Hippo: The In-Depth Story
How Hippo emerged as a popular and powerful print media channel
for readers and advertisers in the digital age.
1. FOR STARTERS
It was 2000 and the first round of the digital age was coming to an end.
But we knew that even with the first tech bubble bursting, the world was changing forever. We launched Hippo in January 2001 as a 5,000 circulation 16-page weekly in Manchester.
By the late summer of 2001, the weekly had doubled in size (to 32 pages!) and circulation was growing. Our initial content focus reflected an emerging nightlife scene in Manchester. This was reflected in many of the bar and club ads we ran during those early days.
But that model proved to be limited.
2. TRIAL AND ERROR
In 2003, we pushed to broaden the appeal of Hippo by including more family information, more arts news, and more food content. We launched a Nashua edition. The next year, we launched a Concord edition. We focused on a lot of local city news.
We again changed the model in 2006 by combining the zones into one regional paper that focused more on quality-of-life issues—things to do and family activities. We reduced "traditional news" coverage to just a few pages and increased coverage of food and other core topics.
By 2006, circulation was increasing again—to over 20,000 copies. We were now the state's largest weekly, but still three times smaller than the Union Leader, our region's state-wide daily paper.
4. REFINING THE MODEL
From 2005 to 2010, we continued to refine our content by using polling and focus groups. We stopped doing "event" covers (front pages tied to specific events) because pick up rates decreased after the event was over.
We found content that was really unique from anything else got a greater pick-up rate than highlighting an event that was also on the front of other publications. It worked.
During this period, circulation continued to grow to just under 30,000. We continued to get requests to put Hippo at more locations than we could afford to go to.
in 2011, we went through a large cull of locations to focus just on spots with a high rate of pick-ups and that more closely matched who we wanted reading the weekly.
We continued to closely track each distribution location for maximum pick-up rates to not waste any issues. We continued to use Media Audit and Circulation Verification Council to find out more about our audience.
Were people using the ads to make buying decisions? Did our readers own homes? What kind of cars did they own? How many times did they go out to eat? We learned all this, and continue to monitor these and many other metrics.
3. IN DIFFERENT BUSINESSES
But by this time, we weren't really looking at the Union Leader or any traditional local daily papers as competition. We now, Hippo had evolved to the point where we were practically in different businesses.
Legacy dailies, already suffering financial problems, had cut local lifestyle and arts coverage to focus on their core mission of hard news. As readership declined, page counts shrank as advertisers found the daily model less effective and reliable.
At Hippo, we found our model continued to flourish, even when the national economy entered a prolonged downtown in the 2008-9 period. People still wanted Hippo's local coverage of quality-of-life topics such as food and family activities. And they still wanted it in a convenient print edition.
Of course we published the edition online, like everyone else. But readers preferred our kind of content in print. Often each Hippo would stay in homes all week long, taking the place of the old-time Sunday newspaper.
One of the great unforeseen advantages of our model was that we did not fit any category for national advertisers. So just as our content remained all local, so did our advertising base. Hippo readers knew they could count on finding information about new local businesses in every issue. In effect, we became the local marketplace, which drove readership further.
6. LARGEST IN THE STATE
In 2013, we changed our weekly to all color and slightly reduced the size to make it a bit more easy to handle. In a digital world, black and white just didn't cut it any more.
But 2014 circulation was up to 38,000 and because of various factors it was now about even with the Union Leader, which had been at nearly 63,000 in 2005, but now was down to 38,000.
By mid 2015, Hippo's average weekly circulation was up to 40,200. The Union Leader's average daily circulation was down to 34,275, and continuing to drop.
For us, circulation is only part of what we measure. We use polling—by American Research Group—to find out what our average weekly audience is. It's about 127,000 weekly readers, meaning the paper is passed around.
For a four-week total readership, non-duplicated, it's over 205,000.
Because Hippo is not home-distributed (a system that daily papers continue to rely on) most of the dailies we get a fair number of occasional readers: people that pick up copies here and there when they have time. This broadens our audience.
5. SAY NO TO NARROW-CASTING
Although we kept refining our model, we didn't ever see Hippo as a niche publication or try to focus on any one age group or income level. In an age of targeted marketing, this is counter-intuitive.
We did limit ourselves in one way: geographically. We focused on southern New Hampshire only: basically the area of Hillsborough, Rockingham, and Merrimack counties. It's where 80 percent of people in New Hampshire live. That's who we serve.
And a funny thing happened on the way to the brave new world of narrow-casting. It turns out that readers want to be part of a larger community. And Hippo's coverage area is right-sized to meet this need: everything in the paper is basically within an hour's drive for our audience.
Because people have these things called cars, the normal geographic limitations of legacy daily newspapers no longer apply. The "one city, one local paper" model doesn't work. But the "one region, one guide to all the great stuff in it" really does.
So Hippo has emerged as something unusual: the broad-based audience, but within a defined geographic area. And that helps our advertisers acquire that most valuable prize: new customers.