huffington post secondary research

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Huffington Post: College Edition Secondary Market Research Shelly de Greeve [email protected] Roland Gendron [email protected] Peter Hsu [email protected] Karlay Tan [email protected]

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Page 1: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Huffington Post: College Edition

Secondary Market Research

Shelly de [email protected]

Roland [email protected]

Peter [email protected]

Karlay [email protected]

Page 2: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Contents

• Company Background

• Demographics / Market Dynamics

• Deep Dive - College Newspapers Readership

• Industry Overview / Competitive Landscape

Page 3: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Company Background• Online news aggregator and original content generator

• Founded in May 2005 by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti

• Legal filings in Delaware

• Headquartered in New York City

• Privately owned by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer

• Internet Publishing and Broadcasting: NAICS 519130 & SIC 27419909

• Website Pages include:

Politics Media Entertainment Sports Business

Living Style Green Technology World

Books/NYR Impact Video Blogger Comedy

City Guides: Chicago

(2008)

New York

(6/2009)

Denver

(9/2009)

Los Angeles

(12/2009)

Page 4: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Company BackgroundSource Employees Revenue

Alexa.com 250-1000 band $10 - $50m

Dun & Bradstreet 1 $85,000

Huffington Post 98 listed Undisclosed

LinkedIn.com 11-50 band not referenced

Manta.com 20-49 band $5-$10m

Yahoo! Finance 48 $4m

Wikipedia.org 60 not referenced

Huffington Post Employee Demographics

according to LinkedIn:

– 51% male and 49% female

– Median employee age of 28

– Top school representation from NYU,

Columbia University and Graduate School

of Journalism

According to Alexa.com, visitors over-index as:

– Female

– College Graduates

– Between the ages of 25 - 64

– Top school representation from NYU, Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism

– Without Children

– Browse from Work

Page 5: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Company Popularity & User Data• 39,642 sites link in to the Huffington Post

• Daily traffic ranking over the past six months improved from 450 to its current 136

• Over the past 3 months, it received 4.3-4.6 page views/user for a total site visit of 5.4-5.8 minutes

• Within the site, guests visit: • 99.1% - main site

• 00.4% - fundrace

• 00.3% - images

• 00.1% - blogger

• 00.0% - feeds, fundrace-origin, and other

• #1 blog on Technorati Top 100 blogs

• 55,000 followers on Twitter

• Almost 87,000 fans on Facebook

• Time Magazine placed it in the 25 best blogs of 2009

Page 6: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Company Ranking & Traffic

PatternsWorldwide Ranking

alexa.com

Global Search Popularity

Last Month – alexa.com

36 US 1 huffington post

100 Canada 2 walmart

166 South Africa 3 brittany murphy

212 Pakistan 4 jamie jungers

240 South Korea 5 josyln james

241 Australia 6 tiger woods

277 UK 7 avatar

406 Netherlands 8 huffington

471 India 9 loredana jolie

1176 Germany 10 jamiee grubbs

Site visits preceded by

upstream visits to:

Site visits proceeded by

downstream visits to:

21.00% Google 18.02% Google

6.64% Facebook 6.26% Facebook

5.20% Yahoo 4.30% Yahoo

2.22% Twitter 2.49% NYTimes

1.90% NYTimes 2.44% YouTube

1.74% TMZ 2.25% Twitter

1.74% YouTube 2.12% TMZ

1.60% People 1.51% People

1.45% CNN 1.32% CNN

0.97% Wikipedia 1.02% Washington Post

Page 7: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Demographics• College Edition targets young adults (18-24)

• Adults 18-24 comprise 13% of U. S. population; 18-34 includes 30% of U. S. population

• 40% of adults 18-24 are currently enrolled in college –12 million potential readers and growing!

• College students spend an average of 18 hrs per week online; 94% online daily.

• Graduates are increasingly retaining contact with their alma mater

• Building brand loyalty amongst college students will likely retain readership post graduation

Page 8: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Demographics – Population

• Ethnically diverse

population group

• Hispanics, Blacks, and

Asians overrepresented

as percentage of overall

group population

• Whites declining as % of

overall group population

(-0.6% in 10 yrs)

• Largely single

Page 9: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Demographics - Growth and Segment

Internet Use

• College enrollment hits all-time high, fueled by community college surge

• Tied as top group of internet penetration at 93%

Page 10: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Demographics – Trends by Gender and Race

• As of October 2008, women

comprised 53% of all young college students. (Census

Bureau)

• Whites are attending college

more than ever before

• Hispanics trend upward on

completing high school, possible indicator of college

trends

• Blacks are declining in both

college and high school graduation since 2007

Page 11: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Demographics – Online Behavior• In the past year, the

majority of college aged

adults have not made

an online purchase

• Primary drivers of online vs retail purchase include:

• 84% - Convenience

• 81% - Lower Prices

• 54% - Sales Promotions

• 54% - TV Ad

• 39% - Print Ad

• 21% - Radio Ad

• Strong opportunity for online sites to supplant more expensive TV/print ads

Page 12: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Online Deep Dive – College Internet Users

• 33% of college students spend >10hrs per week on-line, 5/15 top uses are news related

• Female students show slight edge in most news category activity outside sports and

weather

Page 13: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Demographics – Social Media Usage

• Heavy use of social media among college students creates a network effect for both purchase decisions and viewing habits online– The majority of college students have an active facebook account

– College students are overrepresented on twitter, underrepresented in Blogosphere

– Young adults value peer input in purchase decisions more than advertisements, print or online. This tendency is more pronounced in young adults than in the overall population.

