print and digital. The Times can begin, as it has to link up print subscriber profiles (address, demographics, buying history, and more) with digital usage (what read on which device when and lots more). So through these initiatives, the Times is moving — as every smart publisher must — toward a single view of its reader customer. That view then informs the Times’ ability to better target advertising and to sell readers more digital and print stuff, like the New York Times Store. (And it’s all about stuff, as George Carlin timelessly reminds us.)

• Look beyond subscription sales. Hearst, Rodale, Conde Nast and other magazine publishers have led the way in producing new ebook specials. The future here — think of mining the NYT database — is game-changing. Smurl says he thinks of it as “SKU management,” a new discipline for a new publisher. Look for the Times to start with specials around events like the Olympics and the Oscars, feeling its way along as it figures out “cover price,” sponsorship and ad potentials.
• Compare old and new world costs of acquisition: It costs a lot for a newspaper to sign up a new subscriber. I’ve heard estimates from $50 to $200 per new customer. The cost of acquiring a digital customer can be as little as near-zero to a small fraction of the print cost. Here, we begin to get into the positives of the digital press shift; picking up new customers costs far less. CFO Jim Follo noted on this morning’s call that costs for the company will not decrease this (the first time in four years), and part of the reason is increased spending on digital marketing. The Times is pouring the limited cash it has in going to digital subs.
• Churn is less with digital than print customers: Skeptics opined that people might sign up, but then flee after sampling the paid digital product. The opposite appears true: Smurl says digital churn is less than print churn. Add together the low cost of digital acquisition and the lower churn, and you have a formula for much digital marketing experimentation in 2012 and beyond. Who is the Times trying targeting to buy? “Like-mindeds,” in Smurl’s parlance, those with curiosity, societal engagement — and education and income to match.
• About 12% of digital buyers live outside the U.S.: That’s a growing number. It’s an indication that the Times is becoming a global news medium. Of course, that’s always been true, in Internet times, but largely meaningless. It’s been hard to sell advertising outside the U.S. (other than the Times-owned International Herald Tribune’s traditional business) and, of course, there was no way to make money from digital readers. Now that’s changed. With only 5% of the world’s population (last week I focused on this upside in “The Newsonomics of the Global Media Imperative“), the Times has huge growth potential beyond its core market. By 2016, I wouldn’t be surprised if 25% of the Times’ digital subscribers — many with no access to print, remember — are non-U.S.
• Exploiting Sunday: It took about 12 seconds for Times’ readers to figure out the new subscription math, when the company when digital-paid last year. When they did the math and saw they could get the four-pound Sunday paper and “all-digital-access” for $60 less than “all-digital-access” by itself, they took the newsprint. Which stabilized Sunday sales, and the Sunday ad base. Then the Times was able to announce a near-historic fact in October: Sunday home delivery subscriptions had actually increased year-over-year, a positive point in an industry used to parsing negatives. Now, Sunday is emerging a key point of strategic planning. Keep the Sunday paper strong for at least several more years — and quite likely longer — and the Times gains a fighting chance to find a print/digital hybrid model to sustain its journalism.

In addition to his day job, Smurl has been busy over the last year talking to newspaper publishers, near and far, about going paid. Dozens of people have filed into the Times to see what they can learn, and apply. In addition to the tricks of the trade, Smurl finds itself offering quasi-spiritual advice. “You can’t be apologetic about charging,” he tells his often down-hearted visitors. “Sometimes it’s as much a motivational session as anything else,” he says. Today’s motivational lesson heard all around the media world is summed up neatly in four words: 390,000 paying digital subscribers.

Let’s elevate, for a moment.

Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet.

The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global.

The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning.

As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw:

• The Financial Times, probably the single best model of print-to-digital transformation success, has announced that its digital business leader, Rob Grimshaw, is leaving Number One Southwark Bridge, astride the Thames, for New York City. Grimshaw is managing director of FT.com, and his business is truly global. The company, founded in 1888, now finds 31 percent of its readers in the Americas and only 23 percent in the U.K. — with another 13 percent now in Asia. For the FT, Grimshaw’s move is logical: Go where your customers are, and to the heart of digital innovation. (Talk to Europeans in the digital business, and they’ll tell you how America-centric, and West Coast-centric, the digital business is, somewhat to their dismay.) For the FT, even with its good number of American consumers, the U.S. is “an emerging market,” a belief held by Reuters as well.
• If you were to name the FT’s most head-to-head competitor (for time, and thus indirectly for money), it would be The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s digital audience is now 30 percent international, and just last week in launched still another international local (in native language) edition, for Germany. The Journal’s crosstown rival, The New York Times, is moving globally as well. Already 12 percent of its paying digital subscribers are international, with the Times applying its pay strategies to its European operation, the International Herald Tribune. Last year, it also launched India Ink, focused on that country’s news and culture, with an on-the-ground team there. Expect the Times to move into China this year.
• Less than a year after launching its first non-U.S. site in Canada, Huffington Post last week added an Italian site, alongside its French one. It continues negotiating with publisher partners in several other western European countries, following up on Arianna’s meet-and-greets there last fall.
• The (second) British invasion of the U.S. continues apace (“The newsonomics of the British invasion,”), as the Guardian (reinvigorated U.S.product), the Independent (using Press+ to sell access to U.S. consumers), the BBC (staffing up editorial and ad pushes) and the Daily Mail, which announced a new U.S. push last year and said last week it is now moving on to India.

This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles.

For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”:

• Google: 54 percent
• Apple: 54 percent
• Facebook: 38 percent
• Amazon: 46 percent

Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers.

Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.)

It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market.

There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies.

You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues.

News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live  (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature.

A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions.

What’s your signature content?

Quick: If somebody buttonholed you in an elevator, a school play, or a bar, and said, “Why should I pay you for that?” — what do you tell them?

Each passing week, it seems we’re further into the age of signature content. That only makes sense: If the death of distance is now old news, if everything is available everywhere at the touch of button or the swipe of a finger, then what makes any news or entertainment brand stand out amid this plague of plenty?

