Advertising on the internet is seeing significant growth but it is set to remain a modest part of newspaper revenues for many years to come, says a new report from the World Association of Newspapers.
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Profiting from Digital report from the Shaping the Future of Newspaper (SFN) project says, publishers need to look for other means to make their websites more profitable, such as delivering news content that people actually want to pay for.
Although several newspaper publishers generate a reasonable amount of income through website advertising, overall, this new revenue stream has yet to meet the expectations that many in the industry had predicted. Another factor holding back income from newspaper publisher websites is that currently the public appears reluctant to pay for general news stories.
Rather than predict the future, the report has collated a number of successful examples of content that have provided a successful revenue stream for publishers, these include:
– Email or mobile text alerts concerning vital news such as items for purchase (cars, homes, bargains and financial information).
– Aggregation of content from different sources that would not be easily available to the general public.
– Transactions that offer discounts.
– Archives of historical information relating to issues of particular interest.
Director of the SFN project, Jim Chisholm said: “Ad revenues are growing but remain relatively small and few website consumers seem willing to pay for general news content, so publishers need to be far cleverer about providing content people want to pay for – there has to be more emphasis on what is relevant to people’s lives.”
Although visiting a daily newspaper site has become one of the top three uses of the internet, according to Forrester Research, ‘media consumers continue to prove unwilling to pay for general online newspaper content’, says Chisholm.
He added: “And newspapers need to be more imaginative and attuned to the demands of the new generations of media consumers if they are to profit from the ever increasing use of digital media.”
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