Robert Ivan 2008 MA Thesis - Newspaper Websites' Inability to Generate Economically Sustainable Advertising Revenue

THE KRUGMAN PARADOX
NEWSPAPER WEBSITES’ INABILITY TO GENERATE ECONOMICALLY
SUSTAINABLE ADVERTISING REVENUE
by Robert Ivan
A.A.S. 1998 Brookdale Community College
B.A. 2002 University of Colorado, Boulder
A Thesis submitted to
The Faculty of
School of Continuing and Professional Studies
of New York University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts
Graphic Communications Management and Technology
Fall 2008
Thesis directed by
Bonnie Blake
GCMT Program Director

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© Copyright 2008 by Robert Ivan
All rights reserved

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Dedication
I dedicate this thesis to my mother and father, life-long learners, who never failed to
provide me with persistent support in my pursuit of learning.

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Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the students, faculty, and advisory board at NYU SCPS and GCMT
for their input and advisement.
I wish to acknowledge the donors to the Prism Fellowship Fund. The culmination of my
degree has been greatly facilitated by your financial support through the PRISM merit
scholarship over the years.
In particular I would like to acknowledge Advisory Board member Donald Roland for
always making himself available for discussion and guidance and for acting as a sounding
board for my ideas, no matter how outlandish some of them may have been.
To my family and friends and the professors and colleagues who have supported me in
different ways throughout my graduate study: Thank you.

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Abstract of Thesis
This thesis paper is focused on investigating the economic feasibility of general
information news sites owned and operated by newspaper organizations. In particular, this
thesis seeks to explore a phenomenon I call The Krugman Paradox, which states that
regardless of audience reach, general interest newspaper websites cannot generate an
economically sustainable advertising revenue stream. The goal is to help newspaper
owners better realize the economics of generating sustainable online advertising revenue in
the new Internet paradigm.
The paper begins with a brief background of newspapers, the Internet, and Internet
advertising. The state of the art focuses on the economic performance of newspapers, news
sites, online audience, and online advertising. Much of the online data for newspapers
spans a time period from 2003 to 2008. Information is sourced from financial statements,
industry data, industry analysts, and media pundits. Academic investigations into the
economic performance of the newspaper industry were found to be few and far between,
but were cited where appropriate.
Conclusions are drawn from the included data. Conclusions reveal that to date, there is not
one single general news website that is economically sustainable. The findings in this
thesis support the phenomenon known as The Krugman Paradox, which states that
regardless of audience reach, general interest newspaper websites cannot generate an
economically sustainable advertising revenue stream. Future research regarding the

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findings of this thesis should explore new revenue streams and new publishing techniques
to generate sufficient revenues to maintain and grow operations.

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Table of Contents
Dedication_________________________________________________________iii
Acknowledgements__________________________________________________iv
Abstract of Thesis___________________________________________________v
Table of Contents___________________________________________________vii
List of Figures_____________________________________________________viii
List of Tables______________________________________________________ix
Glossary of Terms__________________________________________________x
Chapter 1: Introduction______________________________________________1
Chapter 2: A Brief Review of Newspapers Transition to the Internet____________3
Chapter 3: State of the Art
3.1 Newspapers______________________________________________8
3.2 Advertising______________________________________________15
3.3 Site Economics___________________________________________22
Chapter 4: Research Question
4.1 Is The Krugman Paradox Real?_______________________________29
4.2 Justification______________________________________________29
4.3 Discussion_______________________________________________31
Chapter 5: Problem Resolution_________________________________________32
Chapter 6: Conclusions
6.1 Conclusions______________________________________________34
6.2 Summary of Contributions___________________________________35
6.3 Future Research____________________________________________36
References:_________________________________________________________37
Appendices:________________________________________________________41

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List of Figures
Figure 1……………………………………………………………………………….3
Figure 2……………………………………………………………………………….6
Figure 3……………………………………………………………………………….7
Figure 4………………………………………………………………………………11
Figure 5………………………………………………………………………………12
Figure 6………………………………………………………………………………14
Figure 7………………………………………………………………………………19
Figure 8………………………………………………………………………………20
Figure 9………………………………………………………………………………27
Figure 10…………………………………………………………………………… 28

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List of Tables
Table 1………………………………………………………………………………….1
Table 2………………………………………………………………………………….2
Table 3………………………………………………………………………………….3

