The six pillars driving PRISA Group’s goal of 800,000 subscribers by 2029
Is the news industry “an interesting sector to invest in”? A somewhat surprising opinion perhaps, but that’s Joseph Oughourlian’s view.
For the past five years, Oughourlian has been the Chairman of the PRISA Group, a Spanish conglomerate operating leading media and education brands across Europe and Latin America.
Speaking at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Marseille, Oughourlian admitted that he was “relatively new to this business,” noting that he is a financier by background.
His presentation therefore offered “the perspective of someone that doesn’t come from the sector, that looks at the sector as an interesting sector to invest in.”
“This may seem surprising at first. But I do think that there is a business case, and an investment case, for news media,” he said.
Oughourlian, who also has investments in football clubs in France, Colombia, Italy and Spain, continued: “I did meet the same kind of scepticism when I invested in football clubs. But let me try and convince you.”
When he arrived at PRISA Group, he said that the company’s radio assets were in a good shape, but its newspapers, including El País, were struggling. At that point, a strategic decision was made to laser-focus on one goal: increasing the number of subscribers.
“We needed to rebuild the direct relationship with what I would call our ‘fan base’,” Oughourlian said. This was because most news organisations – particularly in Spain – had been “giving away our product for way too long, and it was high time we rebuilt that relationship.”
The company looked at international success stories for inspiration: “The nice thing about Spain and our group is that we were so far behind the Anglo-Saxon world, or even the rest of Europe, that we didn’t really need to think much in terms of what our strategic priorities should be. We just focused on what the others had been doing,” Oughourlian said.
PRISA Media in key figures.
New strategy underpinned by six pillars
Today, El País is close to reaching the milestone of half a million subscribers, “which isn’t bad for the Spanish market,” Oughourlian said. “Our number two competitor [the newspaper El Mundo – Ed.] is at 200,000 subs.”
Moreover, El País has attracted 12 million registered users and 182 million followers on social media, showing that there is a “big pool of people out there following us,” he said.
Having built up its audience and subscriber base, El País has gone from a loss-making title to a profitable one over the past five years. The time has now come for the next stage in their growth strategy, Oughourlian said.
It rests on six pillars:
Building on trust: “It’s absolutely fundamental for us to stick to our core values, to the promise that in a world that is driven by tons of fake news, misinformation, disinformation […] you can turn to El País and know that what we put out there has been checked.”
Growth in Americas: Although El País is well-known in Latin America, its readership in the region has not been significant, Oughourlian said. Over the past five years, the publisher has focused on building a bigger audience in the region. Today, half of their overall audience comes from Latin America.
The next step is converting some of those people into subscribers.
“Easier said than done,” Oughourlian admitted, given the market realities: “Those are countries that are notoriously difficult when it comes to the subscription model. People are not used to paying for subscriptions.”
On the other hand, he cited companies such as Netflix as examples of businesses that have succeeded in building a significant subscriber base in Latin America. This shows that there are large groups of people in these markets who are willing to pay for quality media products.
New audiences: Like most publishers, Oughourlian said that PRISA Group aims to reach more young readers, particularly the generation that “has not been brought up with the idea that you wake up in the morning, you have coffee, and you read El País.”
Audiovisual: It is essential for the publisher to offer their news content in a range of formats. As a leader in the radio market in the Hispanic world, largely thanks to their music brand LOS40, audio is a natural medium for the company, while the importance of video is also growing.
Digital advertising and data: The growth in the subscriber base also brings with it access to a broader set of audience data, which helps generate new business opportunities for advertisers to place their ads in a brand-safe environment.
Diversification: Oughourlian was light on details when it came to examples of new revenue streams, but the overall goal for the company is to achieve a more diversified revenue mix.
In his words, the ambition is to “grow your revenues into your brand”.
“Everyone knows El País in Spain. Everyone knows El País in Latin America. But it is a tiny company by its share of revenue,” he said
“The idea is to grow your revenues into your brand, rather than shrink your brand into your revenue. Easier said than done, but as a lot of news publishers have demonstrated […] we have the value of our brand capacity to reach out to people on many, many different other business opportunities and many, many different consumer propositions.”
“When I look at what’s been done, it’s incredible, the range of opportunities we have. And it’s more a question of trying and finding out what is the most appropriate and most interesting, scalable opportunity for us to get into,” Oughourlian said.
Four main verticals
Another key part of PRISA Group’s strategic plan is defining the main verticals for them to operate in. First of these is, naturally, News – but Oughourlian emphasised that news alone is not enough as a business area.
“We’ve always been very focused on news and info […] That’s our DNA, that’s what we do. The people that led the organisation all came from news.”
“So we focused almost exclusively on news – which is the least profitable part of our business. As a financier, I realised that none of the other things would be possible without having built that incredible brand around news. But it’s certainly not the most interesting area to develop as a media organisation.”
The second pillar, Sports, leans heavily on the company’s brand AS, which Oughourlian said is the world’s leading Spanish-language sports newspaper, as well as on the interest in the Spanish football league La Liga globally, particularly in Latin America and the US.
The third pillar focuses on Music, capitalising on the company’s radio assets, particularly the hit-music radio network and multimedia brand LOS40. The crossover between music styles and artists between Spain and Latin America is an advantageous trend here.
“It may surprise you, but Mexico is the second largest music market in the world. So there’s both a lot of production and interest on the content side, but also some very deep and very interesting and profitable markets on the consumer side,” Oughourlian said.
The fourth pillar, Lifestyle, will also have an important role in attracting audiences outside Spain.
“As I keep repeating to my teams, outside of Spain, there’s a limited number of people that are very interested in the results of the elections in Extremadura [an autonomous community in Spain – Ed.],” Oughourlian said.
“But outside of Spain, there are a lot of people that would love to know more about the quality of life in Spain and the best restaurants, the best hotels, the best beaches.”
‘We’ll be a lot more diversified’
Coming back to PRISA Group’s news products and El País in particular, Oughourlian said that the newspaper’s strong reputation as a “trustworthy and balanced” outlet is key to its international growth.
“Particularly in countries like Mexico, where unfortunately you have the largest number of journalists being killed every year, mostly by narco-terrorism or mafia,” he said.
“People turn to El País when it comes to actually reporting on the violence and some of the events that happened there, and also on Mexican politics.”
As for where the company wants to be in the near future, Oughourlian said that the PRISA Group currently has revenues of about 450 million euros. The goal is to increase this figure to 520 million by 2029. Moreover, the publisher wants to increase the number of subscribers from more than 450,000 to 800,000 within the same timeframe.
“We’ll be a lot more diversified, a lot more international and a lot more digital. It looks very easy. I’m aware that the execution is a different matter,” he said.
“But this team has delivered over the last few years, so there’s no reason they couldn’t deliver in the coming years.”