Closed systems — from three or four TV networks to less than a dozen big movie studios to a half-dozen major magazine publishers to geographically dominant newspapers — made signature content less important. Sure, big shows and big names have always driven media to some extent, but now, media without big names or big shows are going to get lost in the ether. Take Hulu’s announcement last week about Hulu Originals. You do have to wonder if Hulu’s fictional 13-episode “Battleground,” about a dysfunctional political campaign, will be bested by the Republican reality show in progress when the show debuts next month. Hulu is also bringing a Morgan Spurlock series for a second run, and probably will feature one other new program. The Hulu announcement joins Netflix’s own foray into signature content. Three years ago, would the thought of Netflix signing up Little Steven to do an original comedy series have crossed anyone’s imagination?

Hulu and Netflix both need to distinguish themselves in the market — not only from each other, but from Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner, among others. They need to buy protection as supposed masses consider cutting the cord on packaged services, Roku-ing and Apple-enabling Internet video onto their living-room screens. In movies and TV, we’re quickly morphing from a world of news and entertainment anywhere — get all of these things, somewhat haphazardly (Comcast Xfinity, for instance) on all of our devices — to one in which consumers ask, “What special do you have for me, in addition to my all access? Yes, All-Access, the cool feature of 2011, will quickly graduate from a wow to an expectation.

Why as consumers should we pay $7.99 (down from an initial $9.99) to Hulu Plus, when the same stuff (kinda sorta) is available through Boxee, or Apple TV, or Netflix, if I can find it? Why am I paying $7.99 a month (apparently the magic price of the moment) to Netflix for a catalog of films that is both voluminous and too often lacking what I want? Consumers are going to be asking that question a lot more.

Publishers, distributors, aggregators, and networks all want more money, and they’ve seen — courtesy of tablets and All-Access — that consumers are now more ready to pay for digital content than ever before.

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars.

News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Let’s be clear. Paid media is paid media, and the original-programming pushes of the video companies have great meaning for news and magazine companies, global to local. For them, the calculus is similar. News and magazine brands can launch new products, though that’s out-of-their-DNA-tough for many. So they’ve focused primarily on sub-brands, many of which are people. These are the faces of news and magazines; many of these have become hot commodities over the last several years (“The Newsonomics of Journalistic Star Power“) as companies try to distinguish themselves — and give readers and viewers a reason to pick them out of the crowd.

How, though, can media companies afford to pay a premium for branded, promotable talent, talent that may open consumers’ pocketbooks? That’s easy: spend less on other content. So we’ve got the rise of user-generated content, obtainable free or cheap, and all kinds of new syndicate action from Demand Media to startup Ebyline (and maybe NewsRight), all trying to make it cheap and easy to get more medium- and higher-quality content more cheaply. What’s old is new again — as a young features editor, I got regular visits from syndicate and wire salesman, ranging from high-quality to the Copley News Service, that sold its stuff by the pound.

Another prominent model no news or magazine company can afford to ignore: The Huffington Post. Back to the early days when Betsy Morgan first teamed up with Arianna, HuffPost has worked this evolving content pyramid. At the top, a few highly paid site faces, many opinionated faces (some paid, most not), and then low-cost aggregation, much of it AP, headlined with the site’s recognizable swagger.

Then, of course, there’s the old standby: staff cutting. We’ve seen lots of staff cutting. In fact, these days, while we see some announcements like Media General’s big Tampa cut, most of the bloodletting is less public, but no less real. If you need to pay more to stars, and ad revenues are still declining, staff cuts of less than premium content (and those that produce it) make economic sense (“The Newsonomics of the New News Cost Pyramid“). It’s the new news math.

These newsonomics of signature content are getting clearer. Netflix is planning to spend 5 percent of its expenses — or $100 million a year — on original, Netflix-defining content. Hulu is spending about a quarter what Netflix’s total, or $500 million in total, on all content licensing this year. We don’t know how much of that is for original content, but observers believe “Battleground” will cost $15-20 million for its 13 episodes. With its other forays, it will probably spend closer to 10 percent of its content budget on original content.

Curiously, many newspaper newsrooms constitute only 10-20 percent of the overall expenses of a daily newspaper company. So we’re starting to see some new, and old, arithmetic play out here.

Simply, Andy Forssell, Hulu’s SVP of content, explained the cost/benefit ratio to Variety: “…having an original scripted series that hasn’t been seen anywhere else yet is considered the best tool for standing out with either advertisers or viewers.”

As usual, we see the bifurcation of the bigger national brands — those with more audience to gain and more money to spend — and local news brands. While many local newspapers have cut to the bone, with too much of the tissue in the form of experienced, name-brand metro and sports columnists cajoled or drummed into “early retirement,” we see increased branding of stars at places like Time, The New York Times, Fox News, and ESPN. The sports network may be the classic business model of our age, and in its anchors and top analysts — many initially lured from daily newspapers — it has shown the way for many years now.

At the Times, consider business editor Larry Ingrassia’s build-up of business columnists, from veterans Gretchen Morgenson and Floyd Norris to new(er)bies Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Stelter, David Carr, Ron Lieber, and David Pogue. And the Times more recently picked up James Stewart from archrival Dow Jones.

At Fox News, Roger Ailes has cannily built the most successful cable news operation not on the interchangeable blondes that provide so much fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but on O’Reilly and Hannity.

At NBC, the news franchise is so built around Brian Williams that his well-received newsmagazine “Rock Center with Brian Williams” is synonymous with its host.

At Time Warner’s CNN and Time, we see the building of a worldly franchise on Fareed Zakaria’s clear-eyed, no-nonsense view of our times.

And then there’s the more local and regional press. Newspapers have long believed that it wasn’t any one or a half-dozen names that sold the paper. They’ve believed the news itself was the star, and the daily information report was the brand. That may be still be true of the Times, the Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and a handful of other national/global news organizations — all of which have substantial, multi-hundred newsrooms that produce branded, unique products. It’s less true of regional and local dailies, many of which still present too much commoditized news in national, business, entertainment, and sports coverage, and have bid goodbye to many faces familiar to readers. Those that have retained familiar faces must do what they can to keep them; all need to recruiting more.

