huffington post secondary research
TRANSCRIPT
Huffington Post: College Edition
Secondary Market Research
Shelly de [email protected]
Roland [email protected]
Peter [email protected]
Karlay [email protected]
Contents
• Company Background
• Demographics / Market Dynamics
• Deep Dive - College Newspapers Readership
• Industry Overview / Competitive Landscape
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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%
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
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
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
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
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?
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
• 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
Industry OverviewIndustry: College news aggregation, forum for college columnists,
journalists and students to share news and exchange opinions
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
Competitors – Major Media Websites
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
Questions?
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