World Association of News Publishers


Alternate revenue streams

Alternate revenue streams

Diversifying revenue streams has taken a big priority for news publishers all over the world as traditional business models face increasing pressure to produce the goods. Therefore, no new idea, product or service is beyond consideration as publishers embrace creativity, experimentation, and initiative like never before.

In the Blogs

The off-label use of WhatsApp as a news distributor has created an opportunity for readers to redefine what it means to have a digital experience, but there’s no clear business model just yet, writes Pontsho Pillane.

Publishers should make e-commerce a priority source of revenue as they fight for survival in the COVID-19 era, industry experts told participants during a session of WAN-IFRA’s recent Asian Media Leaders eSummit.

Everyone is trying to predict what the fallout of the ongoing pandemic will look like for publishers. Difficult to do. Even major companies like PriceWaterhouseCoopers have delayed their annual Media Outlook (usually published in June) with the uncertainty lingering. But publishers, editors and...

With 90% of internet users active on its app, WhatsApp is the biggest social networking app in South Africa. It’s bigger than Twitter, Instagram, and even Facebook. So it’s no wonder that publishers have turned to WhatsApp as a way to reach audiences, writes ...

News publishers worldwide have seen their advertising revenues hammered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. A panel of experts from Europe, the UK and the US, who run premium private marketplaces that sell programmatic advertising for publishers, joined a WAN-IFRA Webinar recently to discuss...

Both Facebook and news organisations such as the BBC are acting rapidly to meet the mushrooming demand in India for various types of video content.

For The Globe and Mail’s Editor in Chief, David Walmsley, the newsroom of the future is one where journalists can focus on finding and telling great stories. With Sophi, its homegrown AI system, the Globe is on its way to making that happen.

What do you do when subscriptions and advertising are not enough to sustain your newsroom? After obtaining nonprofit status, The Salt Lake Tribune can now be supported with tax-deductible donations, while an affiliated nonprofit foundation aims to support journalistic projects across the state...

The German media lab focuses on innovation at the business model level, seeking and creating products and commercial opportunities that go beyond the conventions of the news industry.

With local journalism in crisis, we have no choice but to radically reform our news and information systems, argues Victor Pickard, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

How can you enhance the performance of native ads across different brands and publications? The award-winning Bonnier News Brand Studio in Sweden has some answers.

Play. Pause. Repeat.

Netflix entered the Indian market in 2016. Coupled with the internet revolution brought in by Reliance Jio, it turned tables in the big-screen-Bollywood-obsessed country.

Kurt Sabathil, Managing Director of Schwäbisch Media, has seemingly taken to heart the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" theory when it comes to the strategy of this German regional media group.

A strong focus on a “reader-first” circulation model has helped The Economist grow its reader revenues by 50 percent while doubling its gross margin in the past five years.

“We don't do anything without an audience opportunity and a revenue opportunity,” Robertson Barrett, President of Digital Media at Hearst Newspapers, told participants at WAN-IFRA's recent ...

With more than 100 daily newspapers and related web sites spread across the United States, Gannett has the enviable luxury to test and tweak its evolving digital subscription strategy across its group.

Digital advertising alone will not provide a sustainable future for digital news in Africa. According to Nic Newmansenior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, news publishers will need a...

By Bill Poorman

Publishers need to adopt three, four, or even more business models in order to assure the financial stability of their organizations going forward, warned two speakers Thursday at the PublishAsia 2019 conference in Singapore, put on...

“If it works for us, it could work for any news organisation,” said Savan Wijewardene of Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited (ANCL)’s success in developing events.

By Shobi Pereira

At the recent Publish Asia 2019 conference in Singapore, companies shared their varied approaches in revenue diversification through joint ventures, alliances and creating their own technology platforms.

In the space of seven years, Aller Media Finland, part of a pan-Nordic media holding, has transformed itself from a magazine publisher to a diversified media, marketing, and data services concern that continues to publish two weekly...

