Online Revenue Models of Newspapers in the United States and Finland
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2019
Department
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Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
70
Series
Abstract
The digitization of media has resulted as declining advertising and subscription revenues for the legacy media operators. For the newspaper industry, this has meant cuts in the newsroom operations and closure of several newspapers. The academic research about the topic has focused on describing the challenges of the industry or on analyzing some specific revenue streams while the research about the revenue models as a holistic phenomenon in the digital era has been lacking. Therefore, I aimed to fill this research gap by answering to the following research questions: 1) How have the newspapers in United States and Finland built their online revenue models? 2) What are the main similarities and key differences? 3) Which new revenue streams the Finnish newspapers could adopt in the near future? My study aimed at analyzing and comparing the current online revenue models and specifically helping the Finnish publishers to find new ideas for developing their revenue models in the digital era. The study was conducted as a comparative multiple-case study and the total of ten cases were selected as a sample. The sample consisted of the five largest newspapers by circulation in the United States and Finland. The selected newspapers from U.S. were: USA Today, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Los Angeles Times. The selected newspapers from Finland were: Helsingin Sanomat, Kauppalehti, Aamulehti, Turun Sanomat and Maaseudun Tulevaisuus. The data was based on the existing digital data and it was gathered from several empirical sources; the websites, annual reports and press releases of the selected newspapers as well as from other trusted digital sources. The findings of the study were analyzed between three factors; between the countries, between different newspaper styles and between different ownership structures. The findings offer insights about how the legacy newspapers have built their online revenue models in the U.S. and Finland. Moreover, the study explored the applications of the different revenue streams and how the newspapers have implemented each of the stream. Therefore, the study provides new ideas for online content providers developing their current models. Among other things, the findings revealed that the online revenue models of the U.S. newspapers consist of a wider selection of revenue streams than the Finnish ones, for example, the Finnish papers do not use syndication, per-unit fee or crowdfunding as revenue sources at all. Furthermore, all of the Finnish newspapers have adopted a freemium paywall model while none of the U.S. titles use it. Based on this study, I have improved the model, originally by Gallaugher et al. (2001), of online revenue models for digital content providers. The improved model includes the following revenue streams: 1) advertising, 2) subscription fee for online content, 3) online ordering of the print publication, 4), per-unit fee for online content, 5) sale of additional merchandise, 6) sale of additional services, 7) affiliate programs, 8) syndication, and 9) crowdfunding.Description
Thesis advisor
Tinnilä, MarkkuKeywords
revenue model, online revenue model, business model, revenue source, digital media, newspaper, paywall, online advertising