By Mark Baber
May 14 – News International is to use Premier League football clips to drive subscriptions to its Sun+ service, the digital offering of the UK’s highest circulation tabloid newspaper. The subscription will cost £2 a week in the UK.
In January, News International, the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper group, won the rights to publish online clips from all 380 Premier League games for three seasons from the start of the 2013-14 season on its Times, Sunday Times and Sun digital platforms.
The clip rights had previously been held by ESPN who had used them to drive their highly successful, but free, ESPN Goals app. In the first season of its deal. ESPN had charged a subscription but is believed to have had less than 20,000 subscribers, no-where near covering the cost of the rights fee. The free app, though, became the highest downloaded football app in the UK, with more than 2 million downloads.
The announcement of the News International subscription price follows on from BT Sport’s announcement that it would be providing a package of Premier League games for free to subscribers to its broadband service.
Sun+ will go live on August 1 and be available on web, phone and tablet devices, with The Sun being the first British tabloid to erect a firewall for its digital content, following on from a similar move by The Times.
Mike Darcey, CEO of NI Group Ltd, said: “This move ensures we will be offering a compelling paid-for package across all our titles, delivering great value for news that is worth paying for. With the addition of the Premier League clips, we will be able to build on The Times’ credentials as Sports Newspaper of the Year, The Sun’s reputation as the paper for football and The Sunday Times’ renowned in-depth analysis and comment.”
Murdoch’s company has traditionally used football content to build its customer base, but it remains to be seen if the clips service will attract enough custom to make the subscription model work on the internet.
Where Murdoch has the advantage over the ESPN experience is in the marketing leverage that can be applied through his daily newspapers. With the newspaper group struggling to maintain profitability through news paper copy sales, the digital strategy for content is becoming crucial.
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