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Glossary of Terms
CPM: is frequently used in advertising to represent cost per thousand (where M is the
roman numeral of 1000). When used in online advertising it relates to the cost per thousand
page impressions.
Economic Sustainability: Having a mechanism in place for generating, or gaining access
to, the economic resources necessary to keeping the business operating on an ongoing
basis.
Krugman Paradox, The: states that regardless of online audience reach, general interest
newspaper websites cannot generate an economically sustainable advertising revenue
stream. The term got its name from Robert Ivan after a situation where a PetMeds.com
advertisement ran for three days beside New York Times editorial columnist Paul
Krugman's articles. This after the fact that Krugman had just been named winner of a
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. See Figure 9
Newshole: is the amount of content a news provider needs to create in every publishing
cycle

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Chapter 1: Introduction
The Krugman Paradox states that regardless of online audience reach, general interest
newspaper websites cannot generate an economically sustainable advertising revenue
stream. Big or small, for profit or nonprofit, new or old, this paper will reveal that, to date,
there exists no economically sustainable newspaper website. Hence, the main purpose of
this dissertation study is to introduce the paradox and defend its claim.
On the basis of a comprehensive literature review, the analysis of recent research revealed
flaws in assumptions about how Internet advertising revenues would perform by offsetting
falling print advertising revenues. The historic decline in newspaper print circulation as
well as minimal increase in online advertising revenue now poses a major threat to the 50
billion dollar American newspaper industry. To date, the newspaper business model has
been to grow online audiences in the hopes that those revenue streams will offset the
historic print revenue losses from their declining core product. The analysis contained
herein does not concern itself with the question of “how will journalism get done” but
rather seeks to answer the question of whether a sustainable business model for a general
news site can exist in the new Internet paradigm.
Analysis of The Krugman Paradox also seeks to answer the question, is pursuing audience
growth strategies to generate economically sustainable revenue possible? There has been
no such in-depth prior study as it relates to the viability of the newspaper industry.

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Acceptance of the paradox will cause newspapers to rethink their primary online revenue
stream and indeed their entire business model.
The following section will provide a brief review of the newspaper industry and its
performance transitioning to the Internet. The state of the art is explored in chapter three
through relevant literature related to the two primary data points explored in this thesis,
audience reach and advertising revenue. Chapter four will offer a theoretical framework for
The Krugman Paradox and propose hypotheses based on that framework and on previous
research. Chapter five will then explain the methods of a study designed to examine the
hypotheses. Finally, chapter 6 will detail the results and conclude by discussing the
implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research.

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Chapter 2: A Brief Review of Newspapers Transitioning to the Internet
Although the Internet became available for commercial applications in 1988, the
Newspaper Association of America did not begin recording usage data until 2004 (Oct.
2008). Nielsen/Net Ratings and the Newspaper Association of America have been
keeping track of all newspaper website audience measurements as well as advertising
revenue figures since January of 2004 (Oct. 2008). All the data presented is in this thesis is
for the United States.
Figure1
Total active reach (the percentage of active Internet users that visit newspapers on an
average month) Source: NAA 2008

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Figure 1 above shows the fairly steady growth of newspaper website Active Reach as a
percentage of total internet users. Newspaper web site audience increased sixteen percent
in the third quarter of 2008 to 68.3 million visitors or 42.7% of all internet users. All of
the industry data shows that online newspaper audience is growing (Sigmund 2008).
Table 1
This table shows growth in all categories for the 2008 quarter and 2007 quarter
All newspaper website audience measurements are trending upward in every measured
category. This is true for the 2008 quarter as well as the same quarter in the previous year.
As NAA announced in their Q3 2008 press release, “Newspapers are continuing to
enhance their Web sites with dynamic features, video and other interactive tools that
deliver high levels of user engagement,” said Randy Bennett, NAA’s senior vice president

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of Business Development. “The dramatic increase in page views suggests users are visiting
newspaper Web sites frequently throughout the day.”(Sigmund 2008)
Table 2
Internet usage and poplulation statistics for North America
The data above shows the total United States internet usage to highlight the total internet
pentration as a comparison against newspaper industry data in Chart 1. It is important to
know the penetration data in these charts to make the thesis argument that Internet
penetration at 72.5% is now for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous (NAA Oct. 2008).

