Alan Mutter documents the no-longer-surprising fact that newspaper advertising revenues continued to fall for the 20th straight quarter in the first three months of 2011.
This decline comes at a time when the economy has been growing for nearly two years, turning around declines in broadcast, magazine and online advertising. Mutter closes: “Clearly, newspapers need new ideas. They need to develop a broad array of targeted content and advertising solutions to serve diverse audiences across the web, mobile and social media.”
Actually, newspapers don’t need new ideas. They need to unshackle themselves from their old advertising-and-circulation model and start serious pursuit of the dozens of ideas already presented for developing new revenue sources. Here are some ideas (not all mine and not new here, but not yet in wide use, at least by newspaper companies):
Develop the must-have driving app for your community. I first outlined this idea two years ago in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. I am not aware that any news organization (or anyone else) has tried it yet. Mutter notes that the newspaper ad decline has been most severe in automobile advertising, falling from $5 billion in 2004 to $1.1 billion last year. Auto manufacturers and dealers have built better tools than the newspaper want ads section for selling cars.
Buying a car is a job most people need help with only every few years. It was an easy job to disrupt. But driving is a task many of us do daily, and it presents abundant opportunity. Community news organizations are well-positioned to offer one place where drivers can compare gas prices, buy insurance, find parking spaces, check the traffic, get emergency service, schedule maintenance, rent a car and download coupons for tires and service. And if you develop that app that drivers can use daily, it may also be the best vehicle for advertising auto sales.
Offer commissioned life stories instead of formulaic obituaries. I proposed this last summer and I am not aware of anyone who is trying it. You start with obituaries, but this model can expand to life stories about the living, occasioned by weddings, anniversaries, retirements or huge egos. I have fleshed out the idea into a business plan, but have not published it yet. Anyone who’s interested can email me: stephenbuttry (at) gmail.com.
Daily deals. Newspapers are belatedly getting into the daily deal game. This is a classic case of an opportunity missed because of newspapers’ relentless focus on declining forms of revenue. It will be interesting to see how newspapers’ efforts work here. Groupon and Living Social are far ahead in developing this opportunity, though I think we are early in the history of daily deals.
(Note that I don’t generally refer in this post to newspapers. Media organizations seeking a prosperous future need to stop thinking of themselves as newspapers and start thinking of themselves as digital-first media companies reaching consumers and serving businesses through a variety of tools. I used “newspapers” in the paragraph above because the failure to explore new models such as daily deals is an example of where the limited newspaper vision is holding companies back from pursuit of digital opportunities.)
Direct transactions. This will be more challenging than daily deals, because it will require developing ways to fulfill orders and interface with business customers’ inventory systems. But I believe community businesses are more interested over the long haul in selling their merchandise and services regularly than in the huge discounts and brief spikes involved in daily deals. The rewards here will be worth the time and money it will take to meet the challenges.
Newspaper executives (using the N-word deliberately again here) like to talk about the difficulty of shifting from the dollars they used to get in print advertising for the dimes they can charge for online ads. While I like John Paton’s answer (“start stacking the dimes”), I think we should pursue the possibilities of stacking digital dollars (sometimes hundred-dollar bills) through direct transactions. Sawbuck and MediaOne are plays by media companies to trade in the declining revenue stream of real estate advertising for an actual piece of real estate transactions by becoming a licensed real estate broker.
Quality Consignment, the Ogden Standard-Examiner’s thrift shop is another example of how newspapers can trade up, exchanging the dimes of traditional classified ads for second-hand appliances for the dollars of selling the merchandise directly. If you don’t want to get in the consignment business, maybe you trade up by partnering with a local consignment shop that probably does little, if any, advertising anyway.
As I noted in the C3 sections on weddings, births, retirements and graduations, gift registries can become potent channels for direct transactions (not to mention reservations for celebration venues and lodging for out-of-town guests).
Local search. Some news organizations are making headway here. But every community news organization should offer a directory that offers businesses without websites (amazingly, still a lot of businesses) a de facto website with a multi-faceted entry in your directory, offering photos, videos, coupons, menus, maps, user reviews, reservations, direct-sales and archival content about the business. Even for many businesses with websites, this can offer a better place to showcase their products and services, and a place that will show up higher in search results. That’s the key to mastering local search. Don’t think of it as taking on Google, though you will develop a place where some people will turn first when they are searching for local answers and businesses. But if you do it right, your listings will also show up high when people search in Google or other search engines.
