Revenues for Online Newspapers: Owner and User Perceptions

Abstract
The newspaper industry faces hard questions about business models and economic success for their online newspaper ventures. Managers, editors-in-chief and designers at nine local newspapers in Sweden were interviewed. In addition, semi-structured interviews with 153 users/readers of the news services of these nine newspapers were also conducted. The analysis reveals differences in digital news product content and revenue generation. The paper suggests a new business model for digital news products that includes content-based revenue generation through personalization, archiving and versioning, approaches to advertising that involve more highly targeted market intermediation, and non-news activities covering advertisers and information brokerage. Results suggest that management and users agree on the importance of archives, personalized and deep news content, and a role for the newspaper as intermediary. However, users are not willing to pay for increased multimedia or an e-commerce site sponsored by the news site.