The economics of moving from print to online: lose one hundred, get back eight

The economics of moving from print to online: lose one hundred, get back eight. mondaynote. Frédéric Filloux.

Let’s kill a myth. The dream of a compact newsroom, able to output a high-intensity general news website doesn’t fly. Numbers simply don’t add up. And here is why.
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First, the cost structure of a daily. In a typical operation, the biggest costs are industrial ones: around 25%-35% for paper and printing; another 30%-40% for distribution; around 18-25% for editorial; the remaining 10-15% are for administrative and marketing expenditures. It varies from country to country but we can safely assert most of the costs — at least 60% — are industrial in nature. Evidently, that part disappears when going online.
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Now let’s compare three numbers:
a) the cost of an online newspaper,
b) the audience needed to absorb costs
c) the audience of the biggest website

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Vía: Ramón Salaverría