Since digital journalism is still a relatively new sphere, established strategies for making a profit have not yet taken shape. Still, there are a number of possibilities that are being explored by many digital news sources, ranging from traditional advertisements and subscriptions to more creative ways of enticing readers to pay and smarter ways of getting advertising revenue. These illustrate that online journalism is economically viable and can make a profit using ways that would have been impossible in print or television.
Websites that generally belong to more traditional news sources, like The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times, only give free online access to a small section of articles. The rest can be purchased through a regular subscription to the site. A more lenient version of this is a paywall policy implemented by other news sources like The New York Times. The Times gives online readers access to all articles but limits the number of free articles read per month before asking that readers subscribe.
All online news sources also have some form of advertising, ranging from advertisements that appear alongside a given article on a page (in another column or as a banner), or ads that appear for a short amount of time (e.g. 5-30 seconds) before the viewer can click through to gain access to the article (a strategy adopted by sites like Business Insider and Forbes). CBS has made all of its 60 Minutes episodes available online, but viewers must watch a number of commercials before arriving at the actual content.
There are also smarter forms of advertising that employ machine learning algorithms to send more targeted ads to viewers of news articles, allowing digital sites to charge higher prices to companies that advertise on their site. The most famous, and popular, version of this is Google AdSense advertisements, a service that is especially popular among smaller sites like local newspapers or blogs that have targeted audiences and that benefit from having a third party organization, like Google, to mediate the advertising process (since these sites often do not have dedicated marketing teams).
A final and somewhat less effective strategy for making money online involves adopting a donation based system, similar to how National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting operate. This may also involve annual donation drives reminding dedicated viewers to give some money to the organization. Perhaps the most famous example of this model is the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia. Organizations that rely heavily on donations for income are usually, like Wikimedia, 501(c)(3) nonprofits or Low-profit Limited Liability Corporations, known as an L3Cs, hybrid organizations that are barely for-profit and fill some form of social good.
All of these strategies are relatively untested, but initial results are promising. As organizations shift to digital journalism, income will likely come from a combination of the above strategies as well as newer, more creative ways to make money. Online journalism can be just as profitable as other forms of journalism, if not more so. Journalism as a market can remain healthy as it transitions online.
Websites that generally belong to more traditional news sources, like The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times, only give free online access to a small section of articles. The rest can be purchased through a regular subscription to the site. A more lenient version of this is a paywall policy implemented by other news sources like The New York Times. The Times gives online readers access to all articles but limits the number of free articles read per month before asking that readers subscribe.
All online news sources also have some form of advertising, ranging from advertisements that appear alongside a given article on a page (in another column or as a banner), or ads that appear for a short amount of time (e.g. 5-30 seconds) before the viewer can click through to gain access to the article (a strategy adopted by sites like Business Insider and Forbes). CBS has made all of its 60 Minutes episodes available online, but viewers must watch a number of commercials before arriving at the actual content.
There are also smarter forms of advertising that employ machine learning algorithms to send more targeted ads to viewers of news articles, allowing digital sites to charge higher prices to companies that advertise on their site. The most famous, and popular, version of this is Google AdSense advertisements, a service that is especially popular among smaller sites like local newspapers or blogs that have targeted audiences and that benefit from having a third party organization, like Google, to mediate the advertising process (since these sites often do not have dedicated marketing teams).
A final and somewhat less effective strategy for making money online involves adopting a donation based system, similar to how National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting operate. This may also involve annual donation drives reminding dedicated viewers to give some money to the organization. Perhaps the most famous example of this model is the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia. Organizations that rely heavily on donations for income are usually, like Wikimedia, 501(c)(3) nonprofits or Low-profit Limited Liability Corporations, known as an L3Cs, hybrid organizations that are barely for-profit and fill some form of social good.
All of these strategies are relatively untested, but initial results are promising. As organizations shift to digital journalism, income will likely come from a combination of the above strategies as well as newer, more creative ways to make money. Online journalism can be just as profitable as other forms of journalism, if not more so. Journalism as a market can remain healthy as it transitions online.