SNS = Social Network Service

Page 14: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Current Marketing Opinion on Social Media (B2B)

• Despite the cultural phenomenon that Facebook and MySpace have become in the past few years, 55% of top-brand CMOs said they’re not too interested in incorporating social media into their campaigns.

• Early adopter strategic opportunity?

Page 15: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Deep Dive – College newspapers readership• Despite declines in mainstream newspaper readership, college newspapers are an

integral part of students’ lives, with over three-quarters (76%) of them saying they have read their college newspaper in the past month, 55% in the past week.

• The college newspaper provides students a wide range of information, including where they seek out advertising information: Close to three-quarters (73%) of readers say they look at the advertisements in their college paper.

• Campus news is top of mind, with 90% of those surveyed saying it’s important to find out what’s happening within the campus environs.

• Some 44% state that campus newspaper advertising is also information they read and seek out.

• Entertainment-related news, sports and current affairs rank as top areas of interest for students.

Alloy® Research Study

Page 16: Huffington Post Secondary Research

• Though internet usage among college students continues to gain strength, the print edition still garners the most eyeballs, with just less than 20% saying they have accessed their campus newspaper online in the past 30 days.

• Though just over one-third of students say they read their local, daily newspaper on a weekly basis, the figure pales in comparison to the 79% of students who reported engaging with their daily campus newspaper in the past 7 days.

• 53% of students say they read the college paper while on campus; 29% read the paper at home.

• Strong pass-along rates: an average of 3.2 students share a single issue.

Alloy® Research Study

Deep Dive – College newspapers readership

Page 17: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Industry OverviewIndustry: College news aggregation, forum for college columnists,

journalists and students to share news and exchange opinions

Page 18: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Industry Overview – College Newspapers

• College newspapers squeezed by economic downturns • Declining advertising revenue and increasing cost cutting

• Cost cuts may translate to lower quality and lower printing frequency

• Although online college newspaper readership is significantly lower, cost of publishing online is lower

• 36% of campus newspapers does not have web presence

• UWIRE, prior to shutting down had membership of 850 colleges and universities • Opportunity to explore experiences and feedback from

members in primary research

Page 19: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Competitors – Major Media Websites

Page 20: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Competitive Landscape

Content Offering

Collegenews.com• Publication of Boston Hannah International

• Goal of site is to compliment print magazine

• 38000 unique visitors in Dec 2009

• College editorial staff gathers relevant news and information to post on site

• Website administrators install widget to syndicate The Campus Buzz content

College Media Network• Over 3000 student writers and editors, over

600 college newspapers

• Over 2 million online subscribers, 5 million monthly unique visitors

• Technology based on College Publisher, used by hundreds of US college newspapers

• Owned by mTVU, which has established network with universities

DailyBeast.com• Major competitor for HuffPost

• 3 million unique visitors in Sep 2009

• Launched in 2008

• Does not currently aggregate from college newspapers

• 37K followers on Twitter

Google News• 16 million unique visitors in Dec 2009

• One-stop shop for Google users

• Currently has 8 categories, does not aggregate from college newspapers

• Does not support commenting

Page 21: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Questions?

Page 22: Huffington Post Secondary Research

Appendix - Data Sources• Company Background – Nielsen, college media matters, Alexa, Dun & Bradstreet, LinkedIn, Manta,

Yahoo!Finance, Wikipedia, Government, private studies, Newspaper association of America,

Mintel, comScore

• Demand Estimation – US census, SIC, trade associations, experts, Editor and Publisher (trade

assoc.), college publisher, StudentMonitor.com

• Monitoring the Environment – press releases, legislation, industry trends, magazine articles, gallup,

Pew Internet, Pew social trends, Technorati.com, newmediaresearch.org

• Segmentation and Targeting – PRIZM, Adage($), FT($), NAICS, InfoTech trends, Marketing Charts®

Epsilon®, Burst ®, Alloy Marketing, allbusiness.com, compete.com

• Business Intelligence Data – competitor press releases, annual reports, marketing spend (Epsilon®),

Factiva, FT($), Lexis/Nexis

• Paid Sources that would be of interest:

• PRIZM Premium (for bohemian segment “16”) – Price not available

• College Students : Connecting with the Connected Crowd - $695

• College Students Online: Driving Change in Internet and Mobile Usage - $695