Funding Sustainable Online News: Sources of Revenue in Digital-Native and Traditional Media in Spain

Abstract

Digital news publishers strive to balance revenue streams in their business models: as standard advertising declines, alternatives for sustaining digital journalism arise in the forms of sponsored content, user donations and payments—one-off purchases, subscriptions or memberships, public or private grants, electronic commerce, events and consulting. An exhaustive study found 2874 active online news publications in Spain, and it observed the adoption of such models in early 2021. Advertising remains the most popular source of income for digital news operations (85.8%) and most sites rely on just one or two revenue streams (74.5%). We compare the cases in our census by their origin (digital-native or non-native), geography (local/regional or national/global) and topic scope (generalist or specialized). We find that traditional, national and specialized online media have a broader and more innovative revenue mix than digital-native, regional or local and general-interest news outlets. The comprehensiveness of this pioneering study sheds light for the first time on the risk that the lack of diversification and innovation in funding sources may imperil the financial sustainability of some online news operations in Spain, mostly those with a smaller scope and no backing from a traditional business, according to the results we present here.

A data‐driven approach to improve online consumer subscriptions by combining data visualization and machine learning methods

“…Thus, the second research question (RQ2) is: what are the clusters to potentiate advertising revenue? As digital news publishers strive to balance revenue sources in the business models (Vara-Miguel et al, 2021), in this study, we aim to contribute with an operational solution that helps managers to optimize two sources of revenue. For that purpose, results were made available to the teams on a dashboard to improve the daily decision making process.…”

“…Hence, to diversify and innovate the business, it becomes fundamental to understand reader drivers to read and to subscribe (Vara-Miguel et al, 2021).…”

“…In the last decade, the decline of print advertising revenue, and the increase in digital subscription business models (DSBMs) changed the media business landscape (Arrese, 2016; Rios‐Rodríguez et al, 2022). The challenges of digital transformation, the need to innovate, in the whole value chain, to ensure financial sustainability (Vara‐Miguel et al, 2021) are some major concerns of the media industry. Thus, to improve consumer engagement and acquisition, online news publishers need to build strong digital strategies (Davoudi, 2018).…”

Research on digital native media: an emerging topic in the field of digital communication

“…In this context, digital native media continue the search, already started by legacy media corporations, to find sustainable models. Sustainability is a challenge at the economic and management levels (Vara-Miguel et al, 2021) -to develop profitable, transparent models that favour news independence (Riordan, 2014)-but also at the social level, to build projects that involve communities and manage to position themselves as reliable news media at the service of citizens (Arrese;Kaufmann, 2016;Kalogeropoulos et al, 2019; Sixto-García; Rodríguez-Vázquez; Soengas-Pérez, 2020; Ferrucci, 2017).…”

Cibermedios nativos y dependencia de las agencias de noticias en España

“…Estos cibermedios nativos, pese a estar en fase de crecimiento en España (Salaverría et al, 2018), se encuentran con un reto añadido y es su capacidad de ser rentables sin disponer del respaldo de una organización que los precede (Negredo et al, 2020;Tejedor y Pla-Pablos, 2020;Vara-Miguel et al, 2021). Ante esta disyuntiva la publicación de contenidos de las agencias de noticias podría ser un recurso de primer orden para reducir los costes (García, 2010) a través de la inversión tecnológica y la automatización tal como viene sucediendo en la actualidad (Pérez et al, 2014), pero también un riesgo al ofrecer un producto análogo al de otros muchos portales de noticias.…”