Building an escape room, launching a direct public offering (DPO) for direct reader investment, and renting a room on Airbnb: all ways newspapers are thinking outside the box to diversify their revenue stream. In this guest post, Mary-Katharine Phillips of Twipe says those ideas all provide...

“A media company can potentially have up to 12-15 revenue streams without moving away from its core,” says Raju Narisetti, Professor of Professional Practice and director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University.

“Increasingly, a...

"Our challenge is: How do we get the best out of our 1,000 salespeople? How do we get 1,000 salespeople who can take 2 million businesses by the hand and navigate them on this difficult journey?" says Morgan Stevenson, Director of SME Solutions for Newsquest, one of the UK's...

"I'd like to say very clearly that we love our newspapers as much as we love our digital media products," said Kevin Beatty, CEO of dmg, publisher of the Daily Mail and MailOnline. "Our newspapers, when they were launched back in 1896, were the innovators of their time."

"Amateurs can waste thousands of dollars if they don't know what they are doing. That's where we see ADM fitting in," says Victoria Advocate Publisher Dan Easton in describing the digital marketing services company he founded at the regional daily.

“Our brands have never been so powerful and reached so many people, so brand extension is key to our development and to revenue growth,” Jean-Luc Breysse, Deputy CEO of France's Figaro Group, told participants in WAN-IFRA...

Scandinavian powerhouse Schibsted has never shied away from spinning out one of its disruptive digital operations from its own legacy brands to actually compete with them. Its Norwegian tabloid daily Verdens Gang (VG) first did this with its website (VG.no) and then with mobile. And since 2014,...

Matching a brand’s expertise with a publisher’s storytelling skills and distribution resources has turned out to be a success. Content marketing fulfills publishers’ needs for new business models and is all about leveraging competitive advantages, says this guest poster from Schibsted.

Paid content was envisaged from the start at STAT, The Boston Globe's ambitious life-sciences site – but putting a substantial amount of content behind a paywall only a year after launch was a bold move nonetheless. The paywalled area, called STAT...

Local media companies face an existential question: How can we build a sustainable and growing enterprise on the platform of a traditional media company? In a decade of intense effort, our industry has found no magic formula. In this guest post, Steve Gray, VP of Strategy & Innovation at...

The Information, a tech newsletter devoid of advertising, carries numerous lessons for newspapers – more than are first apparent, contends guest poster Colin Morrison. Publishers ignore those lessons at their peril, he warns.

The answer, says guest poster Steve Gray, is yes – with qualifications. Gray describes numerous lessons from his own experience as a news publishing executive and from attendance at a leading conference.

When Banks Dishmon, advertising director for the Sentinel-Tribune of Bowling Green, Ohio, attended a meeting of the town's Downtown Business Association last February, he had no idea that his newspaper was about to enter uncharted territory.

Big Data represents an enormous opportunity for local media – one they should seize with both hands, Steve Gray argues in this guest post. If they don't, they run the risk of being overrun, he says.

Publishers must expand their focus well beyond the usual concept of "content" when they set out to earn money from digital subscriptions, argues Nick Tjaardstra, Deputy Director, WAN-IFRA Global Advisory.

A French startup raised an impressive $820,000 via crowd funding to launch a "search engine for quotes". The system turns archives into searchable databases to extract quotes which can be added to today's news stories to boost traffic and...

The projects inspired by Newspaper Next have faded into history – but the program's principles of innovation remain indispensable, Steve Gray contends in this guest post.

Just like The Correspondent's new book-publishing house and The New York Times' ...

Milou Klein Lankhorst of the Dutch news site The Correspondent says publishing books is helping them to expand the site's audience.

Since exiting bankruptcy a couple of years ago, US-based GateHouse Media has aggressively grown its business. An ongoing acquisition strategy and the launch of numerous digital marketing services and businesses are just two ways the company is burying...

The successful re-invention of some of the world’s leading publishers is clarifying the future for the best daily newspapers, argues guest writer Colin Morrison in this two-part post. He points to Hearst Corporation as a standout example.

