How will anyone in newspapers ever make serious money on the Web? It's a loaded question, perhaps not even framed in the right way, but the American Press Institute held a conference this week and released a survey of U.S. newspapers on their revenue initiatives.
The findings are pretty muddy, which ought not to be a surprise. If there were a magic bullet to drive online revenue, it would be in general distribution.
But the survey from the ITZ and Belden consultancies have some interesting observations on the so-called "core loyalist," the person who reads a paper two or three times weekly. It turns out those people are also one-quarter of the unique visitors to the paper's Web site, take in some 86 per cent of page views, and clearly would be willing to pay something to keep that access.
What's also intriguing about the 80-slide presentation below is the forecast of the industry around its revenue streams. Clearly the size of the classified stream is diminishing. Clearly the size of targeted online advertising needs to grow.
The findings are pretty muddy, which ought not to be a surprise. If there were a magic bullet to drive online revenue, it would be in general distribution.
But the survey from the ITZ and Belden consultancies have some interesting observations on the so-called "core loyalist," the person who reads a paper two or three times weekly. It turns out those people are also one-quarter of the unique visitors to the paper's Web site, take in some 86 per cent of page views, and clearly would be willing to pay something to keep that access.
What's also intriguing about the 80-slide presentation below is the forecast of the industry around its revenue streams. Clearly the size of the classified stream is diminishing. Clearly the size of targeted online advertising needs to grow.
