Online Revenue Business Model Has Changed Little Since 1996

Newspaper Research Journal, Spring 2007 by Mensing, Donica

The 1996 findings are based on data from 83 valid surveys that were returned by Oct. 15,1996, a response rate of 44.3 percent. Respondents were representative of the total population based on a f-test that compared print circulation sizes of respondents and non-respondents.

The 2005 survey was done entirely online between March 2 and March 25, 2005. A link to the online survey was e-mailed to individual newspaper managers of online news sites in three separate e-mail contacts during a twoweek period. The survey reached 1,040 individual news managers. Of those, 242 completed at least some portion of the survey, for a response rate of 23.3 percent.28

The survey was 11 pages, designed so that each time users clicked to the next page, data were sent automatically to the server. Although 242 users completed the first page, there was a discernible drop-off in the completion rates on subsequent pages, and only 156 users answered questions on the last page. For this reason, all percentages referred to in the 2005 findings include only the respondents who answered the relevant question (valid percentage), not the total number of overall respondents.

Results

Print Circulation of Respondent Newspapers

The 2005 survey included a larger percentage of respondents from small newspapers than did the 1996 survey. Some 37 percent of the 2005 respondents were from newspapers with circulation less than 25,000, while 20 percent of the 1996 respondents were from smaller newspapers. Because many small newspapers did not have online news sites that were updated daily in 1996 but have subsequently added them, this change in the demographics of respondents does not seem surprising. Correspondingly, a larger percentage of respondents from the 1996 survey were from newspapers with circulations greater than 100,000 (34 percent) than in the 2005 survey (21.8 percent).

Staff Size of the Responding Online Newspapers

The staffing sizes of online newspapers remained relatively low between 1996 and 2005. In fact, the average number of full-time staff fell slightly between 1996 (M=4.2) and 2005 (M=3.86), although an independent samples t-test indicated this was not a significant decline. In 1996, more than a quarter of the respondents (27.7 percent) indicated they had no full-time staff; nine years later a third of the respondents indicated they had one full-time staff member. In 1996, 58 percent of the respondents had five or fewer staff; in 2005 nearly 80 percent of the sites had five or fewer full-time staff. In 1996,16.7 percent (n=13) of the sites reported more than 10 full-time online staff; in 2005 only 7.6 percent (n=ll) reported more than 10 online staff members.

RQ1: Did revenue sources for online newspapers change between 1996 and 2005?

A comparison of the 1996 and 2005 surveys reveals some significant differences in the mix of revenue sources between the two time periods. The 1996 survey indicated display advertising was the most important source of revenue in the early days of online publishing, providing approximately 38 percent of all revenue for responding online newspapers. [See Table 1]