Having ceased being a print publication on March 26th 2016, The Independent has since been a digital-only newspaper being accessible via either a mobile application available on iOS, Android and Windows to name a few platforms and a website. As the first national newspaper to embrace the approach, the publication has seen both positives and negatives, first and foremost in the sense that it's readership has risen by 42%. While this is the case though, the paper is also wary of the increase in costs that they may go on to witness as their reach globally goes up.
- Readership up by 42%
- As of April the app received twice as subscribers as the print publication did
- The monthly audience of independent.co.uk has risen by 33.3% in the last 12 months to 70m users
To me personally, this article is representative of the transition that a lot of newspaper publications will make from print to e-media. Having already established that print is a continually dying media in Year 12 while e-media is only continuing to grow and become more lucrative, it's inevitable that we'll see more publications make this switch. Eventually I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more cases of this with The Independent leading the way as being the first to do it. At the same time though, it'll be interesting to see how the publications approach the transition in the way that they'll handle their costs because as said before audiences are only continuing to grow, so where will be the cut-off point where they decide that they're not going to expand their reach anymore?
No comments:
Post a Comment