New Newspaper Marketing Tricks – Free Access To The WSJ Web Site To Those Who Buy The WSJE At Newsstands; Springer Starts Giving Away Welt Kompakt On Trains, And For Some, Being Displayed On Google News Is All Important

WSJ managers can still claim that people have to pay for their web access – it’s just that web access is now considered to be included in the price of a newsstand buy.

“Our retail customers are among those readers placing the highest value on the Wall Street Journal Europe’s content on a daily basis. With this new addition, the value they receive when they buy a copy of the newspaper increases dramatically,” according to Rick Zednik, WSJE circulation-marketing director.

Each day on page 2 the newspaper will print that day’s web access code. Readers will be able to establish their own profiles just as subscribers do.

ftm background

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The WSJE relaunched as a compact newspaper in September, 2005, and the major complaint made at the time was that most financial data (share lists and the like) had been banished to the web site. That was not such a big deal for subscribers -- they got free access to the web site -- but for those who bought the newspaper at a newsstand the web site still cost extra. In other words for the newsstand buyers the newspaper was no longer a complete package.

The WSJE was one of the first newspapers to banish the financial data to the web site, a practice that is quite common today in US newspapers that offer that information on their web sites at no charge. The WSJE daily buyers complained they had to pay and last year Richard Zannino, Dow Jones’ CEO, said the paper would go through some “retooling”, although he didn’t go into details.

DJ’s spokespeople in Europe said at the time it was just part of an ongoing process of making tweaks -- for instance the paper reintroduced the Pepper & Salt cartoon that had been dropped and it added the people index. Making the web site available for free for those readers without subscriptions indicates the “retooling” continues.

Not that the Journal isn’t looking actively for new subscribers. It’s currently running a promotion offering 56% off the cover price, plus four free weeks plus access to WSJ.com.

Meanwhile Axel Springer is doing something in Germany that no one ever thought that company would – it is giving away a newspaper to an upper-class select audience. The paper in question is the tabloid Welt Kompakt, published by Die Welt, and it normally sells for just 70 European centimes – priced that low to encourage those who never read a newspaper to start. Springer has never given out Welt Kompakt’s circulation, instead combining it with Die Welt, but German media analysts believe its circulation is around 25,000.

Mathias Dopfner, Axel Springer’s chairman and CEO, told newspaper executives last year that Welt Kompakt is a completely different newspaper to Die Welt and research shows there is only about a 5% cannibalization of Die Welt’s circulation to the new tabloid that sells for less than half of Die Welt’s price. At the time FTM asked Dopfner why he still insisted on hiding the circulation of each newspaper and only reported their combined circulation. His response: “That’s a very valid question, but I am not willing to divulge today that information.” And Springer still does not break out the numbers.

But in a new marketing twist Welt Kompakt is now being given out for free in first class carriages on German trains. It is competing with about 8,000 free issues of Handelsblatt News am Abendand Financial Times Deutschland Kompakt. What’s interesting here is that Welt Kompakt really isn’t designed for first class train passengers – it is more down market than that -- but if successful it could well bring the newspaper a brand new readership.

And then there is the continuing marketing debate of whether Google News is friend or foe to news organizations. AFP is suing in US Federal Court because Google linked to its stories without permission and did not pay for the privilege, refusing to stop linking until the lawsuit was filed; In Belgium Google is awaiting a court’s decision on whether it can link to that country’s French language newspapers, and the World Association of Newspapers based in Paris is leading a coalition seeking a system that allows publishers to manage automatically the access to their digital content.

But the Wall Street Journal has reported that not everyone is against Google. Indeed British national newspapers are doing all they can to ensure that Google News picks up their stories prominently. The newspapers also compete fiercely with one another to buy search terms – sometimes the fight to get the right search words is as competitive as Fleet Street knows to be.

Obviously the UK newspapers believe that getting eyes onto their web sites in ever increasing numbers is all-important for their cpm models. They are not concerned with Google copyright issues – what they care about is the world’s largest search engine sending more unique visitors their way.

And does Google News make a difference? FTM’s own experience shows it can. In the two months since Google News has linked to FTM stories the number of unique visitors to the site has more than doubled, and there is good reason to believe that once visitors have discovered the site they come back on a regular basis!

And that’s without paying the minimum 19 cents a click on a not competitive search term.

Google attracts a lot of US visitors and that is what the UK newspaper web sites are after. The Times, Guardian and the Telegraph via their search term marketing now count their regular US visitors in the millions.

So, how important is Google in this online battle? The Times trains its journalists to use the buzzwords in their leads that are sure to be noticed by the Google computers. Edward Roussel, the Telegraph’s digital editor told the WSJ “The most important driver of all readers to our site is Google, except for people who know us and come directly. It plays a critical part of exporting our brand, particularly to the US.”

But what is interesting in all of this is how European media is split. The British seeing Google’s worth in driving eyeballs to its sites, whereas in some other countries newspapers are more concerned with copyright issues and that Google doesn’t pay them for referencing their stories.

ftm's verdict – if we had the 19 cents to pay for the search clicks we would. But we don’t, so we won’t.