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Posted by
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on Tue May 8 00:58:01 2012
fiogf49gjkf0d Forbes
Business | 5/07/2012 @ 1:11PMThe Washington Post Is In Even Worse Shape Than You ThinkJeff Bercovici, Forbes StaffThe Washington Post Co. reported its first-quarter earnings on Friday, and the news coming out of the newspaper division was mostly grim. The unit lost $22.6 million in the quarter, with revenue down 8% and revenue from print advertising specifically falling 17%.
Meanwhile, the Post just reported one of the biggest circulation drops of any major newspaper with the lucrative Sunday edition selling 5.2% fewer copies and the daily edition skidding almost 10%. Oh, and newsroom leaders are so distressed about the way the business decline is affecting them, they held a secret meeting with the paper’s president, Steve Hills — without inviting executive editor Marcus Brauchli.
Now, are you ready for the really bad news?
Check out the chart below from AppData.com. It shows the number of monthly average users (MAU) of the Washington Post Social Reader, an app that encourages Facebook users to read and recommend articles from the Post’s website.
For those readers who suffer from chart-blindness, AppData shows Social Reader’s MAU falling from 17.4 million to 9.2 million over the past 30 days.
It would be hard to overstate the importance and centrality of the Social Reader to the Post’s strategy. When I interviewed the Post Co.’s chief digital officer, Vijay Ravindran, earlier this year he pointed to the app as one of the company’s most promising new products, a way of bringing precious new younger readers to a franchise that has been otherwise challenged to reach them.
It’s in large part the promise of social-powered distribution that has induced Post chairman Don Graham to keep the paper’s digital editions free. This even though other newspapers are having real success with various types of paywalls, and even though Warren Buffett, the company’s biggest and most influential outside shareholder, has made it clear he thinks papers must charge for their digital content.
In other words, if the trend in the chart above is genuine and not some kind of blip, the Post needs to completely reevaluate the assumptions underlying its digital distribution strategy. And fast.
Update: It doesn’t seem to be a blip. Buzzfeed’s John Herrman notes that other Facebook-based media consumption apps, including the Guardian’s, are showing signs of audience collapse as well.
Meanwhile, here’s what an AppData spokeswoman told me, via email.The data from AppData comes directly from Facebook. The data is accurate; no methodology/implementation change from AppData would cause the change.
Facebook is constantly testing how social readers/open-graph-enabled apps appear and and how much distribution they get in the news feed. This may impact the active user counts for all social reading apps, including others like The Guardian. For example, it recently started grouping social reader stories in a “Trending Articles” aggregation.
Many Facebook users are still learning about social reading apps, deciding whether they want to use them or not, and whether they want to share activity with their friends. The peak growth of the Washington Post Social Reader may have come from users trying it out, and since then has come back down.
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