Online Revenue Business Model Has Changed Little Since 1996

ATHENS JOURNAL OF MASS MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS

Since the Internet became less of a novelty and more of a cultural paradigm, global society has turned to the web for up-to-the-minute updates of news and events. One casualty of this new 24-hour news cycle was the American newspaper. No longer the medium by which a digital society receives its news, the American newspaper has slowly limped off to its dying place, as day-old news does not attract readers with the same frequency that it did before the rise of the Internet. Dying mediums do not attract advertisers. A decline in advertising means a decrease in operating budgets, and that means fewer reporters and editors. Part of the reason newspapers were not ready for the technology boom is because management lacked the business acumen and marketing prowess to ready itself for a changing landscape. Newsroom managers were tone deaf to the calls of their readers to innovate. Newspaper response to the Internet was to put all their content online for free, assuming that once accustomed to receiving their news online, readers would come around and agree to pay for online subscriptions. Tellingly, the hierarchical newsroom management model remained unchanged, and news consumers' habits changed around them, thereby rendering print newspapers obsolete. This paper explores the historic downfall of the print newspaper and proposes a new newsroom model that can save the American newspaper.

The new, exponentially digitized communications ecosystem is forcing newspapers to rethink their business and production models. In the pursuit of yield and profitability for their digital outlets, news organisations are searching for new methods of production and payment. In this article we compare the various business models being implemented by the newspaper industry to consolidate their relationship with readers. The freemium model, which combines free and paid content, is utilized by The Wall Street Journal. Another, known as the metered or utility model, employs a payment scheme based on actual consumption. This model has been adopted by The Financial Times. The micropayment model, a third option adopted by several digital newspapers, is based on an open platform and geared towards charging the reader for specific content. A fourth option is the franchise model, an innovative alternative that is developing primarily within the niche market for local editions of mass media publications and which has ramifications for both the reader and product quality.

2002

Today online newspapers are putting a lot of resources into their news sites without profiting from them. They have to find ways to gain from them in order to keep them going. Lately there has been a move from print to multimedia, i.e. news is only a part among other services at the news sites and is presented as audio and video as well. We have conducted interviews at nine local newspapers in Sweden about their current situation and future plans. We have also used a cooperative scenario building technique aiming at finding new online services that could be profitable with both newspaper management and end users. The objective of this paper is to describe the current situation for these newspapers and to discuss possible new future services. Examples of services from the workshops are e.g. advertisement on demand and intermediary services.

Ledelse av mennesker i det nye arbeidslivet, 2020

This chapter explores ways in which legacy newspapers may transform their business and operational models to ensure profitability and protect journalistic ideals. This transformation is explored through the lens of Norwegian media company Amedia, an early innovator. Our analysis sheds light on the ways in which the industry has come to understand the digital attention economy as defined through key innovations initiated by Google and Facebook. At Amedia, these innovations paved the way for a major corporate turnaround in which data harvesting and AI play major roles. The turnaround is still ongoing after seven years, but preliminary conclusions can be drawn. Within an ecological view of organizational adaption, this chapter proposes six theses about design requirements and transformation for legacy newspapers and concludes with four key findings: a) survivability will be difficult without the implementation of a new AI-operational model and business model built on software, b) a spa...

Journalism Practice, 2019

The Web has been publicly available for more than 20 years, and US newspapers' experiment with this particular platform has been going on for nearly as long. Motivated initially by high hopes for the potential of the Internet, newspaper firms have expended substantial resources digitizing and distributing their content through a multitude of channels. Underlying newspapers' sustained enthusiasm for a digital future is a long-time (yet unchecked) assumption that print newspapers are dying (Chyi, Lewis, and Zheng 2012; Penenberg 2004; Picard and Brody 1997); the 2008 recession, which accelerated declines in print circulation and advertising revenue, reinforced such a belief. It is against this backdrop that US newspapers, especially national and metro dailies, became more determined than ever to complete their transition from print to online-by slashing resources for the print edition, laying off print staff, and reducing printing and delivery schedules while expanding digital operations, hiring multimedia reporters and social media editors, and requiring all journalists to reinvent themselves digitally. Another widely held assumption is that "digital natives" would not be inclined to read the "dead-tree" edition of a newspaper. As a result, "newspapers need to figure out how to attract young people to their Internet sites" (quoted in Graybeal 2011, 95). However, amid early excitement and recent determination about an all-digital future for news, a long-time problem facing a vast majority of newspaper firms persists-digital revenue remains insufficient to cover the loss on print revenue (Pew Research Center 2015). Industry discourse often focuses on the loss on the print side without critically examining the performance of the digital products, framing the problem as "newspapers have not yet figured out how to monetize online news users," implying that a solution will emerge in the future (Chyi 2015). However, to this date, the performance of newspapers' digital products in terms of advertising and subscription revenue has remained underwhelming. The result of newspaper firms' transition from print to online is, in the business sense, "exchanging analog dollars for digital dimes" (quoted in Dick 2009, para. 1). Since readership is the foundation for subscription and advertising revenue, to tackle the mystery behind "analog dollars" and "digital dimes," we scrutinized major newspapers'

