On one floor of Prisa Media’s Madrid headquarters, El País has built a digital subscription business of roughly 490,000 subscribers behind a paywall that changes its rules by country. One floor away, Diario AS — the group’s sports title and one of thw two most dominant names in Spanish sports media — has no paywall at all. And the executives who run it aren’t convinced it will ever get one.

The gap between those two answers was the most instructive thing about the Prisa Media stop on the opening day of INMA’s Madrid study tour, a two-day programme of newsroom visits that opened Media Innovation Week for 25 news media executives.

Ana Ormaechea, digital product manager at Prisa Media, raised the question before anyone in the visiting group could:

“It’s really different from other countries, such as Italy or France, that sports newspapers are under subscription,” she said. “In Spain, no. The two biggest, that are AS and Marca, they are open, both of them.”

Whether they will eventually go behind a paywall, she added, is a perennial discussion.

Tomás de Cos, deputy director of strategy at Diario AS, explained why it continues to be a conversation.

“It’s always in the landscape, but it’s not a real thing today because here we have a different sports media ecosystem,” he said. “We have more than four sports media legacy: Marca, Diario AS, Diario Sport, and Mundo Deportivo. And two or three digital players more and probably the most competitive ecosystem in sports media in the world. It’s quite different to Italy or France.”

The structural point matters for any publisher weighing a paywall on a secondary brand. In a market with one dominant sports title, putting the content behind a paywall is a decision about pricing. In a market with four legacy sports dailies and a handful of digital challengers, it is a decision about handing the audience to three rivals who have kept their open.

De Cos still lists a potential subscription model among the brand’s goals. It sits behind everything else.

Ad revenue and audience expansion

What AS built instead began with advertising, not readers.

Its international expansion — a Latin American edition in 2013, then newsrooms in Chile in 2014 and in Colombia, Mexico, and for U.S. Hispanic readers across 2015 — was driven by a revenue problem rather than an audience one.

“We had a huge amount of audience out of Spain but without income,” de Cos said. “We are searching for readers but mostly important advertisers. If you want to have new clients in the advertising industry, you have to be local.”

Local, in practice, means locally made. “Mexican content, written or generated for Mexicans,” de Cos said, “filtered by a Mexican, too. This is the key to success.”

That approach now supports seven digital editions in Spanish and English, 57 million monthly unique browsers, around 800 million monthly page views, and more than 38 million social followers. De Cos said AS ranks first among Spanish-language sports websites worldwide and first in Spanish-language sports media in the United States, where it sits 12th in Comscore's general sports ranking.

Social expansion

The second strategy is social, and it is a response to pressure rather than an opportunity.

“We are suffering a lot with the Google strategies,” said Aloysio Araujo de Albuquerque, chief sports officer at Prisa Media. “All the live matches, we are losing a lot of traffic, direct traffic in the Web, so we are trying to get all the audience by social and combine both audiences.”

The numbers suggest the substitution is holding. AS recorded 3.5 billion social video views in July during the World Cup and climbed 10 positions in the US ranking over the summer. Crucially, the revenue followed.

“We have doubled the revenues this year in social, and idea is to at least increase 50% next year,” Albuquerque said — and not by charging more for the same inventory. Asked whether higher CPMs were closing the gap, he was blunt: “Not increasing CPMs. The idea was to increase branded content, social branded content.” Advertising revenue is rising this year even as Web site traffic falls.

Brand expansion

Print, meanwhile, has become something other than a business. Daily sales have fallen to between 20,000 and 25,000 from a peak around 200,000.

“Print edition today doesn’t help us be a profitable business,” de Cos said. “But at the same time, the print edition is very important in terms of awareness, marketing, and things like that. So it’s not easy to close. But it’s difficult to have this legacy and try to go fast to the future at the same time.”

Where this leads is a reorganisation of the group around the brand rather than the newspaper. Prisa is moving to a matrix structure, with product, technology, and marketing shared across titles, and sports social strategy now managed as one operation spanning AS, the group’s Latin American and Spanish radio stations, and the football social publisher PostUnited.

“According to our strategic plan, AS should be the sport brand of Prisa,” Albuquerque said. “Right now, it’s not like that, but we are moving to this, pushing the brand of AS everywhere.”

For a title that cannot charge for its journalism, the brand is the asset being monetised.

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