DMGT considers charging for online content

Daily Mail & General Trust, parent company of the Associated and Northcliffe newspaper groups, is considering charging for content on MailOnline and its other consumer-facing websites.

The slump in press advertising saw DMGT's first-half pre-tax profits swing from £22.6m last year to a £239m loss, including £317m in exceptional items such as impairment charges and redundancy costs. Losses per share were 46p against earnings last time of 15.3p.

Turnover fell 7 per cent to £1.09bn. Nearly 80 per cent of sales come from business-to-business, where charging for content online is more common.

Martin Morgan, chief executive, said the group was considering micropayments for consumer titles, as well as devices such as Amazon's Kindle.

"We are certainly looking at those models," he told the Financial Times. "What is in some ways exciting is that the conversation is being had and the game is moving on from the broad-brush approach that everything has to be free."

He said that there was no "big initiative that is going to come out any time soon" on paid content. But he said that MailOnline's strong position in celebrity content, for instance, could allow it to "add another dimension to stories, [so] as you get deeper in, you have to pay.

"The more specialised the information is . . . the more likely to you are to be able to charge for it," said Mr Morgan. But he warned that it would be "challenging" to charge for general news in the UK because of free competition from the BBC.

Consideration of alternative revenue models has intensified as the print media industry debates whether advertising revenues will fully recover after the recession, due to the challenge from the internet.

"The prudent way we are running DMGT is not to make the assumption that all the revenue will come back to previous levels," said Mr Morgan.

He added that DMGT would look at disposals to focus the business when markets improve and if local media merger rules were relaxed. He would consider "a suitable offer" for its 20 per cent stake in ITN.

The interim dividend is held at 4.8p. The shares fell 10½p to 301p.

Published by: Tim Bradshaw

Published 21st May, 2009

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