Scripps Bets People Will Pay For Content

Plenty of TV stations and newspapers have apps to deliver content to smartphones, tablets and other devices, but many are free as the content owners bank on selling ads as their business model. E.W. Scripps Co., however, is moving to make consumers pay for the apps needed to access content from its stations and newspapers.

“We are a very aggressive believer in digital,” Scripps President-CEO Rich Boehne told the UBS Global Media and Communications conference Tuesday in New York. “Pretty much everything that we’re doing on the newspaper side we’re also doing on the TV side,” he said, showing the investor gathering a slide with multiple apps available from ABC affiliate WEWS Cleveland, Ohio.

Click here to see a similar list of apps on the WEWS website. A few are still free, but several require payment. For example, the Storm Shield weather app for iPhone will cost you $4.99 to download from the Apple iTunes store.

“Most of our apps today are paid and we will continue to introduce more and more paid apps on the TV side,” Boehne said. “We just think that with what the newspapers are doing across America — where they’re introducing and building this revenue stream of paid digital — that TV stations will miss an opportunity if they don’t try to come in at the same time and build a market alongside or in competition with the newspapers for those who are going to pay for digital content.”

The CEO said you could probably divide the conference room right down the middle between those who believe that paid digital content is going to work and those who believe consumers, for the most part, won’t pay. “We happen to believe it will work — that high-quality products providing content for which there are no substitutes in the market will drive value and subscribers. And we’re investing behind that,” Boehne told the gathering.

“We’re also adding lots of digital sales people. We’ve done research in our markets on what the digital revenue opportunity is in each market. We’re building a model against the opportunity,” Boehne said, stressing that is especially the case in Scripps’ TV markets.

Scripps recently reported that digital revenues jumped 85% in 3Q to $4 million for its TV segment. Newspaper digital revenue was greater, $6.5 million, but was up less than 1% from a year earlier.

Company executives reiterated guidance that 4Q same-station TV revenues will be up 35%-40%. Scripps had previously announced that political revenues for 4Q were $57 million, bring the full year to a record $107 million. Looking ahead, Scripps is expecting another big political year in 2014, with gubernatorial races in eight states where it has 11 stations and U.S. Senate races in five states.

Brian Lawlor, the company’s SVP-television, continued to talk up the self-produced shows — The List and Let’s Ask America — which replaced the syndicated Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy on Scripps stations in seven markets beginning in September. Lawlor told investors that the company expected household ratings to slip. “And that’s certainly been the case, but the demo skew on that show was so incredibly old that part of our motivation to move on was that we were never getting bought on 18-24 and 18-49 buys because there was no audience there,” he explained.

As for the newbies, Lawlor says more than half of the audience skew is below 54 years old. “I think advertisers have been happy to see that.”