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Figure 2
Quarterly Newspaper Internet Revenue
Figure 2 shows newspaper online revenue which had been trending upward until the last
three quarters of 2008. Remember that Chart 1 and the data behind it are showing historic
online growth quarter after quartere, year after year (NAA Nov. 2008).
Table 3
NAA newspaper website revenue data for assembling Figure 2

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Notice also the steady decline in total print and online revnues beginning in the first quarter
of 2004 highlighted by the trendline in Figure 3. Total combined print and online
advertising revenue has fallen. Money flowing into the newspaper industry is falling.
Figure 3
Quarterly combined advertising revenue (NAA Nov. 2008)
This background information is presented to bring the reader up to speed on the current
economic trends in the newspapers industry as well as get a better feel for the overall trends
in internet usage and reach in the United States. The biggest takeaway is that newspaper
website audience is rising, and newspaper website revenue is not following suit.

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Chapter 3: State of the Art
3.1 The Newspaper Industry, In the Presence of the Internet
Because of the disruptive nature of the Internet on the newspaper industry this paper begins
the review of the state of the art with a paradox from 1964 by Marshall McLuhan, “the
medium is the message” (Lapham & Mcluhan 1994). What he meant by that quote is
described as meaning, “Whenever we create a new innovation - be it an invention or a new
idea - many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. But it is also often the case that, after
a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and
realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset”
(Federman2004).
The pricing of goods or services in basic economic theory is determined by calculating the
costs incurred to produce the item and adding a profit margin on top of it. This is a simple
matter of supply and demand, which prior to the Internet gave them immense pricing
power. Newspapers, because of their exclusive distribution networks between readers and
advertisers were able to add hefty double-digit profit margins to their costs
(Edmonds2008).
The major problem with this business model is that once the Internet became widely
accepted, the virtual monopoly in their geographic distribution area vanished. Newspapers
are now competing against, not another physical product in their hometown, but the
capabilities of the entire Internet on a computer or mobile device (Edmonds2008). Figure 5

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shows worldwide Internet usage from 1995 and projections for growth going into 2010.
The graph is steep and there are no indications at this time that growth is slowing.
What are the Pundits Saying?
NYU professor, author, and information technology expert Clay Shirky declared back in
1995 that newspapers were doomed to serious value problems (Shirky1995) and recently
revisited the ideas, “It didn’t take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect
copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the
printing press into a latter-day steam engine”(Shirky2008). He claims the newspaper
industry listened to him, and then promptly ignored his opinion.
On September 12, 2007 author and Harvard Fellow, Doc Searls wrote about the utility of
traditional advertising, and how better ways of connecting customers to products and
services have been created on the Internet. He cautions newspapers that assume
advertising will always be around at the levels prior to the existence of the Internet. As he
writes,
“While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones,
both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will
flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful
way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just
that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact
constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.
...The Holy Grail for advertisers isn’t advertising at all, because it’s not about sellers
hunting down buyers. In fact it’s the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers” (Searls2007).

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On April 7, 2008 Nicholas Carr put forth a theory he referred to as "unbundling". Boiled
down to its core the theory states that advertisements (bundled with content) in a printed
newspaper produce a product worth more than the sum of their parts. The opposite is true
online where ad performance must stand alone on a single web page. As he writes,
"As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible
system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to
underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece
of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in
isolation” (Carr2008).
On April 22, 2008 Jay Rosen revisits Searls comments from 2007 to highlight the idea that
whether ad spending grows, shrinks, or stays the same:
“Advertisers aren’t in business to advertise; they do it to reach customers making a
buying decision. If there were some other way of reaching that person, some other way for
buyers and sellers to communicate, advertising would become more and more superfluous”
(Rosen2008).
And Carr’s unbundling theory:
Carr “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by
the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?’ The answer may turn out to be equally
simple: We don’t” (2008).
Rosen “I think he’s right” (2008).
Regardless of the new media situation, newspapers have attempted to adapt to this new
communications medium. Almost all newspapers however have created websites for their
readers and advertisers to engage online. The Wall Street Journal for example launched its