Then they may have a good answer to the question, in one form or another, consumers and advertisers will increasingly ask: What’s your signature content?

The New York Times is slimming down to bulk up. It is no longer a newspaper company, with a strong national newspaper, a Boston cousin in the Globe and regional newspaper interests. It is a global news company whose future is mostly digital, and it will live or die on that adventure. It is a company that now sees 63% of its revenues (last from the third quarter) coming from the Times print and digital operations. Over the past several years, the Times — despite its many trials (selling its flagship building, participating in Carlos Slim usury, before paying back the 14% $250 million loan to the Mexican magnate) — has outperformed financially both the regional group and the Globe .

That only makes sense. Borrowing lessons from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others, the global Times is about scale. You can pay a Times reporter to write a story that can reach some of the Times ‘ 50 million global monthly unique visitors, three-fifths of them in the U.S. Or you can pay a Gainesville or Tuscaloosa reporter a little less to write a story that can reach a hundreth of that total. Do the math, and the future bet is on the company with the big global news brand and the reach.

The regional news companies, important as they are to their communities, have been but a business distraction. The Times has tried to sell them before, pulling back as market conditions forced it to do. Now Halifax Media Group seems set to complete its deal, which we’d have to believe is in final form given its inclusion of the NYTRNG papers on its website (courtesy of Romenesko), now taken down. Halifax is part of new generation of newspaper property buyers, believing they can make a go of these distressed properties, through more consolidation of jobs and other efficiencies. (“Now at Fire Sale Prices, a Few Newspapers…and Maybe More,” Newsonomics, Dec. 2, 2011)

For the Times now, and going forward, the competition is CNN, the BBC, News Corp, ABC, NBC, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Reuters and several others. Who indeed will be among the most trusted names in the (digital) news business?

The spasms of change at the Times come ironically after one of the most relatively successful years for the company. Yes, profits are still tough to come by — a measly $33 million in the last quarter — but the company pulled off a digital pay scheme that has established a modest beachhead. It begins to provide the Times a second digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising. Circulation revenues grew 3.4% for the last period, as the Times’ new digital All-Access push circulation had netted 324,000 “digital” subscribers of one kind or another and enabled the first Sunday home delivery print increase since 2006. It has positioned itself well with apps for emerging tablet and smartphone platforms, moving quickly into the Apple Newsstand, for instance. It is aiming for ubiquity and is in the lead of the newspaper pack, with the Journal nipping and biting along the way.

Yet, ominously, print advertising revenues decreased 10.4 percent and digital advertising revenues decreased 4.5 percent in the last quarter. 2012 looks like another down year, in high single digits. In fact, there’s an array of numbers that offer a quite uneven path to success next year, as I described in the Newsonomics of 2012′s Magic Formula, last week.

Consequently, the company is barely keeping even, and will likely have to accelerate cuts next year to stay profitable. So the plow must be sped. With less than a quarter of its revenues now driven by digital, the Times has to move quicker. It may balance (smartly as its done with its Sunday print/digital pricing) package print and digital, but it is has to grab mind share and market share in all the emerging digital spaces, tablet, smartphone, connected TV and web.

Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world.

The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company, a company now seeing both CEO Robinson and digital head Martin Nisenholtz leaving at the same time, the latter by retirement. Famously balkanized, with numerous power centers, the company has been both innovative and plodding. That’s an odd combo, but one fitting its prudent-above-all news culture. With one distraction removed (and now we wonder about the Boston Globe, its own pay scheme innovation underway, and how long it will remain a Times Company property), the new CEO aces a tough terrain. Given that the company, even post NYTRNG sale, is 90%+ newspaper-based, it suffers in its ability to grow. News Corp, CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg all are part of large, diversified companies that can buffer them from the permanent print ad downturn. As Janet Robinson found, the path forward is an extremely narrow one.

There’s an algorithm out there, we can be sure. It’s got all the components of business success for news-creating companies, each value carefully computed and relational to the others. Yet, approaching 2012, the algorithm hasn’t been found. We have but shreds of numbers, beacons of numerals that portend models, but can’t prove them out.

2011 has been a remarkable year. We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

• The transcendant transformative age of the tablet: The first real replacement device for print swept aside doubters, netbooks, and much conventional wisdom before its second birthday. More than one in 10 American adults owns one, with that number likely to more than double in the next two years. Those owners are readers, spending lots of time with news, single brands, and longer stories.  (“The Newsonomics of the Missing Link“)
• The dawn of digital circulation: Forget “paid content.” Forget “paywalls.” It’s the back-to-the future age of circulation: paying for news and magazines that we depend on, no matter how they are delivered to us. All-Access reinforces our relationship with news and magazine brands we like; ubiquitous access (print, online, tablet, smartphone, soon connected TV) allows us to justify paying for convenience as much as the content itself. Publishers are still experimenting with how to get the paid proposition right, but those that do now have a potent second digital revenue source — and that’s a business advantage digital-only competitors lack.
• Social curation joins editorial curation: We knew that Facebook, in particular, and “social” more generally — including Twitter, LinkedIn, most-emailed lists and our own individual sharings — were changing how we all decided what to read. Now, though, social curation is being built into the best publishing models. Why should each of our own personal quests be a virgin start-from-scratch idea when many consumers/searchers/researchers/shoppers (some of them people like us) have tread there before? So social intelligence, gleaned from mountains of data, is becoming a required part of the companies’ product development and consumer experience. Facebook is in the catbird’s seat as that world develops.

Those three game-changing phenomena offer major drivers of change — but not models. For publishers, the near-term is just getting harder and harder; witness Media General’s major cuts of this week in Tampa (16 percent workforce reduction) and elsewhere. Major cuts are happening this month and into January, as publishers gird for another 5-12 percent decline in ad revenues. Continuing profitability can only be achieved by cutting.

Publishers, publicly or not, are embracing the Digital First mantra of John Paton and Clark Gilbert, the industry’s dynamic duo, who put on another show at BIA/Kelsey this week. Everyone’s into the deconstruction/reconstruction of their companies; some are faster, more adroit, and more public about it.

