Social housing trade title Inside Housing is going digital-only and ending its print edition, with an increased focus on digital growth.
“Broadly speaking, the audience has been growing, and this is, for us, a story of growth,” said Martin Hilditch, editor at Inside Housing, adding that online is “where the audience is at”.
Inside Housing serves professionals in the social housing industry, and published its first print magazine 1984.
“Over the last few years…outside of the housing sector, if there’s been anything we’ve been known for, it’s probably the work we’ve done on building and fire safety,” said Hilditch.
The title moved from a weekly publication to monthly five years ago, and its November edition is set to be its last.
“The focus for many years now has been the digital Inside Housing, the online news and analysis,” said Hilditch.
He added that moving from weekly to monthly print freed up resources “to put into the content, to deliver more in-depth and up-to-the-minute news and analysis”, and the ceasing of print “enables” the same.
“And that really did make a huge difference to the scale and ambition of what we were able to do,” he said.
“And so that’s really driving that decision [to close print], but it’s definitely focused on providing more content and growing and that’s a kind of starting point.”
The magazine joins a number of other trade titles deciding to shut down print and go digital only: in the last month, Nursing Times ended its 120-year print run to focus on digital growth, and B2B travel trade magazine title TTG also revealed it is closing in print after 72 years.
Under 2,000 print subscribers
Inside Housing had a circulation of 12,070 in July 2020 to June 2021, and 2115 paid subscribers, according to the latest figures available from ABC. It currently has under 2,000 print subscribers, said Hilditch.
The title doesn’t sell on newsstands and its audience is “largely organisational subscribers”, such as organisations working in the affordable housing sector, said Hilditch.
Print has been a “minority part of the contribution” to revenue stream for “a number of years”, said Hilditch. Print advertising revenue is 1% of owner Ocean Media Group’s revenue.
Hilditch, who has worked at the title for more than 20 years, said while “the online audience has been growing very substantially”, print has seen “a slow and steady decline over a number of years”.
Inside Housing now has 14,000 paying online subscribers, a figure which has grown by 33% since January 2023, Hilditch said. He added the site has had 4.58 million user visits and 8.8 million page views in the last 12 months. According to website analytics provider Similarweb, the site had 104,202 visits in October.
‘Freed up time and resource’
Inside Housing is looking to redirect resources towards its website Inside Housing Management, “focused on resident-facing house staffs”, and its newsletter and podcast series of the same name, all launched around April this year.
The Inside Housing Management newsletter has reached “just under 5,000” subscribers to date, which is sent on platform Affino.
It will also focus on its upcoming launches of two newsletters and a series of webinars that look at what the UK Budget means for affordable housing.
Inside Housing Living, launching on 24 November, is another sub-brand “focused on built-to-rent, later living, for profit, [and] student accommodation”. It will be launched alongside a weekly newsletter of the same name.
Hilditch referred to Inside Housing Living and Inside Housing Management as “two big new products for us this year aimed at really specific sections of the market”.
The title is set to launch another newsletter on sustainability, Inside Housing Sustainability. In April, it redesigned and updated its Building and Fire Safety Special newsletter.
Inside Housing currently offers 16 newsletters, with around eight sent on a weekly basis, six sent fortnightly, one daily and one monthly.
“It’s about growing what we’re doing, growing the scale and the ambition and the depth of what we’re doing, and expanding as a set of products, really, the editorial offering,” said Hilditch.
In terms of shifting its editorial focus, Hilditch said more resources can be devoted “to doing those big pieces of work”.
Inside Housing claims to be the only publication that covered every day of the Grenfell Inquiry, and “that kind of in-depth investigative journalism that hopefully we built up a reputation doing” will be explored more as the title moves to online-only.
Expansion in editorial and production teams
The magazine is also “expanding the editorial team”, said Hilditch, which started taking place this year.
It currently has a 17-strong editorial team, including one part-time role.
“Overall, we are growing jobs. This year, we’ve hired, we’re expanding the team so the team is growing,” Hilditch said. “We’ve expanded our production team this year as well…so, it’s in terms of numbers, it’s been a growing team this year.”
The publisher will also look to expand its “range of our offer to partners in the market” this year, Hilditch said. “So yeah, there’s been a big growth in our sponsored content offerings over the last couple of years already, but again, looking to kind of expand and grow that.”
This includes developing “big targeted advertising campaigns”, and developing sponsored content for “everything from round tables to webinars” to “developing that podcast audience”, said Hilditch. “That’s probably some of the areas we’re looking to develop, and that have been developing.”
The Inside Housing Management podcast is released on a fortnightly basis.
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