New And Emerging Business Models For Online News: A Survey Of 10 European Countries

The online music and news markets have changed significantly and fundamentally over the past few years, as more and more new players – many of them originally from other sectors – enter the market space of the original media companies. While online news venues have been available for quite some time, the major tragedies and news events of the past few years have highlighted their ability to provide immediate, constantly-updated information (Emmer et al., 2002). In this paper we describe the current state of play in the online news industry in ten European countries, as at May 2003. The findings are based on the first two phases of a three-phase, European-Commission-funded market survey. In the paper we consider in greater detail the Internet business models of these companies. After initially introducing some of the literature in this field and discussing the justification for our chosen research approach, we describe our research design. We then report the findings from the first two phases of the project – the “Expert talks” and our web-based survey of the online news industry. Finally we identify the key driving factors for online news today: the new competitive environment, the appropriate payment systems, the focus on core competences, end devices and the consumers.