Do Small Streams Make a Big River? Detailing the Diversification of Revenue Streams in Newspapers’ Transition to Digital Journalism Businesses

Abstract

The newspaper industry is in a deepening revenue crisis and the advertising side of the news business has virtually collapsed as a result of global competition with technology platforms, as well as the Covid-19 outbreak. This study examines the business of digital journalism through a revenue diversification lens and maps how the revenue streams of a national newspaper industry is shifting. Our case study is the Norwegian newspaper industry’s revenue streams from 2006 to 2019, a media market deemed particularly successful in making readers pay for news online. By means of industry data, we measure revenue diversification by applying the Revenue Diversity Index—an index which quantifies the number of revenue streams and the distribution amongst them for the whole newspaper industry. The findings identify a forced diversification which challenges assumptions of a simple and positive relationship between revenue diversification and economic performance. We find that revenue structures have flipped from an advertising based model to an audience dominated model, with a larger diversity of revenue sources but lower total revenues overall. The increasing prices of digital journalism may further expand knowledge gaps in the population between those willing and able to pay and those who are not.