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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
PA Media ends eight years of revenue growth | Oxford Mail doubles audience in August
And New Scientist launches advertising platform aimed at B2B audience
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👋 Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Tuesday, 29 September.
⏰ FINAL CALL on entries for this year’s British Journalism Awards. The official extended deadline is midnight tonight. But – between you, me and the gatepost – we will still accept entries all day tomorrow (Wednesday). Find out more here.
🚀 Newsquest’s Oxford Mail was the fastest growing top-50 news site in the UK in August – nearly doubling its monthly audience to 6.5 million, and more than tripling engaged minutes year on year to 11.7 million.
Another Newsquest site, The Herald in Scotland, grew its audience 58% year on year to 2.9 million.
Meanwhile, Reach titles Chronicle Live, Daily Record and Manchester Evening News were among the biggest fallers – down more than 30% year on year each in terms of monthly UK audience.
The Oxford Mail seems to focus heavily on local, breaking news and it may be that Google Discover and search are favouring this over more generic stories around particular verticals (like health and personal finance), which used to do so well for certain Reach titles.
Overall, only 16 out of the top 50 UK online newsbrands grew their UK audience year on year in August.
Looking at the top ten titles ranked by total audience minutes per month, The New York Times was the fastest UK growing online newspaper brand in the UK in August – up 33% to 648 million minutes.
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🤔 Do publishers have an audience challenge or a sales challenge?
Sometimes I think we focus on the former at the expense of the latter (distracted by the big monthly reach audience number falling as we lose a lot of drive-by traffic from social media and search).
Harmsworth Media has decided to beef up the sales operation of the New Scientist with the launch of a new B2B arm. It offers a mix of native content, events, brand partnerships, consultancy and new editorial platforms designed to better capitalise on its core audience of boffins actually working in science and technology.
It’s all based around the premise that the New Scientist knows its audience better than anyone else and can offer marketers bespoke packages to get in front of them.
CEO Emily Shelley has put in place a three-year plan and a new senior leadership team aimed at bringing the company back into growth.
The core news agency business – PA Media – only accounts for £35m of annual turnover with stock picture agency Alamy around the same. Its other businesses are sports betting information brand Podium (£22m), PR and marketing services (£12.7m) and sports streaming platform StreamAMG (£11.6m).
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