Tag archives: media24

Grubstreet: Weideman — ‘Marketers are cutting back on ad spend’

by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) Naspers, the giant multinational that owns Media24, released its annual results recently. Because of its remarkable success in markets such as China, Russia and India, the South African division out of which Naspers grew is often ignored at results time. Grubstreet interviewed (via email) Media24 CEO Esmaré Weideman about how it fared in the greater group and in a tough market.

Analysis: Moneyweb vs Fin24 — and how it could upend our media

by Roger Hislop (@d0dja) In a legal clash that shows all the signs of setting the tone — and the legal precedent — for our entire industry for decades to come, why is everyone sitting back and leaving it up to corporate lawyers and high court judges to define what is, and isn’t, allowed to be done in the name of profitable publishing, and what is, or isn’t, in the interests of journalism, publishing, South African readers and civil society?

“Die Burger’s almost like Riaan Cruywagen” says editor Bun Booyens

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Media24’s Die Burger joined an elite group of newspapers this year that are showing signs of arresting circulation decline, which is really something to crow about in this grim market.

As sales were falling across the board, the ABC circulation figures for the second half of last year showed that Die Burger – which has Western Cape and Eastern Cape editions (the latter grew out of Die Oosterlig) – was slowing its downwards trajectory. Then in the latest set of ABC figures – for the first quarter of 2013 – Die Burger (Western Cape) netted 51 516 compared with 51 232 in the same period of 2012. It’s Port Elizabeth-based Eastern Cape sister posted 10 721 circulation compared with 10 748 the corresponding period of the previous year.

So stability in a devastating quarter for newspapers, in which the Daily Sun lost 20% of circulation, The Star fell 14% and the Pretoria News shed 12%.

I’m sure the excellent reporting and run of exclusive breaks on the Oscar Pistorius story in the first quarter that Die Burger carried (from its sister paper Beeld) helped to buoy sales. And indeed, Die Burger’s Cape Town-based editor, Bun Booyens, is cautious about singing his newspaper’s praises.

“Let’s be sober about this. I think a lot of these are lapsed subscribers that we’ve won back,” he told Grubstreet last week. “We suffered some real subscriber damage with the Cycad software problem (Media24’s CRM programme that governed subscriptions and distribution). I suspect the gains we made were lapsed subscribers, among others, who we won back – which is in itself encouraging.”

The growing digital footprint of Huisgenoot, YOU and Drum

by Herman Manson (@marklives) In the world of print publishing the three sister magazines of Huisgenoot, YOU and Drum make for a formidable powerhouse – they are the three biggest circulating consumer magazines in the country.

Until recently that offline brand and circulation power hasn’t been effectively utilised online, but it’s changing, and quickly, according to Wilmer Müller, Head of Digital at Huisgenoot, YOU and Drum.

The three brands started rolling out digital strategies at the beginning of 2010 and soon found success on Facebook, especially in the case of Huisgenoot, whose community of Afrikaans speaking readers were looking for a safe online space in which to engage with one another in their home language. . Growth has been organic says Müller and on Facebook the number of Huisgenoot fans currently stands at over 205 000.

The Facebook presence of Drum is growing at the same breakneck pace as that of Huisgenoot in 2010, but Twitter has really been its success story, as the channel is well suited for breaking news on black celebrity culture – a key point of interest to Drum readers.

Talking of Twitter, Huisgenoot hasn’t seen as much success here as on Facebook. Müller suggests that this is due to slower take-up amongst Afrikaans speakers – English seems to be the default language South Africans use on Twitter. The Oscar Pistorius story, first broken on Twitter by Beeld, has changed this, and Huisgenoot has seen a substantial take-up of its various social media platforms, including Twitter, over the past two months. This was mostly tied to the Pistorius story, says Müller.

YOU has been tougher to grow digitally since it competes with a wider range of English language sites, many of them international, but its numbers are far from insubstantial.

Highbury Safika on Ramsay, SA Sports Illustrated and more

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Highbury Safika Media is a publisher that flies largely under the radar.

Sure, we’ve all heard about controversial rugby writer Mark Keohane – who resigned from Highbury last year – and of it’s most high-profile consumer magazine, SA Rugby, but although it’s a similar-sized company to Associated Media and RamsayMedia we don’t know too much about it. This is probably because a lot of what it does is custom publishing such as for the Foschini Group.

However, the Cape Town-based company was in the news recently when MarkLives revealed that Highbury and Ramsay – the publishers of Car, Getaway and Popular Mechanics – were in merger talks last month.

This month Highbury CEO Kevin Ferguson told Grubstreet the talks were off (and he confirmed it again this week after Ramsay said the talks were still on the table).

He also told Grubstreet why the company was happy to have a low profile, why it’s taken so long to launch a website for SA Rugby and why he thinks Media24’s Sports Illustrated could have avoided shutting up shop.

Digital spend jumps from 1-2% to 10-15% of SA media budgets

by Herman Manson (@marklives) The online media planning space is moving at a hectic pace – where else can you can lose two big spending clients close together and still plan for 100% growth over the next two years? Lighthouse Digital, the media agency launched only three years ago, has grown from 4 to 26 people, and has been doubling its revenue every year since then.

Aaron Van Schaik, Managing Director at Lighthouse Digital, estimates the value of SA’s digital advertising spend at around R1.2 billion – Aaron Van Schaikbetween 40-50% of that is spent on search. Google doesn’t release its figures for the South African market making it difficult to be sure of exact actual spend. But growth has been rapid with spend jumping from 1-2% of media budgets a year ago to between 10-15% today*.

Van Schaik attributes this growth to marketers realising the value digital media represents as well as directives form international parent companies asking local operations to shift budgets online.

Brand Journeys: MWeb – not quite ‘just like that’

For many people MWEB is still the big black box, which it launched in 1997, the same year the business was established by MIH Limited (a Naspers company). The big black box, in case you don’t get it, was a box, and black, and offered wary South Africans everything they needed to connect to the Internet via dial-up modem, with the payoff line “Just like that” (I still hear the finger snap in the background).

The commercial Internet was new, exciting, and big business was getting in on the act. The first dot com bubble had yet to burst and MWEB was spending large swathes of money buying up rival ISPs before its 1998 listing on the JSE.

Today it is a friendly consumer brand wholly owned by Naspers. Its pay-off line has changed to Connect & You Can to reflect the growing acceptance and integration of the Internet into daily lives. It serves a user base of over 300 000 subscribers (which is not that much higher than figures available for 2005 – although it has had success in converting many of those to ADSL) of whom more than 200 000 sits on ADSL. They consume 4.5 petabytes (4,500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of bandwidth per month.

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