I outlined these possibilities in the C3 Blueprint as well as in my 2008 Newspaper Next report on interactive databases: Be the Answer. While many news organizations are offering community business databases, I have not seen one as robust as I believe they can be.
Calendars. Again from C3, I think newspapers have been woefully slow to develop the digital possibilities of calendar information that they have always gathered (I counted 11 calendars once in a weekly newspaper). Calendars can be standalone websites or a dynamic part of your news site. They should offer direct transactions: buy tickets for a concert, movie or athletic event or register for a class. Multiple vendors offer calendar possibilities. Or you can develop your own, as The Oklahoman did with Wimgo, the best calendar I’ve seen with newspaper roots (it’s expanded nationally from its Oklahoma City start).
Social media. Community news organizations can help local merchants develop social connections in the community. News websites using ads (check out the possibilities offered by NowSpots) that feature social media content can offer more meaningful ads to businesses — timely, easily updated ads that build a business customer’s social media connections.
Blog networks. One of my biggest disappointments in the TBD experience is that we did not pursue the full possibilities of selling ads (and coupons, deals, direct transactions and other commercial possibilities) through a network of local blogs and sites. Someone is going to demonstrate the rewards in such a network.
Mobile applications. As I’ve noted before, newspapers have a long history of helping businesses make ads. The smallest newspapers I worked for routinely made up “spec” ads for local merchants who were better at baking bread or selling tires than they were at making ads. A news organization today needs a strong mobile app. Once you have developed that ability (whether the ability is on your staff or with a contractor or a vendor such as Verve Wireless), you have a valuable service you can offer to businesses, helping them develop and market their own mobile apps.
Mobile apps and websites offer other possibilities for media companies. Can you partner with local businesses and individuals who develop apps, selling ads on their apps and helping them promote the apps? Can you help provide members of your local blog network with apps or better mobile sites and sell ads and coupons on their apps and sites?
Location. I think location-based ads, coupons and transactions present tremendous opportunities. Community news companies may be in the best position to develop those possibilities. Or they may watch someone else beat them to another revenue stream.
Data. Dan Conover does an excellent job of describing the possibilities of finding revenue streams from structuring our content better as data through the use of a semantic content management system (no, it’s not developed yet; you could hire Dan and develop another revenue stream by selling your SCMS to other media companies).
Memberships. Steve Outing is exploring the potential of membership models for news organizations.
Community funding. I love the Spot.us model of seeking community funding for specific stories pitched by freelancers. Could a news organization apply that approach to funding of entire beats that are not attractive to advertisers but are essential to the community? If you’ve cut back on your sports staff, perhaps you could use community funding to restore coverage of particular teams.
Direct content sales. I am not opposed to news organizations selling their content. I just think it’s futile to demand pay for digital news content. But if you produce quality content, some people will want to buy that content in high-value forms. Most newspapers get a small but steady revenue stream from the sales of photographs their staff shoots at high school sports contests and other community events. But they typically publish only a small minority of images that staff photographers shoot. What if you posted all (or nearly all) of your unedited photos (and raw video), along with do-it-yourself tools parents (and others) could use to order prints, posters, DVDs, t-shirts and other merchandise?
Newspapers are pretty good at producing and marketing books and t-shirts relating to big news events (when I was at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, we produced a book about the 2008 flood and t-shirts of our front page the morning after the 2008 election). But we can do a better job of offering individual or small lots of t-shirts, books, DVDs and the like. Texts from Last Night offers the opportunity to order a t-shirt of any of the funny texts it publishes. Newspapers could offer custom t-shirts of any front page, story, headline or quote, from either the newspaper or the website. They could offer limited-edition books or DVDs with coverage of a local high school team’s sports season. You could set a price and a minimum order number and not produce the book unless it will make money.
Archives. I suspect the small fees that most newspapers collect by charging for access to their archives could be exceeded by opening (and promoting) archives, with advertising by targeted topics and keywords and DIY tools for people to create booklets, DVDs, posters, t-shirts and other merchandise showing your archives.
As an early online newspaper guy, this list really saddens me. We had many of these things at the Strib, back in the mid 90s.
My favorites:
We did a deal with the local MLS to put their real estate listings on our site. Their technology was so limited that someone literally walked a tape across town every day to update the listings. We found a company locally that photographed the homes of every home in the Twin Cities and geocoded the data. You could come to our site and see every home in the area. StreetView circa 1996.
We did a deal with MN-DOT to get traffic sensor data and plotted it on a map showing segment by segment speeds.