As that reconstruction moves forward, the new magic formula may seem simple: reconfigure costs and revenues. Yet, working the in-between — most publishers still depend on print for 80 percent of their revenues — is hardly formulaic. Building the new cost structure and the new revenue structure, in tandem, with changing audiences and advertising spending habits, is the fixing-the-moving-car-at-65 MPH scenario publishers face.

With that speeding car in mind, let’s look at some of the numbers that will go into that magic formula, when it’s finally perfected. Mix, match, blend, and extrapolate:

5-15 percent: That’s the percentage of many news sites monthly unique visitors that drive half or more of their pageviews. That’s a jaw-dropping number, and one that news companies are just beginning to acknowledge — privately. Why be quiet about it? Look at the annual reports and quarterly financial disclosures of the public companies; they trumpet uniques and pageviews. Yet in the age of news ubiquity, we’ve reached near-infinity in pageviews and of ad inventory. Is there much meaning left to one random web visitor hitting one random web page, courtesy of Google or Facebook, some time in any given month? Not much. Yet, that’s what most people still point to publicly. Privately, the question is the 5-15 percent. These are your customers. How much will they pay for access? How much more valuable are they to targeting advertisers, given you know much more about their reading and shopping habits? The metric needed: How much does a core customer yield annually, and in a lifetime? Then: How do I most efficiently find and convert more of them?

35 percent: That’s the percentage of print readers who will transition to tablet-only by 2014, believes one prominent news company, which is using that forecast in its business planning. High? Low? What’s your number?

$544 a year: That’s a Newspaper Association of America number (from 2009) for the revenue value per unit of Sunday circulation. What will a tablet customer be worth, combining subscriber and ad value? Get that answer right and you can try to accelerate, or slow down, your readers’ embrace of the tablet.

10-20 percent: That’s how much of national news company traffic now comes from mobile; Facebook already says that 35 percent of its use comes from mobile. Yet, in the U.S., only three percent of digital revenue comes from mobile. That’s a huge gap — the audience is way ahead of the money — and it will be closed over the next several years. In fact, in the age of expected anywhere access, “mobile” will disappear as a category. Big issues for publishers: dividing what kinds of revenues can be wrung from tablet (now lumped into “mobile”) and from the brain extensions in our pockets and pocketbooks, the smartphone.

One billion: That’s one estimate of how many smartphones will be shipped worldwide in 2016. It’s a continuing curve upward from the almost half-billion shipped this year. U.S. smartphone penetration is about a third of cellphone owners; so there is lots of headroom for growth. (Singapore’s the first to cross the 50 percent threshold.) Big challenge for news and magazine companies: coming to terms with how to make money on that little screen: advertising, sponsorship, All-Access subs, and more.

63 million: That’s the number of smart TVs that will be shipped in 2011, up from 43.6 million in 2010. 2016 forecast: 153 million. Smart TV is just the next screen, joining the tablet and the smartphone, providing us ubiquity. When WSJ Live (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) — the company’s model-breaking tablet product launched this fall — it included launch partners Samsung and Vizio, leading smart TV makers. This is the beginning of the next wave.

$2.75: That’s the average ad CPM, or cost-per-thousand rate gotten, at one top 15 news sites. Average rates have been going down and are likely to continue doing so. High-targeted and high-branded (combine the two, and you’ve got the best of both worlds) audiences continue to outpace average sites and average inventory. It’s less and less good to be average.

22 percent: That’s the third-quarter increase in U.S. digital ad revenue. Digital ad growth accelerates as print declines more rapidly; in the U.S., it is now surpassing newspapers to become second only to TV. Worldwide, expect the industry to hit $80 billion this year. Within that ad spend, publishers have access to less than half: Paid search continues to be about half the market, with publishers getting only a tiny slice of it. Display/banner ads — publishers’ strongest suit — account for 23 percent of the total. Video is growing 42 percent a year. Performance-based business models (as opposed to selling impressions) now command 64 percent of the market. (Most data from IAB.) So, in all the areas of growth, news and magazine publishers are weakest. Despite uneven digital ad results reported by newspaper and magazine companies, it’s not that the money isn’t there — they just haven’t transitioned their businesses enough to compete for it.

$13 billion: That’s the amount of retail ad revenue the newspaper industry in the U.S. took in for all of 2010, and it’s down this year. Retail makes up roughly half of all newspaper companies’ ad revenue. In a new, circle-the-wagons attempt to hold on to it, ShopCo, a consortium of eight of the large newspaper companies, is building out a new local shopping portal. FindnSave, tested first by McClatchy, should be up in 250 larger markets by the middle of next year. Will it be good enough and big enough, to satisfy both consumers and merchants? (“The Newsonomics of Google’s retail push“)

25 percent: So if a reader drops print and embraces the tablet, and digital access overall, how much savings can a news company achieve? It no longer has to print and deliver a paper, but it still has the costs of maintaining a staff, maintaining distribution, and maintaining a plant. So maybe it costs 25 percent less to fulfill that customer’s access? In this long interim with hybrid digital and print reading, how much of their production costs can companies cut out? The long-term question: At what point can the news industry make a major shift, as most reading becomes digital and a minority of it in print?

56.7 percent: That’s the percentage of downloaders of the Guardian’s new Facebook app who are under 24, with 16.7 percent 17 or younger. For a news industry decrying the lack of young readers and focused on aging baby boomers as the core audience, the Guardian’s early experience is phenomenal. It’s well and good to sell All-Access to long-time print readers; it’s essential to bring in new ones, and Facebook looks like a great bet.

7: Daily means seven days a week for newspapers, right? MediaNews is dropping Monday printing at some Northern California papers. Michigan remains the epicenter of the non-daily daily. Following the 2009 cuts in metro Detroit, Advance is now going digital-first with smaller papers there, with several becoming three- and four-day print “dailies.” The idea: keep 85 percent of print ad money and radically reduce print costs. Publishers take a very deep breath and hope they aren’t cutting the print cord too soon. Expect to see more of such day cuts in 2012 and beyond. It’s a hybrid strategy, and as we see its impacts — on print ad revenue and on digital reader and ad transition — we’ll have new numbers to plug into the model.

