Abstract
Digital news publishers strive to balance revenue streams in their business models: as standard advertising declines, alternatives for sustaining digital journalism arise in the forms of sponsored content, user donations and payments—one-off purchases, subscriptions or memberships, public or private grants, electronic commerce, events and consulting. An exhaustive study found 2874 active online news publications in Spain, and it observed the adoption of such models in early 2021. Advertising remains the most popular source of income for digital news operations (85.8%) and most sites rely on just one or two revenue streams (74.5%). We compare the cases in our census by their origin (digital-native or non-native), geography (local/regional or national/global) and topic scope (generalist or specialized). We find that traditional, national and specialized online media have a broader and more innovative revenue mix than digital-native, regional or local and general-interest news outlets. The comprehensiveness of this pioneering study sheds light for the first time on the risk that the lack of diversification and innovation in funding sources may imperil the financial sustainability of some online news operations in Spain, mostly those with a smaller scope and no backing from a traditional business, according to the results we present here.
Highlights
Digitization and the internet have transformed the funding model of online news organizations, which used to be based almost exclusively on advertising
In relation to the types of funding (Table 3), conventional advertising is still the most widely used source of revenue by Spanish digital media, both in conventional display formats (85.8%) and in the new kinds we identify as sponsored content (16.4%)
In comparison with earlier studies [51,52,54,73,74], this paper shows that Spanish news organizations will have to be more innovative in using traditional and alternative funding sources if they do not want to perish
Summary
Digitization and the internet have transformed the funding model of online news organizations, which used to be based almost exclusively on advertising. Media companies have conceived and implemented new revenue streams, and they have focused their efforts on developing models for users to pay for digital news and editorial content [1]. Most of the audience is using several devices to get digital news [4,5], mobile devices are becoming the main platform for news consumption [5], and they are creating additional readership among those who do not use legacy brands [6,7] New platforms such as social media emerge as alternatives to traditional digital publishing and broadcasting on media organizations’ own platforms; this tendency towards off-site consumption of content takes monetization options away from the hands of media companies and subjects them to new intermediaries. This represents more competition in an already complex market [1]
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