International Journal on Media Management, 2011

The business of journalism is an uncomfortable subject for many journalists and one they prefer to disregard whenever possible. Because the news industry enjoyed a rising tide of funding as advertising expenditures increased decade-by-decade during in the twentieth century, the question of how journalism could be funded did not arise and most journalists ignored business aspects of news provision. The swelling revenue from advertising allowed journalists disregard the fact that the news they produced was also being sold to consumers in a market transaction, but that its price was well below the cost of gathering, preparing, copying, and distributing the news. Considered in revenue terms, the primary business of newspapers publishing in the twentieth century was advertising not news. The movement of news to digital platforms, however, is forcing journalists to pay greater attention to the business of news and to wrestle with issues involving economics of journalism, the commercial value of news, how news audiences behave, what prices consumers will pay, how payment will be structured, and what opportunities exist for non-market funding. This chapter addresses issues involving the funding of digital journalism. To understand that issue, it is important for readers to distinguish between the terms funding model and business model. They are often erroneously used synonymously by many in journalism, but represent distinct concept and issues. The term funding model refers to how an enterprise makes money, but this is only one part of the firm's broader business model that specifies the firm's business logic, value proposition, value configuration, processes and relationships, and customer interactions (Picard, 2011a). Those issues are crucial for making the funding model successful. This chapter will using the term funding to refer to income/revenue received and funding model for the revenue configuration that makes it possible. How digital operation alters the economics of journalism The need for funding is directly linked to the costs of producing and distributing news and how the shift to digital operation affects those costs is important. Digital journalism alters the cost structures that exist when journalism is practised in print (Picard, 2011b). Digital operations do so by ending costs that previously existed for making newspaper copies and delivering them. In physical production (print), profitable operation is pursued by managing variable costs. This requires seeking efficiency in the unit costs of producing copies through economies of scale and reducing transaction costs. The environment provides significant advantages to newspapers with larger numbers of customers. In digital operations, however, serving additional digital copies has little cost effect and competitors tend to operate with relatively similar cost structures regardless of the number of customers. Costs are primarily affected by the scale and scope of content provided rather than scale and scope of copying and distribution costs. In this environment managing fixed costs becomes the challenge. Although digital journalism reduces the cost of production and distribution, it does not equally reduce the costs for gathering and processing news and news organisations have threshold level production

The online music and news markets have changed significantly and fundamentally over the past few years, as more and more new players -many of them originally from other sectors -enter the market space of the original media companies. While online news venues have been available for quite some time, the major tragedies and news events of the past few years have highlighted their ability to provide immediate, constantly-updated information . In this paper we describe the current state of play in the online news industry in ten European countries, as at May 2003. The findings are based on the first two phases of a three-phase, European-Commission-funded market survey. In the paper we consider in greater detail the Internet business models of these companies. After initially introducing some of the literature in this field and discussing the justification for our chosen research approach, we describe our research design. We then report the findings from the first two phases of the project -the "Expert talks" and our web-based survey of the online news industry. Finally we identify the key driving factors for online news today: the new competitive environment, the appropriate payment systems, the focus on core competences, end devices and the consumers.

Nordicom Review

Recent digital transformations of the media landscape have altered media economics. Media outlets are experiencing a decline in newspaper circulation and are struggling to develop new revenue streams within digital media. Newspaper publishers are accustomed to a two-sided revenue model geared towards readers and advertisers. In digital publishing, such two-sided revenue models must be further developed. This article describes a model in which journalistic content functions as an engine for digital traffic, and how that market position is used to promote other commercial digital services. Unlike earlier advertising models, the media company itself has become both the advertiser and the owner of the promoted services. This article’s contribution is a description of how new revenue streams are being developed around digital journalistic products. A case study of the Schibsted Media Group, including examples from the media outlets VG (Norway) and Aftonbladet (Sweden), is used here as th...

The business model literature is both rich and rapidly-growing. Authors identify specialpurpose business and eBusiness models -and, increasingly, develop taxonomies of business models types. But, in searching for a comparatively simple way to understand the components of a "typical" internet business model, as part of our work for the EC research project SimWeb, we found that these taxonomies had little overlap and offered only a modest assistance to smaller companies trying to identify their own business identity. In this paper, therefore, we present the preliminary results of a three-year research project into appropriate business models for the online news and music industries. Having identified the problems, we describe the general taxonomies and components of Internet business models found in the literature, and explain our own core + component framework for developing an internet business model -using the online news industry as our example. We show how a combination of core and complementary components can be combined by any news-providing organisation for its Internet business model on the basis to its specific needs, resources and changing circumstancesand illustrate the usefulness of our this framework by means of "mini-case" examples of regional online newspapers in Germany.