> 1 percent: Google now makes 54 percent of its revenue outside the U.S., as does Apple. Such international orientation is a major differentiator in the economy of the day, and not in the publishing and digital industries. Even The New York Times, with impressive global reach, gets only a percent or two of its revenue internationally. In the last year, we’ve seen The Independent (through Press+) selling U.S. access, PBS launching a British channel, and the Guardian relaunching an American foray. Digital media knows no national bounds, but monetizing outside home countries has been difficult. Breaking through this barrier could create significant upside for top publishers.

And on the seventh day, they didn’t rest; they sped up.

Next Tuesday, look for The New York Times to announce its first Sunday print circulation gain…since 2006. That will be a home delivery Sunday gain. Let those three words soak in: Print. Circulation. Gain. Those are wonderful words to anyone in the newspaper business and a small encouraging sign of our turbulent times, right?

In a word: Yes. But…

I’ve been following the Sunday print/daily digital trend since the Times went public with its pay system in January. In an elementary, sleight-of-marketing hand, it priced its Sunday + digital offer cheaper than its digital-only offer, which has apparently worked with its many smart readers who can do basic math. Why not get the Sunday paper in print and smartphone/tablet/online access, especially if it’s cheaper? For readers, it makes common sense. For publishers — almost all of whom applaud the Times’ ploy — it’s a way to bolster their highest-profit day of the week, a day that brings in a third or more of their ad revenue and is home to that precious keep-it-to-the-bitter-end preprint business.

That simple pricing twist has apparently turned a five-year-old negative line into a more positive one at the Times, though overall Sunday print circ, including single-copy, will be down. Importantly, circulation revenue is up — not a lot at 1 percent, but up — at the Times in the last quarter, so the overall move to get readers to pay more of the freight of the news business is moving in the right direction.

What’s been dismaying this week, as I talk with many publishers at the dozens of other dailies now charging for digital access, is that it’s hard to find the Times model moving similar Sunday-plus trends elsewhere. Publishers don’t want to disclose actual numbers, but the apparent consensus among those who have charged for six months or more (which covers the reporting period we’ll see when the Audit Bureau of Circulation FAS-FAX numbers releases its half-yearly numbers Tuesday) is that print/digital reader bundling hasn’t had much effect on the decline in circulation numbers.

Why? It may well be that it’s too early, with pay psychologies just kicking in. Or it may be that propping up the print business won’t be a route to the future. Or maybe too few papers have aligned all the things a publisher needs to do to make the Sunday + digital equation work; maybe they haven’t aligned the stars well enough yet, though we do have one just out-of-the-box experiment, in Memphis, that displays early alignment.

It’s important to note: Even if the print decline is not significantly affected, charging for digital access remains a prime strategy going forward. What we’re looking at, entering 2012, is paid content 2.0 for many publishers, a new rev that will push the faster-adopting among them to a fuller alignment of business model, product, and analytics.

By way of background, let’s remember that the circulation decline (tracked well with a series of charts, midway down the page at State of the News Media) is simply breathtaking, from a height of 62.5 million copies in 1993 to about 43 million now.

It looks like the Tuesday report will follow recent trends. In other words, still down — but as the p.r. spin has it, with “moderating declines.” Translation: We’re off the floor of devastating high-single-digit declines experienced in the depth of recession, and getting closer to the lower-single-digit declines of 2006-2007. Even those publishers who expect to be up a tad don’t attribute it to their new print/digital bundling/pricing strategy.

That’s a conundrum. Reducing print loss (or churn) is one of the top-rated reasons for putting up a paywall, and a number of paywall publishers have adopted the Sunday preference for digital pricing as well. Why isn’t it doing that effectively?

Let’s call it the revised newsonomics of Sunday print and daily digital (first edition:  ”The Newsonomics of Sunday Print/Tablet Subscriptions“)  subscriptions. Why aren’t paywalls helping print circulation much?

Let’s start with the uncertainty principle. Newspapers have chosen from this menu of options to improve circulation:

• Increase sales pressure, effectively buying new subscribers through increased marketing, coming out of the recession.
• Improve customer service, to improve retention and new-sign-up rate.
• Market their Sunday print coupons to a Groupon-crazed, deals-desiring audience, resulting in more single-copy Sunday sales.
• Bundle digital access with Sunday-only print subs.

So even in cases where circulation has improved, publishers don’t know exactly what to attribute it to. Their guesses, though: the first three factors are more important than digital bundling. So here we see, exposed, one Achilles’ heel of a legacy business: Data collection and analytics can’t tell them specifically enough how well their strategies are (or aren’t) working.

Beyond uncertainty, let’s look at the model. The Times’ — and the Journal’s — model is All-Access. That means you pay for access across the board, whether using paper, a computer, a tablet or phone. Yet most of the Press+ papers seems still to be offering free smartphone access, even as they restrict iPad access. Mobile access is already providing 10-20 percent of news company page views, and growing rapidly. Why not drop a print subscription if you find most of your reading is done on the phone? Semi-access is a tough selling point, or incentive to keep print.

Another key part of the model is how many free article views a month a site allows visitors. Many started with 20, the Times’ number, but found few visitors bumped into the wall. So visitors found that they didn’t need subscriber access to the local site because they didn’t use it enough — which provides one fewer reason to keep paying for the paper. Many Press+ sites have lately been getting more restrictive (including MediaNews, largely moving its 20+ sites to a five-free-view model in August).

Even among papers with a harder paywall with little sampling allowed (another key to growing newer customers, but that’s another story), circulation loss hasn’t been stemmed — but it certainly makes us wonder the declining value of the print product unto itself.

Beyond the model, let’s look at the products. First off, a local newspaper is not The New York Times. While once first cousins, the Times is now in a distant relative: global, national, truly multimedia — and with a strong, differentiated-from-daily, stand-on-its-own Sunday product. That’s just the nature of our world. The Times is a peer of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, ABC, the Journal, the Guardian, and a few more, while local papers are still that — with varying digital add-ons.

Those digital add-ons, I believe strongly, are one of the key reasons the print/digital bundling isn’t as effective as publishers want it to be.

