With the economics of news forcing the likes of Seattle-PI and Christian Science Monitor to abandon print for the web, doubtless dozens of other publishers are mulling the same option. Not so fast – ditching the dead tree could lose publishers the bulk of their revenue and even a sizable chunk of their web traffic, say researchers from London’s City University.
Could going web-only kill newspapers? Photograph: Makz/Flickr/Some rights reserved
• Finnish business daily Taloussanomat stopped printing to focus on digital in December 2007. Though costs fell 52% by jettisoning print, Taloussanomat also lost 75% of revenue when print ads and subscriptions disappeared in favour of cheap web ads, leading the site to neglect innovation and researchers to conclude: “Ditching the print edition makes such a strategy financially worthwhile only if expenditure is at least 45% higher than income … If this finding holds true more widely, current profit levels can sustain newsprint for some time to come.”
• While sites with print editions continued to grow traffic, within five months of losing cross-promotion from the newspaper, Taloussanomat.fi‘s unique users and page views were down 22% and 11% respectively, according to researchers Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti.
• The problem for anyone considering online-only – readers spend just 3.5 minutes on-site and view just 2.6 pages, in Taloussanomat.fi’s experience; that’s about a quarter the time readers spent with the printed equivalent. And Taloussanomat.fi’s website is still loss-making.
Focusing on just one title, it’s unclear how far this study can be extrapolated more widely – but we know Seattle-PI.com lost a fifth of its page views a week after axing its paper. Thurman has previously researched online news video and US visits to UK news sites. The Finnish study’s methodology was company interviews and newsroom observation.
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