We discovered that there was a digital thermometer on the roof for our audiotext system. We converted the data into Web format and had live temperature on the home page. (See http://blog.agrawals.org/2009/08/16/building-sandcastles-on-the-web/)
We out-innovated just about everybody in that time. Then senior management decided that this Internet thing was more than just a toy and decided to put experts in charge.
I tried to get the company to commercialize the great technology we’d built, even if it just meant giving me the ability to license it. The answer? “We’re a newspaper company, we don’t do that.”
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The blown opportunities go way back, don’t they, Rocky? Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that anyone will seize the remaining opportunities.
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To be fair, some of the issues were structural.
Newspapers didn’t have national scale to spread the development costs over. Even though we did a lot of cutting edge work, we were a mid/large market newspaper. (We did all of this before McClatchy bought the Strib.)
Even with McClatchy, there wasn’t national scale. And the newspaper companies never learned how to truly cooperate with each other. NCN, Classified Ventures, etc. have all pretty much been failures.
Comp structure for employees has long been a serious issue and that is going in only the wrong direction.
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Hi! i think Newspapers real value I always thought was not in telling the news – television and radio and now The Web- always did that faster but it was in turning the news into intelligence. Thanks
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I agree, Steve … we have enough ideas already. Your list here is terrific.
I’m wondering if Steve Outing’s focus on membership could be combined with the array of values you outline here … using the cable television model. Even though people only view a few channels, they would never spend $50 a month to watch just the few they actually watch. But the smart cable company piles on a lot of channels that offers the viewer a wide range of choices that seems to make the cable package worth $50 a month.
Package your kind of services, inspiringly described here, and meter access to the package like the cable company does, using the family membership model that brings up to four access codes for just $12.95 per month. I’m thinking a small-community paper here. If it were a city daily, perhaps the same family membership for $29.95 per month.
A 25,000 circulation daily, generating $29.95 monthly from 20,000 families would take in $7 million annually after turning off their press — or converting to a much less costly paper service, sold separately. Advertising would be replaced with commercial memberships that help ad value and justify consumers spending $29.95 monthly. Commercial memberships would generate something approaching what newspaper advertising generated in its hay day.
The future could well be the cable television model, where it is experience rather than raw content, that justifies families spending even $100 or more per month.
Without looking the least greedy, the follow on to old-school newspapers may well achieve profitability Google would kill for.
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Interesting suggestion, Bill. I think that the digital market has disrupted bundling of services, as newspapers have done and as cable does. I can see some merit in bundling, but it might be challenging to make it work.
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Newspapers were the original bundle and what we’re seeing in the broad sense is unbundling. I get my stocks from Google Finance, TV listings from my DVR, national news from NYT, local news from blogs, sports from EPSN, comics directly emailed to me from uComics, Target ad with the Target iPad app, weather from home screen of my phone. If I’m looking for a job, I’ve got LinkedIn. Apartment, I’ve got craigslist.
Newspapers were a collection of random stuff in what was at the time the most efficient form of delivery. The bundle made sense when the means of distribution were expensive.
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Awesome list Steve and right on.
I like that memberships and community-funded reporting are next to each other, because the more I think about it (partly through conversations we’ve had) the two are linked. The community-funded reporting model is an aspect of a membership program.
Why become a member of your local news organization? Because a small part of your membership fee gives you a vote on potential stories.
Reader wins: They get a seat at the editorial table.
News org wins: They get some extra money to fund reporting they want to do AND they get a richer connection with the members of their organization.
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Alt. hypothesis: the harvesting strategy was tried. It worked. End of story.
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[…] Read on, padawan: Newspapers don’t need new ideas […]
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I work on search engine optimization for Wimgo and we certainly have an interesting story to tell having grown up from an independently owned regional newspaper.
We’re on the first page of Google results for all of our key terms in Oklahoma City and out-competing much bigger sites like Urbanspoon and Yelp for many keywords.
We’re looking for media partners – other media players who can leverage their website’s authority so they can compete in local search results for businesses, restaurants etc. through Wimgo in their market too.
Local media have a lot of catching up to do in the digital space, especially as pure-play sites like Yelp, Urbanspoon and Wimgo take hold. We’re offering a way for the industry to work together and leverage its assets to compete.
