The concept and phenomenon of media innovation is gaining some attention in the academic community, policy circles and among practitioners. However, the phenomenon is still poorly defined and not well understood. This paper therefore first analyses how media innovation is framed in the literature on media economics and media management. Then it considers to what extent the standard analysis of innovation could be applied to the media field, considering, on the one hand, the traditional view on innovation policy and, on the other hand, some of the most common indicators of innovation. Based on this information, the paper suggests a novel conceptualisation of media innovation. Furthermore, an analysis of statistical indicators on R&D expenditure leads to three assumptions related to media innovation, namely (1) that the Media and Content Industries (MCIs) are much less innovative than the ICT industries, or/and (2) that R&D statistics do not properly capture the innovativeness of the MCIs, or/and (3) that the innovative activities in media and content are largely taking place elsewhere (for instance in the ICT sector). Whereas the statistical indicators point towards the second explanation, a small round of expert interviews in Flanders revealed that there is a case for assumptions (1) and (3) as well. First of all, it was shown that all forms of innovation defined in our typology exist in the media field, but not with the same importance. The most important ones from the media industries’ point of view seems to be the innovation related to the product, notably concerning the core (e.g. creation of new types of TV shows) and business model innovation. There is also technological innovation taking place in the media industries, for instance concerning new ways to access and interact with the content but this innovation comes from out the media sector (e.g. HD-TV, search engines) and at best the media industries try to adapt to this rapidly changing technological context.

This article tries to reveal why some newspaper Web sites rely on subscriptions, whereas others (also) offer pay-per-view. To that end, this study applies logit analysis to a unique dataset on 82 national newspapers from 8 countries. It was found that quality newspapers are more likely to offer site subscriptions and pay-per-view, whereas newspapers with a higher offline market share prefer Portable Document Format (PDF) subscriptions. On the country level, a higher relative importance of advertising revenues is negatively related with the former 2 access options, and positively with the latter. Indications of mimicking or herd behavior were also found. Finally, the newspapers studied apparently see site and PDF subscriptions as substitutes, and site subscriptions and pay-per-view as complements.

This paper analyses the Web sites of 82 national daily newspapers in eight Western European countries, in order to determine their online revenue models. Overall, 80.5 per cent of our newspapers try to monetise (part of) their online content in direct ways. In doing so, the bulk of the paying sites rely on 'traditional’ online subscriptions rather than unbundled access options although 43.9 per cent of all sites offer both, and in this way target regular as well as occasional readers. However, the low cut-off points between the online subscriptions and pay-per-view seem to indicate that our newspapers have embraced pay-per-view only half-heartedly. We also find that newspapers that adopt ‘mixed bundling’ have a higher fear of channel spill-over between the online and print subscription. The same is true for smaller newspapers. An important finding is also that for all the strategic decisions that we analyse, there are dramatic inter-country differences. This suggests that local market circumstances – such as the relative importance of advertising revenues, Internet penetration, and even mimicking behaviour – play a major role.

In this article, the principles of multi-sided platform theory and value network analysis are used in order to give a detailed picture of the financing and revenue sharing models present in the audiovisual media industry in Flanders. By means of expert interviews, we verify whether the counter-logics of platform ecosystems and the double marginalisation effect of double platform markets pertain to the Flemish audiovisual media industry.

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