By JON NEWCOMBE, The Rugby Paper (updating of article written in late November 2011)

A Premiership contact of mine recently told me that match day programme sales at top flight games were steadily declining year-on-year to the extent that the take up was just 17% of the gate – compared to nearly twice that number only a few years earlier. The story, it seems, is similar in the RFU Championship where the once-loved programme appears to be something of an endangered species; one club revealing sales figures to me that were less than 10% of the 2,000+ in attendance on the day in question.

Indeed, some clubs have scrapped programmes for the so-called ‘lesser’ competitions, while others have produced a magazine-style publication covering several games over a set period of time.  Obviously, if you are reading this you are still of the ‘old school’ brigade that likes to digest rugby matters in print, rather than having to zoom in or zoom out on a phone or computer screen. Not the same, is it?

In my opinion there will always be a demand for the print media, but as the much publicised sales figures of the nationals tell us only too starkly, things aren’t what they used to be.

The decision to give content away free of charge a decade or more ago when the internet first came to pass was a blinkered one, and one that has had serious repercussions on the newspaper trade, and so it would seem on programme sales.

Where once they were deemed to be highly collectable and a must-have accessory on match day, programmes seem to be viewed as an expensive add-on that many people choose not to buy in what is, of course, an extremely difficult economic climate.

By match day, you will either have read your fill of club-related news either in The Rugby Paper, on the web or through one of the several social network vehicles, Twitter being particularly well-aligned to the modern day demand for instant snapshot news.

To make a match day programme worth buying it has to have original content and that’s no easy feat given the grip that Twitter terminology has even taken on the likes of  Terry Wogan who, on Children in Need night, was talking ‘hash tags’ and ‘trending’. And only the other day Demi Moore’s estranged hubby was talking of his undying love for the actress via Twitter, for goodness sake. If he can sum up his affections in144 characters or less she’s well shot of him, I’d say!

The love affair with Twitter, though, shows no sign of being such a fleeting romance. Extensive research (well, half an hour searching on my Twitter deck) reveals that the Championship and National League One has embraced the concept as a way of communicating with its supporters and members as much as the Premiership has, with differing levels of commitment it has to be said.

As of the halfway point in the Championship season I discovered that all 12 Championship clubs and all 16 in National League One have official (and active) Twitter accounts.

The number of Followers varies greatly from club to club and is sometimes linked to how often the service is updated i.e. Number of Tweets.

Some of the Clubs in the Championship would love the number of Followers to be reflected in numbers through the gate. For example, Nottingham are followed by more people than any of their rivals (2,720) – nearly twice their average home gate this season.

That is why striking a balance between giving content away (the web, Facebook, Twitter etc.) has to be balanced with a commercial considerations. Having a healthy Twitter following is all well and good but if they are not buying match day programmes with hard cash because of it surely that balance has got out of kilter?

Like all good things, moderation (or should that be a moderator?) is the key.


N1 Twitter activity, as at 7th January 2012