Aus der aktuellen Kolumne "Stop the Presses" von von Steve Outing bei Editor&Publisher.com, ein Quote von Gordon Borrell CEO von Borrell Assiciates Inc die zum Thema neue Untersuchungen präsentieren:

CEO Gordon Borrell says he saw some good news in those numbers and in the variation between news companies. His researchers found that the newspapers that were doing well were those that had gone beyond the ordinary and had added new revenue streams to the core, obvious ones -- like classified-ad upsells and vertical classifieds services (auto, real estate, jobs).

The sites that reported higher per-visitor revenues had invested in larger sales staff to push online; they had created services like virtual home-sale tours and aggressively sold them; they had created effective targeted advertising programs on the Web, and were heavily into targeted e-mail services.

In short, says Borrell, business models already exist for newspapers to make decent money online. It's just that many publishers choose not to employ them.

He says that one of the papers surveyed as part of the "What Newspaper Web Sites Earn" project reported online revenues of "zero" -- this from a newspaper with a print circulation of 75,000, whose publisher had chosen to have its Web site merely be an extension of the print product, with no sales staff to monetize the online investment.

Borrell was able to find several other newspapers with similar print circulation that had Web sites pulling in between $350,000 and $400,000 in annual revenues. That zero-revenue paper, which already had a Web publishing system in place, had made a management decision not to bother earning money to pay for its online operation, let alone profit from it.

Borrell's advice to online managers at organizations with similar stories: "Grab the publisher by the shoulders and say, 'All you have to do is sell some advertising!'"

Hier die vollständige Kolumne zum Nachlesen: Online Business Model Progress Report.