Pew's view of News Media in 2010-specifically online news
Posted by Sheila Conlin
We know that advertising revenues are down for all kinds of news producers - newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and online. Local TV news and radio are the hardest hit - down 22% in 2009 - according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Some of the drop they attribute to the sagging U-S economy. Some to the explosion of the Internet and the way people get news and information in this changing landscape.
They do not have figures for online NEWS websites. But they say online sites, as a group, only lost about 5% of their ad revenues. (They speculate news online sites "fared much worse.")
But some of the other statistics seem to tie into the research objective of this project. So I'll share some of them with you.
"And as we enter 2010 there is little evidence that journalism online has found a sustaining revenue model. A new survey on online economics, released in this report for the first time, finds that 79% of online news consumers say they rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad."
"But if a new model is to be found it is hardly clear what it will be. Our survey, produced with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, finds that only about a third of Americans (35%) have a news destination online they would call a "favorite," and even among these users only 19% said they would continue to visit if that site put up a pay-wall."
So if ads on the sides of your site are not the secret to making money with online news and information sites - perhaps we should consider widgets and social media tools. Another clip from the Pew report reads:
"So what about the new media experiments growing around the country? There are certainly exciting things happening, from former journalists creating specialty news sites and community sites, to citizens covering neighborhoods, local blogs and social media."
"In 2009, Twitter and other social media emerged as powerful tools for disseminating information and mobilizing citizens for purposes such as evading the censors in Iran and communicating from the earthquake disaster zone in Haiti. The majority of Internet users (59%) now use some kind of social media, including Twitter, blogging and networking sites, according to a new PEJ/Pew Internet & American Life survey."
There are a lot of other insights in the Pew report. If you'd like to read "more about it" - click here.
