With $188 worth in ad revenues, how much journalism can you afford to put into the average online article?

  • Jon Lund 

This is to me the most important questions, my new analysis raises: We as a society needs someone who on an ongoing basis scans the radar for poor functioning, mal-conduct and fraud in government and business, and sees to it that matters are digged into, holding those in charge responsible.

The bloggers, the Google-news and Digg aggregators or the Wikileaks won’t be able to keep up the work by themselves. They’re great vehicles for findings, revealings and transparancy. But they’re endangered by their voluntary character: things only gets uncovered if we’re lucky enough to have a dedicated, well-formulated and -connected man on the scene of crime. And the voluntary setup is to often much to fragile in terms of ressources to keep on digging, when things gets complex.

A few established media will be able to keep up the work – particularly niche-sites with long-tail potentials (which will only give us exactly this: niche-coverage of niche-subjects).
Most established media won’t. there’s simply not enough money for high-cost news production in a world where established media will have to fight the googles, facebooks and craigslists of this planet in the battle for the advertising dollar.

This is what I document in my latest report: that an average article in established Danish online media only makes $188 in advertising revenues. When the rent, the servers, the sales staff are all paid, not much is left for journalism. Read on:

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[Download “Economics of news: the case for qualitative journalism on the internet” as pdf]

4 tanker om “With $188 worth in ad revenues, how much journalism can you afford to put into the average online article?”

  1. You are looking for answers in the wrong place imho.

    It HAS BEEN the medias traditional role to “keep the elite from screwing over Joe Sixpack”. But the world changes, and the media business model can’t keep up, which leads to collaps.

    What we need to look for, is NOT a way to preserve the media, but a new way to “keep the elite from screwing over Joe Sixpack”. When you focuses on the format, and not the goal, you WILL end up with faulty conclusions.

    What we need is not to prolong media life… what we need is a new society-structure, that won’t be prone to “screwing over Joe Sixpack”.

    Look for what you need, not for what you want.

  2. Still you seem blinded by the format… in this case “deeds of journalism”.

    You are forgetting to think out-of-the-box, in order to find alternatives for reaching the true goal, as the deeds of journalism now, is on the brink of extinction.

    Well… I have only read your intro, and can’t realy know what I’m talking about 🙂

    Perhaps you actually do present many ideas for changes we should work on, in order for the world to function still, even without the deeds of journalism of yesteryear.

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