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In 2007, I was sake to be one of the founding board members of Peak Radar.com! It was created by my former editor Susan Edmondson and it was a website that listed all the events in Cilorado Springs. Both Susan and I worked on the entertainment desk at the local paper at one time and I had always thought that calendar listings were a gold mine that was left unsifted! It was the perfect platform for realtime daily deals for movies, arts, food, wine etc. The fact that former reporters went on to create it after leaving the newspaper is a telling tale. Newspapers real value I always thought was not in telling the news – television and radio and now The Web- always did that faster but it was in turning the news into intelligence, ie. We analyzed all the school test scores for the last five years and if your kid has an aptitude for math he should go here…with the web and semantic web functionalities we can be even more precise in our intelligence that adds real meaning and value to people’s lives. People pay all the time for data that makes their life decisions easier they pay for financial advice, career advice, businesses pay for data! Local newspapers are some of the best arbiters of intelligence there is yet they have failed to capitalize upon thus fact to show the value to their readers and advertisers.
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[…] about news blogging from filling in for Jim Romenesko for a week, and the other from TBD’s Steve Buttry on possible revenue streams for newspapers. Posted today, 10:30 a.m. | Tags: AOL, Bloomberg, […]
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[…] Moos about news blogging from filling in for Jim Romenesko for a week, and the other from TBD’s Steve Buttry on possible revenue streams for […]
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[…] blogged recently about the many possibilities I see for news organizations to pursue new revenue streams. I mentioned calendars as one, citing Wimgo, the events site developed by The […]
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[…] Pursue multiple revenue streams. You need to pursue non-advertising revenue streams and non-traditional ad approaches. I have blogged about this topic before and won’t repeat those points here. Brady was more interested in pursuing multiple revenue streams than his Allbritton bosses. If we had been allowed to get up to full speed and had pursued more revenue streams with a digital sales staff, we would have celebrated profitability in three to five years, I am sure. […]
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[…] not covered all the possible revenue sources a blogger might pursue. I blogged earlier this year on varied revenue sources that newspaper organizations should consider. Bloggers might be able to develop some of those […]
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[…] and my tips for engaging through newsroom Twitter accounts, also from August, were 10th. And my ideas for new revenue streams, originally posted in April, got over 200 views in November. 0.000000 0.000000 Rate this: Share […]
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[…] Cultivating multiple revenue streams […]
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[…] Cultivating multiple revenue streams […]
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[…] of them about the New York Times), but I did blog about the 5 W’s of business and about the many revenue sources newspaper companies can and should try. The final piece of my Digital First series curated several posts by John Paton and others about […]
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[…] Newspapers don’t need new ideas; here are lots of ideas for new revenue streams […]
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[…] My posts from last year on how a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work and on different revenue sources for news organizations both had more than 500 views last month, and five other old posts had more than […]
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As usual, an excellent post as I always expect when I read your blog, Steve. I shared the link with a LinkedIn discussion group Newspaper Professionals about why we need pay walls. I appear to be the only one since the discussion was started yesterday who believes, as you do, that pay walls are by emailnot the solution. If you’re a member of the group, you can find the discussion at http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=99188&type=member&item=98242450&commentID=71069519&report%2Esuccess=8ULbKyXO6NDvmoK7o030UNOYGZKrvdhBhypZ_w8EpQrrQI-BBjkmxwkEOwBjLE28YyDIxcyEO7_TA_giuRN#commentID_71069519.
Again, I appreciate you and your blog very much, and I share your url with a lot of folks.
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Thanks, Ted.
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[…] digital ad sales will exceed the decline in print dollars. Growing digital sales aggressively and developing new revenue streams are the only paths to a prosperous future. 0.000000 0.000000 Rate this: Share […]
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I have to thank Ted Schnell for pointing me to this blog from the Newspaper Professionals LinkedIn forum. Steve, this is a great posting; I have been working in a similar vein but you have some great ideas I hadn’t thought of. I posted a number of revenue ideas on http://bloggingwrites.com/how-to-drive-online-news-revenue-346/ that we’re using with client newspapers. There seems to be only a small amount of overlap in our lists, so hopefully folks will find some good ideas from both posts. Now everyone, let’s go make some serious digital revenue!
