Interview: Annelies van den Belt, New Media Director for Telegraph Group

UK’s Telegraph Group bit the convergence challenge bullet last month with a much-publicized move to a new premises and integrated newsroom. After the AOP conference this week, new media director Annelies van den Belt told paidContent.org that after looking at the experiences of other publishers, it was felt that the huge cultural changes that needed to take place would be best tackled head on.
“There are different schools of thought: either drip feed, or do it all in one go. By moving into a new building and creating one editorial floor, we were trying to make that cultural change all in one. But it’s not a revolution, so much as an evolution.”
But as part of that evolution, the Telegraph made 133 staff, including 55 journalists redundant. So how does creating more news for more platforms need less journalists? “By converging we’ve looked at how to be more efficient with our content on any platform – and that’s something you saw in banking five years ago. We need to be more efficient because it’s a very tough advertising market and a very tough circulation market out there, so what do you do if you see your traditional income streams under threat? You look at efficiencies and new business models, and that’s what we’re doing.
And if online advertising crashed, how else would the site generate income? There’s the obligatory crossword club, but Telegraph has done well with its fantasy football game that van den Belt said has 300,000 paid users and generates “an awful lot of revenue”. Fantasy football is sponsored by Virgin Money and offers a prize equivalent to $187,000. Users pay $11 per team, $28 for three teams and an extra $2.80 for WAP access to manage the team (so that’s a back-of-a-napkin base of $11 x 300,000 = $3.3 million). There’s also fantasy cricket and a fantasy football podcast. “That shows there is a future for pay-per-view and pay-to-play. Those two models show there is an audience. If you want to charge, you have to show that it’s a relevant product and not a one-fits-all.” Her own example is that she pays two Euros a time to watch Dutch TV, because she says it is product relevant to her.
Van den Belt wants more multimedia on the site and though she says it’s exciting, she seems frustrated with its progress: “It’s only about 20 percent there. It’s not about the next new thing, it’s about a continual stream of new products. Our website needs to be redeveloped and redesigned every day to reflect what consumers want and what advertisers want.
Multimedia is well underway following a recent content deal with ITN. Van den Belt is less confident about the direct revenue potential of audio and its relevance for advertisers: “I don’t think we’ve yet seen a very good example of a digital publisher making a lot of money out of it, but it’s great for editorial and for consumer loyalty.” For publishers used to dealing in solidity of advertising and circulation revenues, these less tangible revenues streams are hard to adjust to, but just one more part of the cultural shift that Van den Belt describes. “It’s an indirect revenue stream and in that way, it’s a challenge for us to think about and is much more about the lifetime value of a customer.”
Related:
UK Telegraph’s Digital & Print Integration May Cost 70 More Jobs
UK Telegraph Revamps Again; Adds More Audio, Video, Blogs
UK’s Telegraph’s New Design; Pares Down Ad Units

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

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