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| INTRODUCTION | DATA COLLECTION | TAXONOMY | REFERENCES | |
When extending their business online, newspapers have to make several important and difficult decisions in response to multiple strategic challenges. This section of the website illustrates decisions taken by 82 Western European newspapers with regard to their online content.
Firstly, there is the question whether the websites are free or not. In other words, do newspapers try to monetise their online content directly (by charging for it) or indirectly (by relying on advertising revenues)? For the paying sites, we also took a closer look at the subscription formulas and alternative access possibilities offered. Here, our main interest was the extent to which newspapers ‘play it safe’ and mainly offer ‘traditional’ subscriptions, or are expanding their digital horizon, for instance by unbundling the news and offering it on a pay-per-view basis. In particular, we analysed the offering of online news (free versus paid content) and the access options (subscription formulas, PDF versions, day pass, pay-per-view, etc.) for 82 newspaper sites in eight countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom).
Concretely, we present how many of the newspaper sites are freely accessible and how many adopt a ‘walled-garden’ approach. Besides, we show which unbundled access options are available in which countries, and how many of the newspaper sites offer them. Thirdly, to present a more general picture, we calculated what percentage of the newspapers in a given country offer at least one unbundled access option (either pay-per-view, a credits card, a day pass or an X-days pass), at least one type of subscription formula (either a general online subscription or a PDF-subscription), or both. Fourthly, we also checked how newspapers handle their online archive. When collecting the data, we discovered that newspapers not only handle their current articles in a variety of ways, but that the same is true for their archive. Obviously, this is also a crucial dimension of newspapers' online behaviour. In some cases, access to the archive is completely free for everybody. In other cases the archive is only accessible for subscribers to the online and/or print version. Another possibility is free archival access for subscribers, but charges for occasional visitors. A final option is that the archive is charged for to everybody. In our analysis, we only examine the split-up 'free for everybody' vs. charged-for, the latter thus being broadly defined. Finally, we analysed which payment instruments are accepted on the ‘fee’ websites for the payment of online content. The five most popular payment instruments in a given country are listed, as well as the percentage of newspaper sites within a country that accept it.
By looking at all these strategic dimensions, the differences in online revenue models between the newspapers in our dataset are illustrated.
The results can be selected on a per-country basis or per strategic decision. The first option allows observing the current state of the newspaper market in a specific country. On the other hand, presenting the results per strategic decision enables inter-country comparisons. For more detailed results on the current state of the newspaper market in Western Europe, the interested reader is referred to Bleyen and Van Hove[i].
During the period June-July 2006, the websites of 82 newspapers in eight countries were examined. More specifically, this analysis included all national newspapers with a daily circulation in Belgium (9 sites), Luxembourg (6), the Netherlands (8), Germany (10), the United Kingdom (10), Italy (20), Spain (8) and France (11).[ii] Regional and local newspapers were not included because of their specific orientation and generally smaller market share.[iii] Newspapers aimed at an extremely specific audience (for example horse-lovers, children, etc.)[iv] also fall outside the scope of our research. The same applies to freely distributed newspapers such as the Metro. They typically only generate revenue through advertising and thus have no strategic decisions to make for their websites on this subject. In choosing the countries, their geographical position was an important factor since we wanted to be able to compare certain (neighbouring) countries and hence highlight interesting differences.
Importantly, only the national daily newspapers, as certified by the national co-ordinating organisations, are studied in our research. This number differs considerably from country to country. For example, we have no less than 20 Italian newspapers in our dataset, whereas in the Netherlands only 8 newspapers are defined as national daily newspapers. One could therefore argue that Italy is over-represented. However, we have always calculated the average of the country averages, and checked if this figure varied from the unweighted average of all newspapers. The divergence remains limited to 1 or 2 percentage points at most. To conclude, we emphasise that when collecting the data, we operated in a selective though exhaustive way; selective in the sense that we made choices regarding the type of newspapers and countries, but exhaustive in that we did not take a random sample but examined the total population within our selection.
As of 2007, Finland will be added to our dataset, which enables us to take a closer look at (part of) the Scandinavian market too. Furthermore, all our findings will be updated once a year. As a result, changes and evolutions in online strategic behaviour can be tracked.
