Fairfax gets some billion dollar advice
Hills presenting at INMA in New York
Steve Hills, the big cheese at The Washington Post, was pretty open with his advice to Fairfax Media’s news division boss Sean Aylmer during his keynote at the INMA Conference in New York overnight.
Aylmer queued up to ask the WashPo president about the challenge of maintaining mass audience while building a paid content strategy.
Hills was keen to emphasise the freedom that came from being owned by Amazon owner and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos: “It would be great if you could be bought by a billionaire.”
“He then went on to explain that the Post did not think a large audience and a successful paid content strategy were not mutually exclusive.” Really?? WTF
@ Rupert its not that hard to figure out. Check out the NYT — they have 1m people paying for unlimited access to their content AND they have an audience of 30-40m reading (limited amounts) of their content for free each month. It’s called the metered model. Ditto Fairfax mastheads — around 200k people paying for unlimited access, another 6m or so reading their content on a limited access basis each month.