“If the market is changing, why aren't you?” asks Schibsted Sweden's Frida Kvarnström. “Sometimes you need to look at your strategy and see if it matches the new channels that are offered out there.”

Opportunities remain for media companies to earn money with classified ads, says Peter Zollman, CEO of the AIM Group, a leading consultancy in interactive media and classified advertising.

This is the second of a two-part series on rethinking publishing in the age of social media distribution. In the first installment, media analyst Andreas Pfeiffer examined why publishers should attempt to embrace a wider...

As The New York Times has reached the end of sustainable readership growth within the US, it is expanding its global audience to double digital revenue by 2020. With a US, international, Chinese and Spanish version, The New York Times is looking to develop these markets even further. 

“Within two weeks, the French newspaper Le Monde will run out of cash.” So began French media analyst Frederic Filloux’s Monday Note essay on June 10, 2010. The iconic daily practically had one foot in the...

“We (the industry) are always looking for a single answer. That's a very dangerous way of thinking. You have to be constantly diversifying everything,” Melissa Bell, Vice President...

One of the most ambitious niche news sites ever launched, The Boston Globe's STAT health and life sciences site is free to the public but plans to experiment with paid content later this year.

For a publisher that has a stated strategy of doubling its reader revenue in five years, you might think The Economist doesn't have much faith in advertising down the road. While the iconic "newspaper" is indeed a reader revenue success story, its advertising business is still thriving, says...

In search of new revenue streams to offset an expected drop in income from traditional operations, Costa Rican media group Grupo Nación decided to purchase its own events venue, called Parque Viva.

What we've tried to do is, rather than think, What are we going to put inside that box? we think, What is it the advertiser wants to achieve and how can we create the best user experience in our environment based on...

Germany's NOZ Medien serves as a beacon of inspiration for regional media companies. Its stated strategy involves sweeping transformation, aggressive diversification – both organically and through acquisition – ultimately building a sustainable business backed by paid content. The company is...

Though their direct contribution to RCS MediaGroup’s bottom line is modest, e-commerce activities indirectly boost the Italo-Spanish group's revenues by strengthening reader loyalty and collecting a great deal of information about readers' interests.

Alternative revenue streams: those three magic words spell out the holy grail of newspaper publishing the world over. The quest for the grail has become rather urgent, too, as print revenue continues to shrink and digital income grows too slowly.

Video expert Magnus Zaar pulls no punches when characterising today's state of video: “Publishers may have a grand plan when it comes to online video, but when competition hits and video ratings match neither high...

Southern Germany has always been home to innovation, perhaps most famously when it comes to automobiles. Südkurier Medienhaus in Constance continues that tradition in its online...

This post about providing Internet services to local businesses is excerpted from the upcoming WAN-IFRA Report, "Alternative Revenue Streams for News Publishers," to be published in February 2016.

Large and mid-sized media companies face the same need to supplement their core activity with additional growth drivers. At the World News Media Congress in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the session titled "Can mainstream media buy its way to growth?" looked at different strategies for growth...

In the weeks to come and during World Publishing Expo 2015, we will be featuring a number of first-time exhibiting companies. One such company is OwnLocal, the U.S.-based provider offering media companies,...

After more than a decade of digital disruption, the African entertainment and media industry has entered a new era –where the media between traditional and digital spheres is blurred and...

A few years ago, many editors and news publishers believed native advertising would undermine the credibility of journalism. But the harsh financial realities and the need for new revenue streams have softened the overall attitude. Native advertising has grown up fast and is now taking...

As more brands and publishers venture into native advertising, the quality of branded content becomes critically important. Since native advertising looks and feels like editorial content, it has to compete for attention. This has given rise to a whole new...

Publishers have a distinct advantage over other content providers or marketing agencies in that they “own” their audience. However, this can also be a weakness, as most brands want their content to reach a certain threshold of impressions, counted when a web page is shown to a visitor....

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