Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries: The Newspaper Publishing Industry

Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries 
8
 
Online there are also many services which aggregate news from other sources, offer their 
users various ways to personalize the ranking and categorization of the news and combine this 
with linking the service to user’s profiles in social networks. Examples of such services, 
especially developed for use on mobile devices, are Pulse, Flipboard and Zite.
Changes in the value chain and new business models 
The internet and digitization have affected the value chain of news production, aggregation, 
distribution and consumption in fundamental ways. While most newspapers have launched 
websites, and offer RSS feeds, blogs and apps for mobile devices, they still also need to bear 
the costs for their physical product. In this respect online-only news providers have a 
competitive advantage.
At the same time, there are only few companies which have succeeded in developing viable 
online business models for their news services. Due to the huge quantity of news and 
information available on the internet, few people are willing to pay for online news services. 
Revenues from advertising on news sites are growing, but are still low compared to revenues 
from print advertising. One reason for this is that the prices for online advertising are 
relatively low. This can be explained by the abundance of advertising space available, the 
fragmentation of readers and the short time online readers spend on any particular webpage. 
In addition, established measurements for internet news consumption, which are accepted by 
all stakeholders, are still lacking. 
Successful pay models are scarce as well. Some newspaper publishers have experimented 
briefly with the pay-wall model and then left, as sales and subscriptions revenues could not 
compensate the vast loss of advertising revenues due to the loss of readers after the 
introduction of a pay-wall. Lately new attempts have been made by newspaper publishers to 
re-introduce pay-walls for premium content, for instance by the New York Times, a number 
of Murdoch’s newspapers, The Berliner Morgenpost, the Hamburger Abendblatt and Le 
Figaro. Other pay-models combine subscription on print and online editions or offer 
subscriptions to news offers for news apps on the iPad and other tablet computers. Recently, 
newspaper publishers have welcomed the iPad, tablet computers and new generations of 
eReaders as these devices make digital newspapers more attractive to read and could persuade 
consumers to pay for digital content. There are also providers which offer subscriptions to 
selections of news and other content from different sources. It is still too early to determine 
the success of these models. 
Most successful so far in business terms are aggregation services like Google News, or 
services which manage to engage large amounts of readers with low cost user-generated news 
and blogs, such as the Huffington Post. News aggregators provide links to news headlines 
from other sources, which can be ranked and categorized according to the users’ preferences. 
This practice has led to much controversy between online news aggregators and legacy news 
publishers. Legacy news publishers think they should be remunerated by aggregators for deep 
linking to their websites, while the online news aggregators argue that the news publishers 
benefit from the traffic they generate to their sites, implying that their aggregation services are 
mutually beneficial. News services like the Huffington Post have been able to monetize on 
local versions of the online news service, with active and engaged readerships and clever 
search engine optimization techniques, generating both traffic and advertising revenues. So 
far, these models have proven to be successful mainly for the largest players. Though smaller 
players do manage to generate some revenues, they are often not enough to run a viable news 
service. 
Consumers benefit from the increased availability of ‘free’ news and the options to tailor 
news consumption according to their own preferences. There is some concern, however, as to 

---