Innovation and Business Models for Digital News Industry: a critical approach to part of Brazilian reality

Abstract

The journalistic industry is facing a crisis since the Internet started to challenge its solid and old business model. The media companies and only them held the spaces for advertisers to reach thousands of people at the same time with their message. Once the monopoly has fallen, the revenues started dropping, the circulation of newspapers decreased deeply and the consumer’s attention moved to other platforms like social media, for example. Taking this into account, we intend to present here a discussion about the news business models, including revenue models, that are being adopted by some Brazilian industry examples. Our work is a didactic research considering business models is still an unsolved issue for this industry. Since there is no paradigm, what we present is a panorama of choices, remixes and customized adaptations. As ours research questions we have: RQ1: What kind of new business/revenue models are being adopted by media?RQ2: What are the differences between Brazilian big publishers and independent media strategies?To bring light and develop this questioning we start discussing innovation in journalistic industries. Also, we follow our discussion here with an outlook on the business models existent and the new ones that are being adopted or created by media companies. To end our work we present a list of strategies that are being used in mainstream firms from Brazil and also the ones that are created or adopted by the new companies that are born in the actual digital context. As our research method, we adopt the non-participant observation of the market and the companies here specified and the use of documents and media articles that present the strategies used by journalistic brands to face the revenue crisis. The main finding of the research isthat most of the companies are adopting the same strategies, in a “wave movement”, where once one companie gives it a try the other go with the flow. Keywords: Business Models, Digital News Industry, Brazilian Reality, digital context