NLA's mission in supporting quality journalism has never been more important. At a time when 'fake news' is rife and the threat to publishers of digital platforms such as Google and Facebook is only increasing, NLA is returning record-breaking royalties to publishers for their content.
In 2017 we saw revenues increase to more than £43.8 million which meant the distribution to shareholders and publishers grew by 3.7%. Our client base surpassed 10,000 licensees for the first time, and we provided more content to more media monitoring companies (MMOs) than ever before.
We also experienced significant growth in our international business, with six new agreements allowing companies abroad to re-use UK newspaper content legally and for UK companies to do the same with foreign news.
This was all achieved on a backdrop of internal company restructuring and innovation. NLA media access has acted as a conduit between publishers, MMOs and licensees for many years, however as both industries have evolved, so must we, and considerable effort was - and will continue to be - put into new products and services NLA can offer to enhance the respective organisations’ operations.
Whilst the fruits of much of our labour will be seen throughout this year (and beyond), we did launch eClips Web Specialist in late 2017, allowing participating MMOs uninterrupted and reliable access to 14 specialist paywalled websites, with many more in development.