Many of the paywall papers still rely on e-edition or e-edition+ replicas for their tablet products. A relative few offer useful mobile apps. Let’s recall the NYT product/pricing strategy: build strong mobile products and then lead with thosewhen you are moving to paid access. (Look at the consistent sub offer, fronted by mobile products.)

Local publishers, largely, haven’t delivered the suite of mobile products that makes the new offers sufficiently appealing. One way we can measure this is to see what percentage of print subscribers find restricted digital access sufficiently compelling to sign up for. In August 2010, when The New York Times first started tracking home delivery customers, it found that 50 percent had a linked account. As of Oct. 24, 73 percent of all home delivery customers had linked. For many local papers climbing the paywall, they’ve found starting “linked” totals to be in low single digits. This linked number is one vital new metric in determining how well these companies — and models — are becoming truly hybrid ones.

Overall, my sense is that for too many publishers’ digital circulation pushes simply aren’t aligned enough. Let’s take one quite recent launch that does seem aligned. The Commercial Appeal in Memphis launched its All-Access pay system about a month ago. The top two aims, publisher Joe Pepe tells me: protect print circulation and keep the preprints business stable, the two goals are, of course, quite connected by a Sunday paper focus. So Pepe has priced Sunday paper + All-Access digital just a buck a month ($11 compared to $9.99) higher than complete digital access. The paper is up a net of 500 Sunday subs in a month; that’s a great start.

What we may see in the Memphis plan is the kind of alignment The New York Times is working. A true all-access business model, including mobile access. Real mobile products, not just e-editions. Integrated authentication across print and digital. A sampling program (five pages a month) to give potential buyers some access. A Sunday pricing scheme that makes intuitive consumer sense. It’s an alignment that both invites consumers with a good offer, and makes it harder for them to find a way around the system.

“They no longer have a loophole they can crawl through,” says Pepe.

Is Memphis the paid content 2.0 model the industry is looking for? Too early to tell, but many eyes will be following the Commercial Appeal’s experiment.

Okay, it’s 11 p.m., and you are in bed.

What do you reach for? There’s no wrong answer here, but if you are in the news/information mode, you may reach for your Android smartphone or scoop up your iPad. So many choices, at this oddly news-consuming time of day. We know that evening is when tablet usage peaks, and, yes, such companies as Zite tell me that 11 is a top hour. An Ericsson study shows that usage is heaviest in the early and late evenings, when over 60 percent of users are active, with 40 percent using their smartphones before going to bed.

As Ipsos OTX President Bruce Friend recently put it: iPhones and Androids are, yes, our lovers. “It’s almost always turned on. It never leaves you. You have an intimate relationship with it.” Yet love is so short-term these days: “The tablet is rapidly becoming a companion or even a competitor to the smartphone. Tablets reduce smartphone as entertainment devices. The tablet will take the place of that.”

We’ve got so many emerging studies of our fast-changing habits that comparing them can leave you dazed and confused. What they all add up to, though, is a simple learning: Digital disruption is now increasing. Audiences are even more up for grabs than they were a couple of years ago. Advertising and sponsorship dollars, pounds and euros, are also being more greatly swayed by these disruptive winds than they were in 2009.

Let’s look at some of this emerging data, and begin to make sense of what it means and where revenue is likely to flow into the next several years, in the Newsonomics of disruption.

Consider local news disruption. In a report this week pointedly and smartly entitled “How People Learn About Their Local Community,” Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Internet & American Life Project gave us a picture of reader disruption, if not downright confusion.

Among Pew’s conclusions:

Most Americans (69%) say that if their local newspaper no longer existed, it would not have a major impact on their ability to keep up with information and news about their community. Yet the data show that newspapers play a much bigger role in people’s lives than many may realize. Newspapers (both the print and online versions, though primarily print) rank first or tie for first as the source people rely on most for 11 of the 16 different kinds of local information asked about—more topics than any other media source.

The worth-a-read-report analysis points out that Americans aged 40+ are those most interested in civic issues (many of those 11 info types above). Non-newspaper sites, though, snare more of the younger people, and therein lies the further local disruption to come:

Web-only outlets are now primary source of information on key subjects like education, local business and restaurants. And greater disruption seems to lie ahead. For the 79% of Americans who are online, in addition to Americans ages 18-39, the Internet ranks as a top source of information for most of the local subjects studied in the survey.

Yes, in the digital din, we don’t know what we’re getting from what — or its relative importance.

Consider tablet disruption of smartphones. Remember, in late 2009, when tablet naysayers said, “It’s just a big smartphone, and do you want to hold that big thing up to your ear?” Well, they were at least half-right. The tablet is, in part, a big smartphone — but, oh, what a difference several inches make. Inevitably, minutes eat into minutes, and we’re just learning which devices we prefer to use for which activities.

Consider emerging tablet news disruption. For 18 months, the tablet and smartphone news environment has been single-brand-oriented. Early top-drawer brand winners include: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the BBC, NPR, the Financial Times, and CNN.

Three start-up news aggregators have popped up their heads. Zite, a product that has pushed the concept of “fair use” taut, has been scooped up by CNN.Flipboard, with a revamped publisher relations strategy in place, and backed by$60 million in venture capital, would like to be the tablet news aggregator, as would Pulse.

We’ve wondered where the big guys are — those winners in the online web derby. We won’t have to wonder much longer. Google Propeller and Yahoo Livestand will soon join AOL Editions, as Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all up their various tablet aggregation plays, as well.

2011 may well be remembered as a short time of innocence in the tablet news landscape.

Consider tablet disruption of laptops. Several forecasters have said tablets will surpass laptop sales within a year.

Consider tablet disruption of tablet. Kindle Fire has unexpectedly sped through the “less than $200 tablet price point” barrier, one pointed to way back in 2010 by analysts as a key to the tablet becoming a mass product. So Kindle Fire, with its deepening bench of Amazonian media products, will update the American promise: Two tablets in every house, and a shiny new hybrid in every garage (as soon as the recession lifts). As if Apple, forecast to sell 100 million iPads worldwide by the end of next year, hadn’t already done the unthinkable.