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first website in 1996 as a news service to their paying print newspaper subscribers (Dow
Jones2006). In September of 1998 Google begins searching the Internet (Google2008).
The first organized publishing competitor to established newspapers and their sites was
Open Diary created in 1998 as a blogging platform that allowed readers to submit
comments on other writer’s blog entries (Seminerio1998). At least one smaller newspaper
began experimenting with blogging this same year. The Charlotte Observer posted a blog
about Hurricane Bonnie (Scanlan2003). During this time newspaper revenues were still
growing strongly and continued to do so until 2002 when Internet usage hit a tipping point.
Suddenly everyone was on the Internet. Social networking sites like Fotolog and
Friendster arrived in 2002. Linkedin, Myspace, Wordpress and Last.FM arrived in 2003.
Flickr and Facebook in 2004. YouTube and Ning in 2005. Facebook (open to the general
public) and Twitter in 2006 (Boyd2007).
Figure 4
Number of Blogs Tracked by Technorati

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Figure 5
As time went on, the Internet got more sophisticated and people became familiar with using
it. Indeed an entire generation now exists that does no know a time when the Internet did
not exist. The value of newspaper content began falling steadily as the capabilities and
technology became cheap, fast, and ubiquitous. Modem speeds went from slow to fast and
from a telephone connection to cable to wireless. The high barrier to entry costs of self-

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publication and self-advertisement are virtually eliminated on the Internet. In online
publishing, there are no printing presses, no mailrooms, and anyone in the world can
produce content.
Total print and online revenue growth leveled off in 2002 and began steadily falling in
2005. This happened only two years after NAA began tracking online advertising revenue.
Beginning in 2003, several newspapers launched free weekly newspapers. The revenue
and interest these papers generated is mixed, “Despite the gains in New York, Metro papers
in Philadelphia and Boston are struggling” (Flamm2007).
2005 proved to be a year of experimentation for newspapers online. The Las Angeles
Times launched a Wiki called Wikitorial where any reader could go on the site and edit
content. The site was shut down in 2 days because of a barrage of pornographic material
that ended up on the site (BBC2005). In an effort to battle their declining print revenues
and bolster Internet revenues the nation’s number one newspaper website by unique
visitors, NYTimes.com launched Times Select a paid feature on their free website. The
idea was that readers would pay to read the “valuable” articles written by their editorial
columnists. The Times Select had other features as well such as the ability to interact with
the columnists through a blog and access to archived materials on the NYTimes.com
website. The exercise was a failure and two years after launch the feature was removed
and the entire site opened back up to anyone (Sanders2007).

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In 2008 almost all mainstream newspaper websites are, like all other Internet content, free.
Those newspapers are generating their revenue almost exclusively from advertising on the
site. The few exceptions are business newspapers. Based on a quick trip to WSJ.com,
FT.com, and IBD.com all charge for full access to their website. Those sites serve up very
specific content, business news, and charge their readers fees to access this valuable
content. It is an important distinction between what they are publishing and what general
information news sites are publishing. The pricing power for these papers has not been
impacted as much as their generic counterparts but they are the exception, not the norm.
Figure 6
Stock performances of select publicly traded newspaper companies.
Nearing the end of 2008, newspapers had lost almost all of their market capitalization.
Newspaper stocks like MNI (McClatchy) that once traded in the sixty-dollar range in 2004
were now selling for two dollars. The New York Times (NYT) dropped from a high in
June 2002 of $51.88 to a low of $4.95 in November of 2008 (Mutter2008). NAA reported
that online newspaper advertising in 2006 totaled $2.664 billion and 2007 totaled $3.165

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billion representing a ~26% increase (NAA2008). However those figures represent
roughly 10% of total advertising revenue, the other 90% coming from rapidly declining
print advertising revenues. Without a new business model to save them, newspapers
continue to attempt to make money doing the only thing they know what to do, printing a
newspaper, and making money on advertising, print and online. They are cutting costs,
reducing web widths, adding “new” content in the form of blogs, participating in social
media like Facebook, utilizing RSS feeds, and increasingly linking out to other non-news
sites. However, as reported in the annual 2008 State of the Media report, “the concept of
mass media has ended” (Edmonds2008).
3.2 The Value of Newspaper Advertising, In the Presence of the Internet
Newspapers were once the only distribution platform for people and businesses to reach a
certain target audience. By placing advertisements in newspapers, people and businesses
were able to target a geographic area with their advertisements. It was a shotgun approach
to advertising but being that there were few alternatives, radio, TV, direct mail, everyone
used it, and it became a $50 billion industry (NAA2008).
It was not uncommon for the classified section of the newspaper to be 20 or 30 pages long,
filled with job postings, home sales, car sales and other items for sale, as well as personal
sections. In a 2006 Pew Research state of the news media report, PewResearch.org
reported that, “From 1950 through 1999, newspaper revenue grew seven percent a year”
(Pew2006). This is before the widespread acceptance of the Internet.

