"Digital revenues, including advertising and subscriptions, represent 50% of Les Échos' turnover, which amounts to approximately 90 million euros. And, for the first time since its acquisition in 2008 by LVMH, a group founded and chaired by Bernard Arnault, the daily is in balance in 2021", welcomed Pierre Louette, head of the Les Echos-Le Parisien group since 2018.
On the other hand, the situation is more complex for the national daily Le Parisien-Aujourd'hui in France.
Its CEO hopes to see it "close to equilibrium" and conquer 200,000 digital subscribers by 2025.
"In 2015, we recovered a newspaper in a state of great unpreparedness on the web, with a model based essentially on free access and therefore with very few digital subscribers", he develops.
“For a long time, it was not able to compensate for the decline in paper with digital”, Le Parisien remaining “very exposed to the continuous erosion of newsstand sales”, specifies the manager.
Since its takeover by the LVMH group in 2015, the daily has "accumulated heavy losses" and was bailed out "up to 83 million euros", underlines Le Figaro.
But in 2021, Le Parisien "reached an inflection point" with twelve consecutive months of upward circulation, assures Mr. Louette.
"The daily exceeded the milestone of 50,000 digital subscribers at the end of 2021, multiplied by 6 in three years, which now represents 25% of its circulation", explains the number one of Echos-Le Parisien.
This result can be explained in particular by the reduction in free articles and the development of internet subscriptions.
At the editorial level, the CEO also explains that he "led a large-scale editorial project, with around a hundred mobility within the editorial staff, to redirect (the) content towards those that transform the most".
At the same time, the group has "reduced all paper-related expenses, again recently by selling Proximy, the distribution subsidiary".
"We are becoming a media tech company: our group now has a great depth of content, backed by more than a hundred digital specialists to finely send the right information to the right person", says Pierre Louette.
© 2022 AFP