So how will these developments affect the two hopes of the news industry: digital ad and digital circulation revenue?

Consider digital circulation plans. “Paid content” strategies were well underway before the iPad hit the market, but the iPad made them swerve. Now publishers are seeing longer-term print replacements more rapidly making the digital jump.

For newspaper execs, now increasingly placing all-access circulation strategies at the center of their 2012 budgets, the thrill and chill of tablets replacing print (“The Newsonomics of the Missing Link“) is only accelerating. Further, Amazon’s instant emergence as a #2 player in the field offers new partnership/store potentials for the news industry, even as it races to the agnostic technology of HTML5.

The faster the disruption of print by tablet happens, the faster newspaper owners can jettison print expenses and get closer to sustainable (but not yet proven) mainly-digital business models.

Consider how ad revenue trends are moving. Now, mobile audience patterns are way ahead of advertising revenue splits. That’s often the case: Audience precedes slower-moving (standards, technologies, due diligence) spending moves.

Many publishers privately report that mobile news access now accounts for 10 to 20 percent of overall digital usage.

Yet only 3 percent of digital advertising spend — about $1 billion in the U.S. and $264 million in Europe — will be spent on mobile this year. If usage matched spend, we might see a quadrupling of that mobile spend sooner than later.

So in the mobile ad spending disruption, where will the spending come from? Will it come from other digital — or print, or broadcast — and in what proportion?

Indeed, in this device-eat-device race, we have to wonder the extent to which tablets will supplant smartphones, which are now headed toward a 60-percent penetration of U.S. and European cell phone users by some time in 2012.

(I’ve noticed at the body inspection pit also known as airport security an increasing trend: business travelers placing MacBook Airs, iPhones, and iPads into the gray trays. That’s a $3,000 business play, but it may be a leading edge.)

Five digital native companies now control almost two-thirds of U.S. online ad spending, now drawing 63 percent of digital ad dollars. Within that trendline, though, we’re now seeing an increasing divergence of winners and losers. Yahoo and AOL continue to lose market share, while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all gaining. The disruption within those top five is eye-opening, looking at net ad revenue growth after companies have paid their partners for obtaining traffic, according to eMarketer:

For 2011, here’s the scorecard:

Facebook, to be up 80.9 percent

Microsoft, to be up 29 percent

Google, to be up 27.3 percent

Yahoo, to be down .4 percent (following declines of 5.2 percent in 2010 and 12.5 percent in 2009)

AOL, to be down 2.4 percent (following declines of 11.5 percent in 2010 and 12.4 percent in 2009)

Facebook’s disruptive impact will only be augmented by the multiple-front, market-invading forces of f8. Remember Microsoft’s decade-old bid to become the hub of our entertainment lives, as evidenced by its futuristic Consumer Electronics Show displays? Facebook has taken that metaphor, socialized it, and updated it for years to come.

2011 may well be remembered as a short time of innocence in the tablet news landscape.

Look at it this way: Facebook, with about $2 billion in digital ad revenues this year, will be two-thirds of the way to equaling the total digital ad revenue — about $3 billion — of the entire U.S. newspaper industry. (And the print newspaper total of maybe $20 billion this year is less than two-thirds of Google’s total revenue of maybe $34 billion in 2011.)

Digital advertising? It’s an infant. Check out PaidContent Staci Kramer’s interview with Neil Mohan, Google’s VP of product management. Mohan talks about the $200 billion digital display industry to come, almost 10 times what it is today. (Of course, Google potentially has lots to lose in a mobile disruption if that disruption continues to play havoc with its revenue engine, search.)

Finally, in disruptive revenue, let’s look at app revenue — which, of course, didn’t exist five years ago. According to Forrester Research, smartphones and tablets will reach $38 billion, globally, by 2015. (As a yardstick, $38 billion is about half of what we’d consider the worldwide newspaper industry to take in four years from now.)

This disruption to come seems Rubik’s Cubean. There’s the mobile disruption, and the mobile-on-mobile disruption, with twists of generational difference, tectonic ad spend changes, and lots of confused citizens. While it seems late in the game for some, it’s early for others. We may not yet be into a new “the first one now will later be last” era, but be careful placing your bets too early.

It’s news. It’s video. It’s a streaming tablet product that’s this week’s #1 free news app in Apple’s App Store.

And it’s The Wall Street Journal — founded in 1889.

WSJ Live, launched last week, is a milestone product. It’s not Fox News. It’s not CNN. It’s not New York Times news video. WSJ Live is its own thing, and a model for the news industry. Newspaper companies can talk the talk of becoming multimedia companies, but most are still text-bound. WSJ Live is a news video product that does a great job of leveraging the new technologies of the day and converging them to create an easy-on-the-eyes, easy-to-use new consumer product.

Notice, first, that WSJ Live is a tablet product — or more precisely a “lean-back” product, available not only on your iPad or your Galaxy Tab but aiming to get in early on “connected TV” platforms. If you want WSJ news video, you can access it on WSJ.com and on your smartphone. WSJ Live, though, understands that the tablet is today’s go-to platform for this kind of news experience.

It leverages the tablet-sized screen well. It mixes on-the-hour scheduled programming with on-demand access. It balances the talking heads of its global reporting workforce, via Skype, with anchor-hosted programs (News Hub), photo stills, and graphics. It is faster-paced than most news video, with some of the print-reporter geekiness at least acceptable and often enjoyable compared to the slick, no-surprise, Wolf Blitzer-me-to-sleep monotony of cable news. Within the business news world, it sits somewhere between the casualness of American Public Media’s Marketplace and CNBC’s button-down coverage.

Much of the action is set in the combined Journal/Fox/News Corp. building on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown. The merging print/video setups there are found in few other newsrooms in the world, one of which would have to be El Tiempo, a largely unheralded multimedia leader in Bogota. WSJ Live is touchable in navigation, using the increasingly familiar ribbon (NPR, Pulse, HuffPo Glider) for navigation.

