DAILY XPRESS DOWN FOUR MORE PAGES
At the risk of being accused of being fixated by the goings-on at Daily Xpress, I have yet another post relating to the free English publication produced by Nation Multimedia Group. Today's edition is down to a mere 28 pages (from 32 pages in recent weeks) and feels painfully thin. It's another sure sign of cost cutting.
So how much is cutting four pages likely to save? From my experience publishing an almost identical (in frequency, format and pagination) newspaper I reckon they'll save around 10,000 - 12,000 baht per day in production costs on their claimed 100,000 copy print run. It might be less than that because they use their own printing press.
Earlier this year we opted to stop printing our newspaper and take it entirely online. I wonder if Daily Xpress is heading for a similar destination?
3 comments:
It seems to me that the problem is sales - I don't see that many ad's in there, especially small sized ads local business could afford. My guess is they are cutting costs due to a poor sales team - what do you think?
I think it's too easy to blame sales staff. If you have a bad product or concept even the best sales team will struggle.
Ads have dried up, and I can bet a lot of the ones in there are part of barter deals or promotions - i.e. not paid for. The rate card price for one page in Daily Xpress is something like 180,000 baht. There is no way they're achieving that level in this market and with that product.
It would certainly seem that the Daily Xpress is doomed. If it gets any smaller it will be little more than an A4 flyer hidden inside the Nation.
Actually, I could write a comment Xpress-ing my disappointment that would be longer than the miserable paper itself. Sadly however, I just don't have enough staff, time or advertising revenue to make it worthwhile.
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