A B2B newsbrand for the UK construction industry has topped revenue of £1m for the second year running, some 14 years after its co-founders decided to set up on their own.
Aaron Morby and Grant Prior were editor and news editor respectively at Emap-owned Construction News for nearly 20 years before leaving in 2007 when the publisher decided to make changes and bring in new people.
Both freelanced for a few years before deciding to use a chunk of the payoffs they had received to start their own rival publication, the Construction Enquirer, in 2010.
It is online-only, publishing free-to-read via its website and newsletter.
Prior told Press Gazette the Enquirer has average monthly page views of 1.7 million from 400,000 unique users according to Google Analytics, making it the best-read construction industry title.
Data market intelligence company Similarweb also puts the Enquirer top of the table with 825,500 visits (of which 93% was in the UK) in August. Construction News, Morby and Prior’s former employer which has since changed hands as part of a sale to Metropolis, was on 254,100 but has a paywall model.
Much of the Enquirer’s audience comes via its daily email newsletter, which has been going since launch and now has 43,000 subscribers and an average open rate of 50% according to Mailchimp. (Email open rates should be taken with a pinch of salt following Apple changes in recent years although Prior did say anyone who does not open the newsletter for three months is taken off the list.)
“When Construction News was sort of at its height of popularity way back in the mid nineties, I think it hit a print circulation of something like 40,000 and that was always seen as the highest number of people you could reach in the industry, really,” he added. “We get that every day.”
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Prior said that commercially the Enquirer has grown “steadily” from 2011 when it turned over £18,000. In the year to March 2023 it crossed £1m for the first time and then last year it grew further to £1.1m, generating a pre-tax profit due to its low cost base.
Prior and Morby, who both work at home, remain the only editorial employees and they are assisted by two freelance sales staff and a tech person.
Prior said: “We had a very simple idea: it was just to take the old B2B magazine model and put it online.”
The main difference, he said, was that they ditched features and comment and focused purely on news.
“I never got sort of prissy about this idea that people were going to flick through a trade magazine for two hours a day, it’s always been a bit of a nonsense. And with Google Analytics, you can see exactly how long people spend on stories. They just want quick information and correct information.”
Prior added: “We knew that news was important in construction because it’s always been a very news-driven industry, and when we saw the traditional titles going away from news going towards features and events – to be blunt, most of them became no longer media companies, they became events businesses. And we just sort of drove through the middle of that.
“I get the model… but then if actually your core product, like the magazine, dilutes down to such a small size people there’s no kudos attached to that, so we decided never to get involved, really, in the events side of things. We’re too small a team and it’s too costly.”
Prior added that the “newsletter is the six or seven biggest news stories of the day that we think are important. We just deliver those quickly to people because we took the gamble all those years ago that people’s attention spans were getting shorter, and that’s certainly proved to be the right route to take.”
Commercially the key, Prior said, is that all their ad sales are done directly to industry clients with the promise of a “very focused” audience who are happy to click on products they think might help their business.
The Enquirer offers website and newsletter ad slots as well as email blasts which go out separately to the morning newsletter to avoid any blurring of editorial and paid-for content. They have also deliberately stayed away from pop-up ads and native advertising that “annoys the reader”.
“Everything we’ve always done has been based on just transferring old school print stuff online: news, advertising, keep them separate, write good stories,” Prior said.
“Our advertisers come back because everything’s measurable, so we send out the clickthrough stats and the page impression stats to all our advertisers. They’re all really high and they really enjoy it.”
Prior suggested that others could easily follow suit to create their own rivals to incumbents covering different industries because the start-up costs are much lower than when print was the primary medium.
He said: “There’s a lot of negative talk about the death of journalism, but knowing your market and providing a valuable service to a specialised sector can still pay off.”
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