Box 1: An overview of the definitions of ‘free’ and ‘fee’
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FREE In our taxonomy, a free website denotes that all the news,[v] columns and archived articles (if available) can be consulted for free on the website. |
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FEE In contrast to ‘free’, ‘fee’ means that some content is charged for on the website. This may be limited to a few columns, the archive or – ultimately – all content. We further divided this category into ‘fee light’ and ‘fee+’. Indeed, some sites offer content completely for free in HTML format, and solely try to monetise their online content by means of a charged-for PDF version of the paper of the day. |
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FEE LIGHT This category contains the newspaper sites where all the news, the columns and the archived articles (if available) can be consulted free of charge, and where solely the PDF version is offered against payment. |
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FEE+ These sites also offer something against payment, but either something other than a PDF version, or something more. |
Box 2: A description of the unbundled access options
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DAY PASS AND X-DAYS PASS A day pass gives complete access to the website for 24 hours. One can thus consult all the online articles for one day.[vi] This is a convenient way to search the archive for relevant articles. Note that this is not the same as the purchase of one PDF version of the newspaper. In the latter case, one merely buys the digital version of the newspaper for the day in question, which can afterwards be browsed offline on the screen or which can be printed out. This is something completely different from the ‘surfing on the site’ principle. A variant on the day pass method is the X-days pass. This option gives access to the site for X number of days. |
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CREDITS-‘CARD’ (OR WALLET) Here the visitor of the site buys X credits at a certain price. With this card[vii] he subsequently pays one or more credits per article (often depending on the length of the article), after which the amount is deducted from the card’s balance. |
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PAY-PER-VIEW This access option gives the opportunity to purchase and pay for articles on an individual basis. The reader for instance screens the archive, finds the relevant article and pays for it on a per-unit basis. Another example is the purchase of a column on a per-unit basis. Another way to explain the difference between a credits-card and pay-per-view is that the latter implies pay-as-you-go, whereas a credits-card is in fact (partly) prepaid. |
REFERENCES
[i] Bleyen, V.-A. and Van Hove, L. Western European newspapers and their online revenue models: an overview. Working paper, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2007.
Bleyen, V.-A. and Van Hove, L. Western European newspaper sites still no fan of micro-payment instruments. Working paper, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2007.
[ii] We primarily relied on the list of national daily paid-for newspapers in the report of the World Association of Newspapers (2006). For more specific data we contacted the national co-ordinating organisations for each country. For Spain, we collected data from the portal site <www.spain-newspaper.com> because we were unable to obtain a certified classification for the concept of ‘national, daily, paid-for newspapers’. The list of newspapers is available upon request from the authors.
[iii] According to the report of the World Association of Newspapers (2006), the number of regional and local paid-for newspapers with a daily circulation in 2005 amounted to 61 in France, 139 in Spain, 71 in Italy, 94 in the United Kingdom, 358 in Germany, 26 in the Netherlands, 0 in Luxembourg and 18 in Belgium. The market share of these newspapers, calculated as a proportion of the total circulation per country, amounts to 73% in France, 60% in Spain, 36% in Italy, 29% in the United Kingdom, 92% in Germany, 54% in the Netherlands, 0% in Luxembourg and 31% in Belgium. In other words, the relative importance of the regional and local newspapers varies drastically from country to country. Hence, the same is true for the newspapers in our dataset.
[iv] In France for example, Bilto, La Gazette des courses and Matin courses are intended for horse-lovers and Quoti is a newspaper for children.
[v] In practice, newspapers often offer the news on their website in abridged form, providing, for instance, only the headlines or a selection of articles. In other words, in these cases the online content in HTML format does not completely cover everything in the print version of the newspaper. When a newspaper’s website is categorised as ‘free’ and considered to be completely gratis, this thus does not necessarily imply that the newspaper is giving away its entire print content on the Internet.
[vi] Again we stress that it is perfectly possible that not all the printed articles are available online.
[vii] This ‘card’ is actually a kind of electronic wallet that keeps track of the online balance.