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[…] continue to drive significant traffic. Beyond the 5 W’s pieces, posts on new revenue streams for news organizations, tightening your copy and the Digital First workflow combined for more than 1,000 views last month […]
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[…] of this argument that’s been raging for more than ten years. As Owens has said for years (and Steve Buttry articulated in an essential 2011 primer on money opportunities for local news organizat…) there are lots of ways to generate revenue at the local level. To quote myself from the comments: […]
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[…] suscitar el interés de los clientes. Cuando hagamos eso, creo que surgirán muchas oportunidades. Steve Buttry tiene algunas buenas ideas sobre el beneficio para los anunciantes. Ken Doctor también tiene algunas ideas […]
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[…] need to develop more diverse digital revenue streams. (OK, I’m going to stop coming back here and adding bullets; I think you get the point and I […]
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[…] A 2011 post by Steve Buttry has been gnawing a hole in my consciousness for a few weeks now. It’s called “Newspapers don’t need new ideas; here are lots of ideas for new revenue streams.” […]
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[…] digital ad sales will exceed the decline in print dollars. Growing digital sales aggressively and developing new revenue streams are the only paths to a prosperous […]
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[…] This will be my keynote address to the Arizona Newspapers Association fall convention in Scottsdale today. I don’t know how closely I will follow the script, but this is the written version. I also will lead a breakout session on revenue-building ideas. […]
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[…] long after I posted them. My top 10 posts this month included 2011 posts on writing leads and on different revenue sources for news organizations. In addition to the old posts about ethics and Twitter that I’ve already mentioned, hundreds […]
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[…] don’t need new ideas stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/new… […]
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[…] Newspapers don’t need new ideas; here are lots of ideas for revenue streams […]
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[…] be clear: Newspapers are doing a lousy job of developing new revenue sources. Most of the potential new revenue sources I blogged about two years ago aren’t even mentioned in the “new revenue sources” […]
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[…] The old business model has lost more than 96 percent of its value, even with paywalls. We need new revenue streams. We need to figure out what size of staff those revenue streams can support and how to use those […]
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[…] most-viewed post that I think people actually read is about ideas for new revenue streams for newspapers. It has more than 15,000 views. My only other post with more than 10,000 views is on how a Digital […]
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[…] and better revenue streams). My second most-read post of 2013, with over 6,000 views, was about ideas for revenue streams for newspapers. I wish I could tell you that 2013 was the year that lots of newspaper companies adopted those […]
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[…] sources. I thought its national scale and digital roots gave it potential to develop some of the revenue sources I have encouraged news organizations to explore, such as databases, local search, direct sales and commissioned obituaries and other life […]
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[…] years: the post on Twitter’s follower limit and posts on attribution, the 5 W’s and revenue ideas for news organizations. Those three posts each got 500+ views in January and have become my three most-read posts ever, […]
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[…] Newspapers don’t need new ideas; here are lots of ideas for new revenue streams (I think this is actually my most-read post ever, with more than 16,000 views) […]
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[…] organizations that survive and thrive in the digital age will have a broader revenue base than the advertisements and subscriptions that have traditionally supported newspapers and their […]
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[…] to sell subscriptions and ads. Buttry note: One of my most-read (but least-heeded) blog posts called on news organizations to develop more new revenue streams. I’m planning more posts on this topic, hopefully soon. The examples Jay cited (capturing […]
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[…] aussi la réponse de Steve Buttry avec plus de […]
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[…] também a resposta comentada a esta lista feita pelo professor de Comunicação de Massas da Louisiana State University, Steve […]
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[…] Steve Buttry’s excellent list of revenue streams for news […]
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[…] haven’t been innovative enough at developing broader revenue bases, and we need to get better. Most news organizations remain too dependent on the […]
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[…] Newspapers don’t need new ideas; here are lots of ideas for new revenue streams (2011, nearly 4,500 views in 2014) […]
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[…] If that stack wasn’t quite full, I added to it later in 2009 with my suggestion for mobile-first strategy, in 2010 with my call commissioned obituaries and other life stories and in 2011 with a long list of revenue ideas for newspaper companies. […]
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[…] 2011 post on revenue ideas for newspapers included this suggestion: “I suspect the small fees that most newspapers collect by charging […]
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[…] The reported price tag is a breathtaking fall from what newspapers used to be worth, even in the past few years. I hope this means Apollo’s strategy isn’t to keep cutting staff to maintain profits. DFM doesn’t have much left to cut, and values have dropped as newspapers have been cutting. The best way to maximize this $400 million investment will be to build value by developing new revenue streams. […]
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[…] I’ve helped professional media address for the last decade and more in various positions: Developing new revenue streams; developing new products; finding, adjusting and maintaining the right mix of digital and legacy […]
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[…] wish we had pursued other digital revenue streams harder and I wish we had achieved more in terms of mobile content, products and […]
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[…] business model for obituaries wouldn’t have worked, and neither would any of the other revenue ideas that I and others suggested. But we’ll never know because the newspaper industry was too […]
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[…] business model for obituaries wouldn’t have worked, and neither would any of the other revenue ideas that I and others suggested. But we’ll never know because the newspaper industry was too […]
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