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cstross

Yesterday's news:

"Procter & Gamble, Asda and Tesco consider pulling News of the World ads

Coca-Cola GB and other major brands voice concerns as Halifax, Co-op, Vauxhall and Virgin Hollidays join ad exodus"

-- The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-worl...

Let me emphasize, that was yesterday. The trickle turned into a flood and then a tsunami today: by the time NewsCorp announced the closure of "News of the World" they only had one major advertiser left on board.

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Just to add to this. I emailed the CEO of o2 last night to tell him that I would switch my business to another provider if they didn't pull their advertising and I received a reply within 15 mins (at about 9.00pm) saying they were already doing this and it said "sent from my iPad" so I kind of suspect that it was a personal email I received back. About 15 mins later o2 were being reported as having pulled their advertising following on from Ford, Mitsubishi, Virgin etc. By this morning most major companies had committed to pull their adverts. The whole thing happened in about 24 hours tops. Biggest selling Sunday paper to nothing. 'Name' journalists from other Murdoch brands, even the Times, are reporting being heckled in the street. A lot of people are very angry.

Good example of mob rule vigilanteism rather than due process.

A vigilante meets out extra legal punishment, nobody has been punished, it's just been pointed out by a lot of people that they need to be. Due process didn't work several times in this case because the Police were implicated and failed to investigate properly. Due process generally doesn't work when the system is infected at a high level and there are lots of careers being controlled by the source of the problem. The Prime Minister knew that his director of communications, who has now been arrested, was criminally implicated in this before he was elected a year ago and he was too scared of the tabloids to do anything about it. I think you need a public protest in these situations. Note: that Protest != Violence.

And yet people are leaving the Sun, sister paper in the empire and really quite similar, untouched. In fact some of the advertisers directly said they were swapping their advertising from NotW to the Sun.

Tokenism on all fronts. NI will launch a Sunday version of the Sun within a few months with content suspiciously similar to NotW.

I found it hard to tell the difference between content in the Sun and the News of the World on a good day. The loss is one of brand, little more.

Tokenism indeed. I'm hoping similar fishy stories emerge from the Sun - but not that it'll close even if the exact same stuff happened there. To lose one red-top looks like misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

Interesting to note that this was probably largely down to a concerted twitter campaign - egged on, as ever, by the gruaniad. See #notw over the last few days.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/06/news-of-...

Yes, when I noticed that the guardian had a chart of the largest advertisers in the NOTW I did feel it was being a little silly. Though personally, that's why I like the guardian; when it's being biased, it's very obvious.

Also http://www.avaaz.org/en/ had a big part to play. That's how I found out about it, not from the Guardian.

How did I know you'd be citing the Grauniad...

They have by far the highest readership of any sunday paper. That wouldn't evaporate overnight.

You knew I'd be citing the Grauniad because they're the only national newspaper that was covering the story in depth. (Until The Independent jumped on board, late in the day.) The Murdoch press and their rival tabloids were all keeping mum, and The Telegraph wasn't touching it either (possibly out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to the PM).

Politicians and rival media outlets are afraid of the NewsCorp empire. They own 30% of the UK newspaper market and a big chunk of its TV programming, and they have long memories. Not people you would want to have holding a grudge against you if you worked in that industry or had to run for re-election.

Actually the Telegraph ran several articles on the issue, including front pages. They are hardly fans of Murdoch. The Guardian really went for it though.

Yeah, the Telegraph have been going great guns recently. But the Guardian have been hammering away at this for yonks.

(I am reminded of the expenses scandal - The Guardian had a journalist who was petitioning the government to release the expense data for years, but didn't get anywhere except repeated trips to the courtroom. Then the Telegraph gets copies leaked from within the expenses office. It's a dirty world out there...)

I knew you'd cite the grauniad because they're pretty much the opposite politically to NOTW/The Sun etc.

Of course they'd be attacking.

Isn't that irrelevant? It doesn't stop them from being right, and it's a little hard to skew losing advertisers as a good thing...

You'd have to jack the cover price quite a bit to make up for the lost advertising. Also, the public is pretty disgusted about this; I think readership would have fallen off a cliff anyway.

The readers don't pay for the paper. The advertisers do.

FWIW, The paper costs £1, so with a readership of 7 million or so every week... That's around £350m / year.

The top advertiser, Sky, spends £2m a year with the paper.

So I find it hard to believe that advertisers are all that important.

Minus the cut to the retailer, minus the cut to the distributor, minus the cost of printing the thing... The income from advertisers is a much higher percentage of the paper's income than you think.

Tabloids traditionally make a higher percentage of income from the cover price compared to broadsheets, partly because their readers are less affluent and so less appealing to advertisers. Still, this 2002 article puts advertising at 40%, which sounds pretty important.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/13/advertising.circ...

Well, the Metro and Evening Standard are given away for free in London each weekday, and only make money from advertising.

The Metro is mostly recycled news stories and press releases from their sister paid-for newspaper, the Daily Mail; their costs are going to be a little less.

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