Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
June 28, 2009, 4:53 p.m.

Yet another “What if you go online-only?” scenario

Error gathering analytics data from Google: Error 404 (Not Found)!!1 *{margin:0;padding:0}html,code{font:15px/22px arial,sans-serif}html{background:#fff;color:#222;padding:15px}body{margin:7% auto 0;max-width:390px;min-height:180px;padding:30px 0 15px}* > body{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/robot.png) 100% 5px no-repeat;padding-right:205px}p{margin:11px 0 22px;overflow:hidden}ins{color:#777;text-decoration:none}a img{border:0}@media screen and (max-width:772px){body{background:none;margin-top:0;max-width:none;padding-right:0}}#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/1x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;margin-left:-5px}@media only screen and (min-resolution:192dpi){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat 0% 0%/100% 100%;-moz-border-image:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) 0}}@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;-webkit-background-size:100% 100%}}#logo{display:inline-block;height:54px;width:150px} 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /analytics/v2.4/data?ids=ga:12167016&metrics=ga:pageviews&filters=ga%3ApagePath%3D%7Enline-only-scenario%2F.%2A&start-date=2024-11-05&end-date=2024-12-05 was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

This question keeps getting asked in various ways: “What if you just stopped printing the newspaper and went online-only? How many people would you need, what would your costs be, and could you earn enough revenue to make a profit?”

It’s not necessarily the right question, because there’s still life left in print. An online-print hybrid, with one or two days a week of printed distribution tied to a strong digital publishing operation, is probably a much better solution than online-only.

In any case, Peter Kafka of All Things Digital is the latest to noodle the online-only version and has posted a spreadsheet supplied by Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, which offers a news platform, Outside.in for Publishers, that can augment a local news site (such as that of a newspaper or TV station) with a stream of content links to local blogs and other sources.

In Josephson’s wildly optimistic model, the news operation gets 40 million page views per month, which is then augmented by 93 million page views from the Outside.in adjunct, and ultimately this sugars down to a tidy annual profit of $2.8 million with 20 employees who earn $70,000 apiece.

If it were that easy, it would be happening all over. The problem begins with the combined page views of 130 million per month, which is more than nearly all U.S. newspaper sites get, as Topix CEO Chris Tolles pointed out in response to the Kafka post. As well, it seems unrealistic for the Outside.in add-on to the local site to more than triple the combined monthly traffic.  Maybe for the typically underperforming broadcast site, that would be the case, but not with a newspaper partner. Tolles questions the assumed ad CPM, as well.

Josephson responded to Tolles by saying “but the model still works with fewer . [Pageview] reductions reduce the attendant expense and would require fewer people.” Well sure, but look, a typical 30,000-circulation daily paper is lucky to get a million pageviews a month, which, even if leveraged to 3 million with Outside.in, would scale the 20-person staffing model to exactly 0.5 people. Back to the drawing boards, I’d suggest.

POSTED     June 28, 2009, 4:53 p.m.
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
Earlier this year, the WSJ owner sued Perplexity for failing to properly license its content. Now its research tool Factiva has negotiated its own AI licensing deals.
Back to the bundle
“If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will.”
Religious-sounding language will be everywhere in 2025
“A great deal of language that looks a lot like Christian Nationalism isn’t actually calling for theocracy; it is secular minoritarianism pushed by secular people, often linked to rightwing cable and other media with zero meaningful ties to the church or theological principle.”