The Bulldog’s Existential Situation

 

 

We want you to subscribe to The Bulldog. Read on and we will tell you why.

When the Washington Post laid off almost one-third of its editorial staff recently, most observers were shocked.

But people inside the industry wondered what took so long. The economics of newspapers have been in crisis for a couple of decades. Now in the past year or so, they have become precipitously worse.

One of the great newspapers of the world showing, not cracks, but large fissures in its economic viability is a sign of how serious the situation is.

Of course, newspapers are not really newspapers anymore but digital products. And that’s where the existential problem resides.

For many years now (digital is not exactly ground-breaking anymore), newspapers have relied on services such as Google Adsense for revenue. Simply, Adsense sells and supplies ads and plugs them into spaces left by the website owner for them. Then the website and Google share the revenue. No muss. No fuss. For websites it means no ad department, no marketing department, little design and and minimal composition.

It made old labour-intensive newspapers obsolete in no time. In fact, it made early websites yesterday’s news even faster. No need to sell ads. Google Adsense did it for you.

But recently Adsense went from a pay-per-click to an impression model. Pay-per-click is self-evident … websites get paid each time a reader clicks on an ad. An impression occurs when a reader looks at an ad for a short period of time.

Pay-per-click generated a modest amount of revenue … enough for low-cost, small websites like The Bulldog to break even or minimize losses. But revenue is much lower with impressions. Revenue drops from dollars per ad to pennies per impression.

It puts newspaper websites in jeopardy. The main source of revenue has essentially disappeared.

Quickly, websites had to radically change their revenue model. Adsense and its impressions could no longer support a website.

But a bad situation gets worse. Artificial intelligence websites, for the most part, no longer link to websites as search engines such as Google and Bing do. Those links provided hits and, accordingly, revenue and readers. That revenue has diminished.

Between impression-based revenue and artificial intelligence, newspaper websites are in mortal peril. Thus the layoffs at the Washington Post. Major newspapers with their infrastructure and labour costs can’t be supported by pennies. So that’s why insiders have wondered why it took so long for layoffs to occur at the Post … and other newspapers as well.

So now in the face of financial ruin, newspaper websites and websites in general have had to do a quick about-face. Readers of The Bulldog might have noticed it on this website. The Bulldog has abandoned the ad-based model and has switched to a subscription model. Ads can no longer support free content. Therefore paywalls are erected.

Readers have seen that The Bulldog has been forced to go to a subscription model. It’s not something we wanted to do but economics forced the change. It was adapt or die. In The Bulldog example, the jury is out as to whether the new model will work. But then the paywall was only instituted in mid-November last year so it’s a small sales window so far.

The medium and large newspaper websites are frantically searching for subscribers. Subscriptions are being offered at amazingly low prices such as 75 cents for six months. The idea is that websites get subscribers names on the books and then raise the price to around $37-a-month after six months. That’s a very uncertain strategy … desperate in fact. People sign up for the regular price after the incredibly low six-month offer at a rate of about two per cent. We’ll know if that works if Canadian newspapers survive. From the outside, that looks like a dicey proposition.

At The Bulldog, we face the same situation as newspaper websites. Our ad revenue has plummeted. Meanwhile, insurance and hosting costs continue to rise. By moving to a more reliable hosting company recently, The Bulldog’s costs for that service have doubled.

However, The Bulldog decided to go a different route on subscriptions … we’ve offered The Bulldog at full subscription price which is about 13 per cent of a full newspaper website subscription. We have no intention of raising the price unless we can’t break even on our costs. Then the increase will be in lock-step with those expenses.

We don’t publish The Bulldog to get rich. Or at least we haven’t been able to so far over this publication’s 17 years of existence. The Bulldog is published because we think that an independent source of local news is vital to a growing and vibrant city such as Ottawa.

Our contributors to this publication do so because they believe they make this city better. They contribute importantly to the forum of ideas in a market where those voices are disappearing rapidly. They think news and opinion is important to local democracy. It’s their way of defending inclusive Ottawa representative government. We believe The Bulldog has an importance that extends beyond simple stories. It’s about politics, democracy and open government. Praising the good guys. Rooting out the bad guys.

And we believe we publish a very good product. It provides readers with vital information they can’t get anywhere else.

Meanwhile, we expect a number of major newspaper websites will fold within a couple of years or less. Their economic model doesn’t work and their desperate subscription prices smack of crisis.

That’s how serious the news business is now. The situation is existential.

Here at The Bulldog, we’d like to thank those of you who have subscribed over the past five months and told us The Bulldog is important to you and the community. That said, we need more of you.

If you value The Bulldog, please subscribe. Feel free to forward this article to your friends who might be interested. Forward it through your favourite social media.

Read unique news and opinion. Tell Ottawa through your subscription you think this publication is critical to the health of this city.

And we think it’s a pretty good read as well.

Ken Gray is the editor of The Bulldog.

 

For You:

Leiper, McKenney Condemn Possible Water Privatization

Give Us Solutions, OC Transpo, Not Excuses: BENN

Candidates: A Cautious Welcome To Politics: CRERAR

 

Bookmark The Bulldog, click here