Online audience engagement, such as rating or sharing news, commenting or creating content, can enhance users’ loyalty toward online news brands. Yet recently, uncertainties have been discussed within journalism research and practice concerning the handling of online comment sections and potential negative influences – caused through comment reading – on news brands. From a brand management perspective, audience engagement and comment reading can affect a brand’s equity. This study investigates the value of audience engagement and comment reading for the customer-based brand equity of online news outlets. An online survey with n = 313 users of the digital native cohort revealed that comment reading is neither directly beneficial nor harmful for online news brands. However, for brands providing hard news comment reading seems more likely to have negative than positive relations with CBBE than for brands with other content. Sharing and liking news are associated with a stronger perceived brand quality, loyalty, and associations. User-generated content creation including commenting does not enhance customer-based brand equity. Overall, serious content proved to be a stronger driver of news brand value than any form of audience engagement.

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Because of technological developments, it has become easier for media outlets and their actors to collect data, which facilitates the gaining of knowledge regarding customers and competitors. We apply market orientation theory and investigate through standardized interviews with high-level media representatives whether market-oriented news outlets are more successful in terms of circulation change. The results of this exploratory study show that dailies, which emphasize reader orientation and a swift reaction to competitors’ initiatives, are rewarded with success. For weeklies, the opposite is true. Rating means of researching the readership and responsiveness to the competition low is associated with an increase in circulation. These findings call for different media management strategies depending on the type of news outlet.