Chasing Sustainability on the Net

Esa SirkkunenResearch Centre COMET, University

Of Tampere, FinlandECREA 26.10.2012 Istanbul

SuBMoJour-project

• International project: USA, Japan, European countries: UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland.

• Goals– To study empirically how it is possible to do journalism

profitably on the net – To help students or journalists to start their own

ventures based on the experience of others– To start to imagine what happens to professional

journalism in the age of fragmenting audiences and disappearing business models

• Research questions:• how these startups have started, how they have

survived over the first few years, how they fund their operations, what are their products, main revenue sources, how they see their future

• Material: semi-structured interviews with ”pure players” , non-profits not included

• sustainability = profitability in this case• Research Consortium: USC Annenberg, USA, Waseda

University, Japan and University of Tampere, Finland

Submojour.net

69 semi-structured interviews from 9 countries published on a databasehttp://submojour.net

The report will be published online 31.10.2012

Writers: Pekka Pekkala (USA), Mikihito Tanaka (Japan), Johanna Vehkoo and Clare Cook (UK), Clare Cook (France), Nicola Bruno (Italy), Luchino Sivori (Spain) ,Esa Sirkkunen (Finland)

Findings

• Two main categories in the cases:– Storytelling oriented business models: producing

original content, news and stories for audiences, making revenues mainly from advertisements

– Service oriented business models: don’t monetize the journalistic content as such, eg. curate and moderate citizen oriented content, aggregate news from other outlets etc.

Findings

• Revenue sources: – Advertising; display ads, cost per view, cost per click,

cost per action, weekly rates– Charging for content: paywalls, memberships,

subscriptions and freemium models– Affiliate marketing– Donations– Selling data and services– Arranging events, training, consulting– Merchandise

• it appeared that business models are in many cases related to the audience type, content type and revenue sources

• how to connect the business models, audience concepts, type of content (or service), and revenue sources

Conclusions

• Different media environments create different sets of circumstances for journalistic startups

• The national media system by Hallin & Manchini still has some relevance also on the grassroots level

• However the national features may be evaporating – global web-based players FB, Google, Amazon are rivals in the advertising market

Conclusions

• Journalists as business persons: most startups were either one-man-band operations or small teams

• Selling your work to the niche audience and to the advertisers has become more and more important part of journalistic work

• Flexible or atypical work is becoming common – often badly paid, relying on short term contracts

Conclusions

• the service oriented business models seem to be rising although the selling of journalistic content is still the core in the majority of the cases

Future• If journalism should make a living solely out of the net:

• small newsrooms, outsourced work, flexible or liquid professional identities, going back to 1800s?

• This has many implications • to journalism as an institution• for the self understanding of journalists

• next step is to continue with collecting more cases – open invitation for collaboration to all intrested

• start to contextualise the results with more theoretical thinking: theories of media convergence, political economy of the net, journalism studies etc.

• Thank you!