Crain's Manchester Business Sticks To Its Pay Wall Through Downturn

image The chips are down for printed media of all kinds right now, but at least one publisher feels it is doing well in the downturn in both dead-tree and online. Weekly magazine Crain’s Manchester Business publisher Arthur Porter (pictured) told me in an interview the paper, 14 months after its launch, now has more than 1,250 print subscribers and got 52,475 unique users in the four weeks to January 11 — 50 percent up on the previous month (according to internal Omniture data). And he revealed that the mag has made advertising revenues of £320,000 in 2009 to date, including forward bookings. At this point last year it had made £12,000, though it was just three months old. Digital represents about 10 percent of total revenues, with a sponsorship deal for its 8,000 daily emails contributing a major share of that.

Crain’s Manchester Business was launched by US publisher Crain Communications in December 2007, modeled on its network of city-based business titles across America. The paper publishes all its “commodity” news online at crainsmanchesterbusiness.co.uk but the magazine content is for subscribers only online.

Charging for online business content in the business media and B2B sector isn’t new — FT.com and WSJ,com both famously have paywalls while a handful of B2B titles and sites charge for premium content — but they are national or internationally focused, or based around a single sector; no-one else has tried charging for regional, general online business news.

Porter says it’s about time they did. Regional, city-based newspapers have had a torrid time with severe drops in advertising revenue — to help tackle that, Trinity Mirror’s Birmingham Post re-launched to encompass a more business-led approach. But unlike, the Post or indeed the recession-hit Manchester Evening News Crain has given Manchester Business five years to reach profitability, which is a luxury most titles simply don’t have.

Market risks? Crain last week shut down two magazines, the London-based Business Insurance Europe and Automotive News Europe. Porter says he was “lucky to launch before the recession”, but says the company is committed to the Manchester project and its five-year plan. He says those mags failed because they were too narrowly-focused: “If you are only in one vertical, you are vulnerable if that industry is suffering.” But isn’t the print business model generally under huge strains? Porter is defiant: “As long as print is giving (advertisers) a target audience they can’t get anywhere else, it will continue be strong.”

Print can still win: Porter says “the print product is still the main thing, what we want people to see as the core product.” He’s yet to introduce a CPM-based ad model online and sees the website almost as an advertisement and extension of the magazine. Plus he doesn’t rule out making all the site’s content subscription-only at some stage. Porter’s original business model mapped out six UK city titles for Crain, though he says there are plans to launch another just yet.

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