Liza Turner sees Paperloop's revenues increasing from both online products and corporate site licensing.

Paperloop is a business-to-business information company, said Liza Turner, vice president of sales and marketing for the Information Products Division.

Paperloop was formed in 2000 from a series of acquisitions including established newsletter titles in the forest products industry from Miller Freeman in San Francisco..

These titles include Pulp & Paper Week ($867/year), PPI This Week (777 euros/year), and PPI Asia News (24x, $625/year).

Paperloop currently publishes four additional print newsletters: Nonwoven Markets (24x, $627/year), International Woodfiber Report ($449/year), PaperTree Letter (12x, $399/year), and Timberland Markets (6x, $447/year online only), three magazines, and a variety of other information services including research reports, industry statistics, directories, and more.

The magazines, Turner explained, are controlled circulation, advertising-supported, and a different part of the business. The newsletters are part of her area of responsibility.

Still using traditional DM

With the newsletter titles, Turner said that they send out traditional direct mail offers and renewal series mailings and keep very careful records of them, as other newsletter publishers do. "But what I'm very much interested in is the development of new approaches to information marketing."

Forest products, she noted, is a consolidating industry, certainly not a high-growth one--so what Paperloop is emphasizing is "increasing the value and service we are providing to the people we reach."

Moving subs from individual to corporate site license agreements

Basic to their marketing strategy is moving subscribers from an individual basis to corporate license agreements that include print subs, other services (market analysis, forecasts, mill information on costs, and online access to information).

In addition to this, Turner said, they also offer the firms the convenience of having their account managed by Paperloop, freed from mail solicitations and endless renewal notices for various titles.

She also said that this "frees them from worry about copyright violations"--although I'm honestly not sure how much the average corporate subscriber to high price publications worries about copyright violations.

Paperloop studies their subscriber records to identify firms that have perhaps a number of subs to a number of their titles and approaches them, over the telephone and then in person, to convert to a corporate license arrangement. Obviously those vary widely in scope from firms like International Paper to a small mill in Alberta. The number of subscribers covered by the agreements varies from five to 500.

Paperloop has an extensive website (www.paperloop.com). At one point, Turner said, "We were operating in two streams--the newsletter and the online information available on the website, but with our corporate subscribers we are offering 'information' in print or online, however they want it."

A quick review of one day's news on the website showed about one third of the stories to be available free while the remainder are limited to subscribers. They market this as "Gold Access" subscriptions ($339/year) to all the data on the website, but Turner said they may soon drop that and limit all access to information on the website to subscribers.

Internet has given them new abilities

The internet, she said, has given them the ability to create new products, to segment the market, and offer internet-only products at different prices that contain what she calls "repurposed content." All of which, of course, is both available to the corporate subscribers and marketed through direct mail.

At the same time, Paperloop continues to have what Turner called "individual subscribers" by which she does not mean consumers, but executives at smaller firms who might take one or two subs to one or two titles.

They continue to market them with traditional direct mail and to identify those who might be prospects to convert to a corporate subscription. But, in a statement I've never heard before, Turner said she can envision the day when analysis shows them that they would be better off financially to offer only corporate subscriptions and to no longer sell onesies and twosies. They aren't there yet, but she can imagine it happening.

(Editor's note: I myself am trying to imagine a publisher telling a prospect who wants only a single print subscription to Pulp & Paper Week at $867/year that "We no longer offer it that way.")

Rosy future

Looking at the business in 2004, Turner noted that over the past several years their revenues from "traditional newsletters" had been declining due both, she assumes, to business conditions and consolidations in the industry. Business in that area, however, has "stablilized" and revenues are increasing from both online products and corporate subscriptions.

Paperloop, 4 Alfred Circle, Bedford, MA 01730, 781-734-8900, fax [phone]; Fulfillment, 12444 Victory Blvd., 4th Floor, North Hollywood, CA 91606, 818-487-4500, fax [phone], www.paperloop.com