Posted: 2009-11-07 at Asia Media Forum
By Jose Galang
MANILA, Nov 6 (Asia Media Forum) — Hounded by declining circulation and rising costs, Philippine media entities are turning to the Internet for new sources of growth in revenue and readership.
“We’re reaching a wider audience now that we’re on the Web and we operate on less funds,” says Marites Dañguilan Vitug, editor-in-chief of ‘Newsbreak’, which in February 2007 dropped its hard-copy fortnightly magazine format it had been putting out for the previous six years and transformed itself into a mainly online news and current affairs publication (Newsbreak.com.ph).
A community newspaper, ‘Sunday Punch’, published out of Dagupan City in the country’s northern province of Pangasinan, is counting on its website, www.punch.dagupan.com, for more meaningful growth that will complement its print version.
Ermin F. Garcia Jr., the weekly’s publisher-editor, says that most of the ‘Punch’s’ online readers are Pangasinan folks who live overseas, who also encourage their relatives back home to subscribe to the print version. Subscribers of the print edition also ask their relatives abroad to log on to the website for updates.
“I am seeing a complementing role for each [of the print and online versions],” Garcia told the Asia Media Forum.
Meanwhile, industry chatter has it that one of the country’s broadsheets is finalising moves to launch an e-paper that will be highly interactive accessible only to paying subscribers.
Internet usage in this country of 90 million people has surged over the past three years. From 21 percent in 2006, the percentage of the Philippine population who access the Internet has grown to 28.3 percent towards the end of 2008, according to studies made by market research firm Nielsen Media and Internet search engine Yahoo! conducted over October-November 2008.
The growth — noted both in Internet access from home computers and from Internet cafes — was observed not just in Metro Manila but also in all major cities around the country, and in all economic classes and age groups as well.
This surge in Internet usage came as readership of newspapers and magazines declined (from 20 percent to 15 percent, and from 18 percent to 7 percent, respectively, over the same period), along with television viewership (from 97 percent to 92 percent), the same survey said. Only radio registered a higher performance — from 69 percent in 2006 to 80 percent in 2008. (full Story)
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