Is The Journal the only growing news site in Ireland?

by Dylan on March 22, 2011

I have been closely watching the progress of Brian and Eamonn Fallon’s news start-up, The Journal, since it was launched late last year. The entire news space is a sector which fascinates me as it’s really an economic experiment in what happens when a commodity (news) goes to zero. Ireland has several long-established news companies, all of which are bedrocked by daily and Sunday (or weekend edition) newspapers, and at least two of which (the Irish Times and Independent) generate significant online traffic. Jumping into this pool was a ballsy move but it’s paying off.

Although still early, The Journal is a good example of how using every social trick in the book can really hurt the incumbents. From a slow start, it’s now clear that The Journal is definitely taking traffic from both the Irish Times and the Independent. The Compete  graph shows that although their overall uniques is still a fraction of the two combined, The Journal is the only Irish news site that is growing in 2011 (I’m treating Storyful as being in a different category).

Clearly, The Journal has had a blazing start to 2011 and at this stage must be getting discussed at board level by the major Irish and UK media groups. However, the Fallon brothers will have to face at least two major challenges later this year. Firstly, that sticky monetization question. Will display advertising be enough to cover their costs? Secondly, as they aggregate a lot of content, how much will they be impacted when those same companies start to go under or put up paywalls?

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  • David

    Is it paying off? Its certainly brave of them to go headfirst into this market when all of the established providers are setting up paywalls (with drastically reduced customer base/ questionable profitability) because they cant make money through advertising on providing free news online. The independent is to follow the times on this shortly I believe.

    Very interesting to see how this one plays out.

  • GM

    I don’t see aggregation as being a viable, long-term business model. There’s a reason Google News hasn’t been moved out of beta… There’s too many legal issues with who owns the revenue generated from aggregated content.

    The money for Reuters or AP content has to come from somewhere, even if the intern who jazzes up the piece comes for free. Ads from Irish startups on a site with ~25k readership won’t support this.

    It’s interesting that they decided to focus on the Irish market instead of something with a much bigger readership… Couldn’t this model work in a Euronews style context?

    There’s a question of whether they plan on breaking the news site mould or will it be ‘just good enough’ to remain on people’s morning website rotas.

    I’m pretty underwhelmed by journal.ie. My guess is that the Fallons are holding out for someone seeing the potential in their venture and a better idea for making money from it.

  • http://www.hotmail.com Ger

    Hi Dylan,

    Interesting graph. They are currently doing very interesting things but they are not making money. Also on the figures above they wont either. Their business model is to sell placement ads, it is debatable whether this will cover the bills. Finally they try to etch out an existence by leaching off other media, if other media start to suffer so will they.

    Having said all that the infrastructure (IT) on their site is impressive. Maybe their best bet is to sell it off. Definitely one to watch.

    Interesting to see where it will lead.

  • dylan

    @GM I wouldn’t take the actual Compete numbers too literally (they tyically under-index European sites) although the relative positioning and trends (which was my point) should be sound. Your point on the legal ownership of content-revenue is spot-on though. Very interesting to see what this landscape is in 24 months time.

    Ultimately I suspect the mania for very big user numbers will get replaced by much smaller ones that pay surprisingly large amounts of money over time. I’ve heard a lot of people suggest the micro-transactional approach for news content but hard to see it working in that context.

    @Ger It’s definitely an excellent CMS platform. Far nicer than most of the stuff out there.

  • GM

    @Dylan
    Re: Small number of users spending large amounts of money…
    http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33364/Survey_UK_Xbox_360_Owners_Spend_64_a_Month_in_the_Xbox_Marketplace.php
    Not exactly an apples with apples comparison, but very few people could have seen microtransactions for virtual tshirts and DLC in general making this much of an impact back in 2005.

    Personally, the only thing I see paywalls achieving is a lot of out of work journalists. Murdoch’s ‘The Daily’ looks interesting in that it seems to be the only venture that is challenging what a digital subscription news service should look like.

    There’s very little innovation in this market, which is surprising given its potential. Is there a digital site that has the same amount of gravitas as, say, the printed NYT has? We may live in a digital age, but there is a while to go before we’ve moved beyond translating analogue artifacts and really start moving in to a new paradigm.

  • dylan

    @GM I do know a *little* about the micro-transaction space :)

    Micro-payments are unlikely to work for news media as effectively as games simply because there is no real progress-and-reward mechanic there. That said, I know of no particularly creative approach to using it here yet so I’m open to being proven wrong.

    One of the bigger questions for paywall-based media is how to manage the fact that they simply will not be mainstream media any more (for example, where do I put my announcement?).

  • http://www.politicalworld.org C. Flower

    Speaking from strictly loss-making voluntary territory, not making money or looking to, but with an enthusiasm for news, politics and discussion, I’ve asked myself all the same questions. At the moment we are in what might be looked back on as a golden era of free internet professional news content – from press agencies as well as news”papers” – overlapping with individually generated youtube/blog/forum/twitter/fb commentary, discussion and independently generated news.

    As a discussion forum, our members depend on a certain amount of verified news to make sense of what we’re talking about. If newspapers go behind paywalls, we tend to look to other sources (books, periodicals, press releases, raw data) as there is no way that people who like to use multiple sources critically will choose, like some Victorian paterfamilias, a daily journal that we will stick to for life.

    It could point to a future with intensified forms of “citizen journalism” at one end of the scale and an elite of users who can pay for one or more news outlet at the other.

    Storyful might well make it as a link between the two.

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