Research Article Open Access

Business Model Innovations in the Digital Publishing Industry

Abstract

When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.” This is how, in 1997, Clayton Christensen described the situation for media enterprises, particularly the news publishing industry, in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. For decades, publishers operated in an established market, which generated safe revenues. However, this stable economic situation changed with the introduction of the Internet and a “for free” mentality of users. Since then, the total circulation of news publishers has been declining and digital content is on the rise. Even worse, new competitors are entering the field offering digital content and advertising companies have new options for placing their advertisements. The consequence, the publishing industry is on the brink of the most radical change since the invention of printing by Gutenberg: They have to reconsider every single element of their business model. To underline these assumptions, the present study explores users´ expectations towards digital news content. Our findings show that features of content have an impact on payment preferences. At the same time, the acceptance of payment models does not differ depending on the news source. Furthermore we show that brand affinity (towards sources of content) varies between topics. With this study, we mainly consider the changed user behavior and users´ expectations towards digital content in order to de-rive implications on future business models of publishers, in particular on the customer value proposition.

Bianca Dennstedt

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