Nichebuster Strategy

Paid newspapers in the Netherlands are having a hard time these days. Year after year paid circulations are dropping, advertisers are spending less money on newspaper ads, increasingly shifting their money to other media, and free news-sources are spreading everywhere, making competition fierce. And it’s not just the Netherlands that is suffering from newspaper- fatigue. Worldwide, circulations are dropping. In most Western countries, total circulations dropped around ten percent from 1993-2003. Some countries – like Denmark, New Zealand and also the Netherlands – almost dropped by twenty percent. Some newspapers are trying to compensate the decline in income from sold copies and advertising, by selling brand-extensions, like books or DVD’s. Others are changing the actual format of the product (from broadsheet to tabloid) to turn-around the declining income. But does it really help? Isn’t this just treatment of (the) symptoms, and not the cause itself?