It acts on two of three parts of what I’ve called the Tablet Trifecta — mobile, video, and social. Those three phenomenon, each too often considered separately as audience or revenue categories by news business people, are what makes the tablet a truly phenomenal product. We watch video wherever we are, comfortably, and then with a touch share video with friends and associates. The tablet is a product that is natively viral.

WSJ Live, of course, is a video product on the mobile tablet. For now, it lacks simple social sharing, the little arrow we’ve come to see as standard issue on mobile products. The Journal’s Alan Murray tells me the arrow will soon make its appearance, socializing the product.

As good as it is out of the box, WSJ Live is clearly an evolutionary product. It evolved from the Journal’s fledgling efforts. Consider this: Two years ago, the Journal did not offer any regular live webcasting. “A year ago, we did an hour a day,” says Murray, executive editor for online. Today, the full-time video staff of “fewer than 20,” supports a minimum of 3.5 hours of five-day-a-week programming, comprised of seven 30-minute shows and then chunked into discrete segments.

Today, it is a major business line, with more than seven million video streams served per month (pre-WSJ Live), according to Murray.

That’s a steep ramp, and one still meeting the challenge (the biggest in Murray’s assessment) of “getting the reporting staff trained and comfortable presenting to a camera.” Journalists go through a one-week training course; one’s underway this week.

When we look at the newsonomics of WSJ Live, we see these key factors:

• The product enables the Journal to be a magnet for top branded video ads.The Journal’s built a good new revenue stream on news video advertising — with effective cost-per-thousand rates of $50 plus, often well priced over text-adjacent ads. “[It's] our most valuable inventory and is heavily sold through across all our platforms,” Alisa Bowen, general manager of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, told me. “So generating more video inventory is a priority. eMarketer forecasts a more than tripling of U.S. digital video revenue between this year and 2015, from $2.16 billion to $7.15 billion; it’s by far the fastest-growing digital ad segment. Those who create top-drawer products will get a lot of that stream. The main ads are the usual 15-second pre-rolls, but display ads also punctuate the ribbons that provide navigation; tastefully small but effective Fidelity and Aetna ads were populating the site earlier this week. The video ads aren’t optional. They are more TV — meaning intrusive — in nature. They appear suddenly and you have to watch them to get to the content. At this point, there aren’t that many, but the change in ad approach marks a new era.
• WSJ Live acts on an aggregation principle. In the Journal’s case, it leverages internal aggregation, mainly from the wider Dow Jones, Marketwatch, and AllThingsD staffs. That’s a big benefit. Its platform could allow it to bring in other third-party video. Producing three and a half hours a day of news video seems like a lot now, but I think we’ll all find it amusing five years from now to recall that the 2011 product proudly touted “see all 33 business videos.” (Can you imagine: “527 stories included in today’s edition!”). It’s worth noting two other, quite-different-from-one-another news video aggregators. Reuters Insider, which debuted a year ago as a business-to-business product aimed at the financial services industry, created a great news video aggregation model. Newsy, with its unorthodox, but model-making general news aggregation, product, is making headway, especially as tablets thunder off the assembly line.
• It’s a (big) niche product. The Journal, extensions to national/world news notwithstanding, is a business news product. Promise me I can find out about what is ticking in the business world, instantly and with first-hour analysis, and I know I can rely on a single place for business news. In fact, since it’s audio and video, I can leave it on in the background, multi-tasking away. And I can stop and start it, much easier than TV.
• It’s aimed at the future, not the past. In addition to tablet availability, WSJ Live is available via “Boxee, Etisalat, Panasonic’s VIERA Connect-enabled HDTVs, Samsung 2011 Smart TVs, Sony Internet TV, VIZIO Internet Apps HDTVs, and the Yahoo! Connected TV platform.” More distribution outlets will be added soon.
• It’s a free product. The ad money is so good that Journal has made WSJ Live free. That’s part of its longstanding freemium approach to paid content, allowing a porous wall, since adapted by its arch-competitor, the New York Times. Both Bowen and Murray note that paid video models may later develop.

Maybe it’s that freeness that decided the Journal on providing only three text links to its “front page” news stories, and none directly from its videos. Which, if you think about it, is odd. It’s WSJ Live, but in video, with print reporters talkingabout stories they’ve written or will write — but with few links to the stories. (Rather, anchors often say: “Go to WSJ.com for more.”) If the Journal provided those links, how would it charge for access — paid access that currently generates more than $100 million in digital circulation revenue? That’s TBD.

There are lots of kinks to work out and think through. For instance:

• Brand: WSJ as the overall brand is a good decision. The Journal stands for business and subsuming Marketwatch and AllThingsD video under it makes sense. There’s WSJ Live itself and then there’s “News Hub,” “Digits,” and “The Big Interview,” among others, a learning lexicon curve for customers. Time may itself lead consumers to that understanding, or WSJ may decide to simplify, or nest, the brands differently.
• That social thing. WSJ will connect up this product with the social web, building on concepts we see in this week’s WSJ Social launch. (See “With WSJ Social, the Wall Street Journal is rethinking distribution of its content on Facebook.”)
• That saving thing. WSJ needs to give viewers tools to save videos. The NPR tablet playlist is a great model here.
• That search thing. Hard to find at this point.

If you run a newspaper company, or a newsroom, WSJ Live should interrupt your reverie that replica tablet products are “enough,” right now. Hell — smarter presentations of text on tablet products, with good still photos, aren’t enough. But WSJ Live says that far better than 10 analyst columns.

If you run a broadcast company, WSJ Live should send a chill down your spine.How did these print guys do moving pictures better than us? Most local broadcast companies are still stuck in the broadcast thinking mode.

While CNN moved early and impressively to real multimedia, its tablet news video experience isn’t near as fluid. NBC’s Nightly News app is good and has Brian Williams to give it personality, but, too, doesn’t compare well. MSNBC is not yet seen on the tablet, other than Rachel Maddow’s show. The uber multi-platform Bloomberg, exploding in reach and in hiring talent, is undoubtedly studying WSJ Live and planning to play catchup.

WSJ Live becomes the sixth WSJ iPad-specific apps, with one additional Barrons and two Marketwatch (one paid, its data app) products. What began not long ago as an experiment in tablet products is becoming serious business.