It is now just over a year since NLA started licensing magazine content. On Wednesday night we celebrated the anniversary at the RSA with publishers, industry colleagues, and media monitoring service providers. A year in, how are we performing?
Licensing is going well and we are experiencing impressive growth, quarter upon quarter, in both gross revenues and client take up. We are confident this will continue to improve as we learn more about magazine content and client requirements. 2014 has been a successful transition year for NLA and publishers. The income we generate from licensing now helps fund jobs for journalists in both the newspaper and magazine sector.
The first year highlights have been;-
- £2.6m (gross) collected for magazines in our first year. We are currently on track to deliver £3.7m in 2014.
- Over 3,500 organisations of - which 1,000 are net new - have been licensed – reflecting NLA’s deeper penetration of the business sector. These include the full spectrum of large multinationals through to SMEs.
- Organisations understand and accept the logic of the extension of NLA licensing to magazines. Magazines have been added seamlessly to our existing licence structure.
- NLA have introduced new licences for magazines, including our public use licence (CWRL) which has been a convenience for users and has generated significant new revenue for publishers who have opted into it.
- An additional 75 publishers joined the NLA from April 2014 and NLA now represents over 180 publishers, and over 2,000 print and web titles.
We are now focused on what we can bring publishers and licence users in 2015. Expanding the magazine content in our eClips service to deliver higher quality clippings faster to users earlier is the next target. We already have four magazine publishers on eClips and expect many more in the coming months. We know clients appreciate full colour, high quality clips, especially from the glossier magazines in fashion. We also hope to continue to add significant new titles to the core licence, and to build the depth of licensed offerings.
So it was a happy anniversary for the magazines NLA partnership, with a lot more to look forward to.