Revenues for Online Newspapers: Owner and User Perceptions

The newspaper industry faces hard questions about business models and economic success for their online newspaper ventures. Managers, editors-in-chief and designers at nine local newspapers in Sweden were interviewed. In addition, semi-structured interviews with 153 users/readers of the news services of these nine newspapers were also conducted. The analysis reveals differences in digital news product content and revenue generation. The paper suggests a new business model for digital news products that includes content-based revenue generation through personalization, archiving and versioning, approaches to advertising that involve more highly targeted market intermediation, and nonnews activities covering advertisers and information brokerage. Results suggest that management and users agree on the importance of archives, personalized and deep news content, and a role for the newspaper as intermediary. However, users are not willing to pay for increased multimedia or an e-commerce site sponsored by the