The last financial results from The Economist is a gold mine for understanding the recent trends of the media industry and how an indiscuss leader like The Economist is struggling to maintain its business sustainable. Illuminating is the first item of The Economist Group’s guiding principles: “We aim to offer insight, analysis and services that are valued by our customers”. That explains one of the core aspects of The Economist strategy: not multiplying publications, but focus on the needs and nature of your customers. This lead to very simple results: growing of the subscription base thanks to add more value to the digital services and contents related to the subscriptions, less dependency from advertising, growing of research and consulting services. These last seem very interesting for two reasons. First of all, there is continuity among Research business and Content business (with good research you can create great content) Second many of their content customers are also research customer. And from Research, you can develop also Consulting business, which is also growing.
Here the link to the Economist Annual Report: https://lnkd.in/e7tpMDG
