Newspaper Paywalls—the Hype and the Reality

Legacy and Native News Brands Online: Do They Show Different News Consumption Patterns?

“…Almost in parallel, an increasing amount of research has addressed the issue of the adoption of online paywalls by the press. This subject has been studied from a variety of very different perspectives, among others those who study the possible effect of a paywall system on the spread of quality news in society (Collins, 2011;Pickard & Williams, 2014), its present and foreseeable impact on media business models (Duprey, 2012;Grueskin, Seave, & Graves, 2011;Macnamara, 2010;McKeehan, 2011;Myllylahti, 2014), and its relationship with the demand for news and with the willingness to pay for it (Chiou & Tucker, 2013;Chyi & Lee, 2013;Cook & Attari, 2012;Goyanes, 2014;Kammer, Boeck, Hansen, & Hadberg Hauschildt, 2015;Wang, 2011).…”

The Future of Journalism

“…A recent eight-country survey of paywalls (Myllylahti 2014) found that they deliver only 10 per cent of media companies' revenues, while Business Insider magazine posed the killer dilemma: while the average print subscriber generates $1100 a year, the equivalent figure for a digital subscriber is $175. Myllylahti concludes that paywalls are "not a viable business model".…”

“…There seems to be no agreement (within the journalism industry or the academy) about the appropriateness of particular alternatives to the advertiser model, as legacy media experiment with various mixes of pay walls (Myllylahti 2014;Pickard and Williams 2014), advertising on mobile devices (Reynolds 2014;Nel and Westlund 2012), the sale of newspaper apps (Franklin 2013a), crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and co-creation (Aitamurto 2013), hyperlocal business models (van Kerkhoven and Bakker 2014), not-for-profit models which secure funding from international non-governmental organisations, private foundations and think-tanks (Requejo-Alemán and Lugo-Ocando 2014), a mix of public funding, sales and subscription to finance minority-language journalism (Zabaleta et al 2014), efforts to monetise hyperlinks (Doherty 2014) and, finally, even the bizarre-sounding but expansive provision of machine-or robot-written news (Clerwall 2014;van Dalen 2013). The latest digital media innovation which offers the promise of a revenue stream is…”

Using Product Variables of Business-to-Business (B2B) Media to Assess the Impacts of Social Media

“…Social media's impacts on the timeliness variable mainly affected the publishing of news. Today when it is increasingly impossible to sell news (Myllylahti, 2014), news content is just a small part of total B2B media products.…”