Australian Financial Review AFR Access

ByLaurel Papworth

Lots of digital graveyards out there: AFR Access has 892 paid subscribers with a target of 20,000. That’s less than 5% of the target. It cost $11 million to build. From Crikey‘s Tips and Rumours. There are other business models they could (and should) be pursuing…

Lots of digital graveyards out there:

AFR Access has 892 paid subscribers with a target of 20,000. That’s less than 5% of the target. It cost $11 million to build.

From Crikey‘s Tips and Rumours. There are other business models they could (and should) be pursuing…

5 Comments

  1. Ouch! Imagine the number of links they have lost because the content was behind the pay wall; how much would that have been worth?

  2. From AFR site:

    CIRCULATION AS AT MARCH 2006

    The March 2006 Audit Bureau of Circulation results list circulation for The Australian Financial Review Monday to Friday edition as 85,537 and the Weekend Financial Review circulation as 85,392.

    Now the Audit Bureau also validates visitors to sites, and unique browsers. Not sure if they do time on site yet.

    The problem for newspapers is that historically they were the middleman between content creators and the consumers. So content creators would pay to be placed in a newspaper – advertisers mostly, though at least one journalist in history has accepted food and grog and a spin story 🙂

    Consumers would pay to pick up information – and have to ignore the fact that their information was polluted by ads and sponsored stuff.

    A double whammy.

    Now of course, consumers are the content creators and distributors and generate their own income from what they read and regurgitate…

    The hope (as usual) lies in The Space Between – in this case, hardcopy newspaper and online distribution. Build community and eyeballs. Do it around AFR sponsored activities of UNICEF AUSTRALIA, AFR MIDNIGHT RAMBLER, WOMEN OF INFUENCE LUNCHEONS, AFR BOSS CLUB, AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW CONFERENCES and other offline ventures. Think LinkedIn for Australian business people with events and offline networking stuff to get stuck into. Provide tools for discussions – the dialogue is the content and there’s a LOT of business expertise that doesn’t make it into the papers – and deliver worthwhile web 2.0 savvy advertising. Then…

    Pfft you guys have heard all this before! Anyway, if Crikey were to do it it would be much more fun. Think TheSpinStartsHere.com.au with out all those naughty F words. 🙂

    Y’know I wrote a trifle that got published in the AFR maybe a year and half or two years ago. How newspapers had to be talk-back program to retain interest with the smart new business set. They even did a cool cartoon for me. Ah well…

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