“The new generation of readers is completely brand agnostic”

Nikolay Malyarov, EVP, Chief Content Officer and General Counsel, PressReader, speaks to Mamun M. Adil about the benefits of PressReader, as well as changing readership habits.

MAMUN M. ADIL: When was PressReader established?
NIKOLAY MALYAROV: We started in 1999, so we are nearly 17 years old. The original thought was that we would work with newspapers that wanted to reach readers outside their immediate distribution area. This meant that if you were a business or holiday traveller staying at a hotel outside your hometown, you could have your hometown newspaper printed by the hotel or by one of our partners in the area. That part of the business is still growing, although not at the same pace as the digital part. We launched the first ‘all you can read’ press display in 2003 as the digital version of our service. It was envisioned as a way for readers to access content under a single subscription. The key differentiator for us back then, and still is today, was that people did not need to pick and choose the titles they wanted to read. They paid a subscription and they could access anything we offered. At that point, we had roughly 150 publications – today we have 5,200 from 110 countries in over 60 languages.

MMA: Where does the majority of the content come from?
NM: We have a lot of English-language content from all over the Anglo Saxon world, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, the US, and everything in between. We also have a lot of French language content, as well as Spanish and Portuguese and very soon you will see a growth in the number of Chinese language titles. The concept is that it is your one-stop shop for news. We also work with magazines, but the newspaper or magazine element is secondary, what is primary is the content that comes out of them.

MMA: What is PressReader’s reader base?
NM: Our reader base through direct subscriptions is 30 million a year, while our global reach through B2B is 300 million, as we sign up with hotels, airlines, cruise ships, libraries, and private companies, which in turn provide PressReader access to their employees, guests or customers. For example, Qantas Airways wanted to increase the number of their online check-ins in order to reduce costs. They told their passengers that if they checked-in online, they would gain access to PressReader for 24 hours before their flight so they could download whatever they wanted to read. Eventually, when they have WiFi on their planes, they will offer it on board to their passengers. They also give PressReader access to their frequent flyers as a benefit and Qantas can now produce advertising on PressReader to promote their business.

MMA: How has the product changed over time?
NM: One change that has emerged is that PressReader has become less of a digital newsstand in the traditional sense – users are not only coming on board because of the titles we have, but because they want to engage with the content, comment, and interact with other readers as well as with the editorial staff. We have introduced a ‘micro blog’ option that allows users to publish their opinion on PressReader; they are not broadcasting their opinions to all their Facebook friends or Twitter followers; instead, they amass followers around a specific opinion point. For example, if you as a user say, “Pakistan and India should patch up and become best friends,” whoever ‘liked’ your opinion will see content advocating this from other publications. This function is called ‘opinion trends’, and we have spent a lot of time perfecting the corresponding algorithm, because we want our readers to engage with the content. We want to give them relevant content that will drag them in and make them read and read. We have come to the point where our average reading time today is roughly about 20 minutes, which is a lot when you talk about the fact that the attention span of an average person is eight seconds. A lot of publishers come to us because they see how it works.

MMA: Do publishers have to pay a fee?
NM: No, they just have to deliver PDFs to us, and market the fact that their publication is available on PressReader. Some publishers are averse to publicising the fact that their content is available on PressReader, yet we pay the publisher for every one of those reads so it doesn’t cost them anything; in fact, it generates money for them in addition to readership.

MMA: What else is holding back publishers?
NM: Technology has been a barrier from the beginning and still is in some countries. For example, for publishers in Equatorial and Sub-Saharan Africa, providing a daily reliable PDF is not easy to do, although this is changing slowly. The other thing that may hold a publisher back is that ‘perceived’ fear of cannibalisation, or having a mindset that says “It’s my brand, my content, I am the king of the world and I want people to come to me and read me.”

MMA: What are you doing to change this mindset?
NM: We try to show publishers that there is a readership that does not know you exist and is not really interested in entering into a paywall relationship with you, because they don’t know whether the kind of content you produce has any value for them. Furthermore, we tell them that the new generation of readers is completely brand agnostic – they get their content from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, and if you ask them if they know where the content that they are reading is from, they may not know and nor will they care. Yet the mindset we come across with some publishing houses is the old school of thought of having a defacto monopoly on content distribution. They will have to change if they want to be successful today.

Mamun M. Adil is Manager, Business Development and Research, DAWN.

mamun.adil@gmail.com