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Once people and companies accepted the Internet as a viable medium for communication,
the advertising revenue numbers change dramatically. From 2000 to 2006, total newspaper
advertising revenue grew only 0.5%, despite 30% quarter over quarter online advertising
growth and growing audience reach. Advertising that once went into a newspaper or even a
newspaper’s website now found better targeting capabilities on their own, online
(Pew2006).
eBay.com
Founded in California 1995 eBay.com is an online auction where people can buy and sell
almost anything. eBay is the number 8 website in the USA and number 20 in the world. In
2007 their annual revenue was $8.46 billion dollars (eBay2007).
Craigslist.org
Online classified site Craigslist.org was started in 1995 for the San Francisco Bay Area as
kind of a bulletin board but expanded to include a “jobs” section and grew into 31 cities
around the country by 2003. At the time of this writing Craigslist is one of the largest
websites in the world, serving 450 cities in 50 countries. Craigslist is a for profit company
that operates with a non-profit attitude according to founder Craig Newmark. That
explains why the website only generated $80 million in 2007 despite serving 50 million
people per month (Craigslist2008).

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Monster.com
Monster Worldwide is another web startup competing with newspaper classified sections.
Monster.com launched in 1995 and now operates in 35 countries serving up job listings.
The company generated $1.35 billion in revenue for 2007. Craigslist, Monster, and bidding
site Ebay shattered the monopoly that newspapers had on classified by offering listings for
free or little money and eliminated approximately 40% of newspaper’s total advertising
revenues (Monster2007).
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a blog covering technology news. Started in 2005, the website is the
number 2 blog in the nation, receives approximately 1.2 million visitors per month and
generates $2.88 million per year in revenues. “It sells sponsorships that allow advertisers to
display on the home page at $10,000 per month. It also uses Federated Media to sell
display ads, keeping 60 percent of the revenue. And it charges $200 to list in its Cool Jobs
section, getting about five or six want ads per day.” The company is operating in the black
according to a 2007 article by The San Francisco Chronicle (Zuckerman2007).
Other advertisers moved to take advantage of the Internet as well. Websites like Myspace,
Facebook, Adultfriendfinder, Match, and eHarmony eliminated the need for a personals
section in the newspaper, another revenue stream lost. These services, like Craigslist, work
best without geographic barriers that the newspapers continue operating in.

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In a broader view of advertising in the new Internet paradigm it must be mentioned too that
while certain traditional advertising is being marginalized as above, other new forms of
connecting businesses to customers are being created. One such entire new category of
advertising competition is the business website. No longer do car dealerships, locksmiths
and realtors need to place an ad in newspapers. They now use their own websites to better
display the products and services, which they were selling. These business websites are
then found using search engines like Google, Yahoo, CitySearch, and Yelp and once the
prospective customer arrives on the site, they are greeted with mountains of colorful
pictures, comparison information, loan offers, and any other service associated with
helping the purchase process.
Another new, free competitor to paid advertising is the free listing. Any company can set
up free accounts on Yahoo! Local and Google Maps to list their place of business. Here is
the Google Maps boilerplate from their site, “Use the Local Business Center to create your
free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they'll find your
business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. It's
easy, free, and you don't need a website of your own.” (Google Maps) These convenient
features are indexed by search engines and allow potential customers to view business
information, user reviews, and print out driving directions to the place of business. They
are popular too. As of December 2008 Yelp boasted 2.3 million business reviews and was
ranked the number 150 website in the USA. Another business listing website,
CitySearch.com, is currently ranked the number 205 website in the USA. (Alexa)
According to the CitySearch.com website they have, “14.5 million business listings, over

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600,000 user reviews, and ratings on over 2 million business locations nationwide”.
(CitySearch)
Internet marketing such as viral marketing campaigns, search engine optimization, search
engine marketing, banner ads, email marketing and web 2.0 techniques like blogs, and
wikis are also new competitors for ad revenue. .
Figure 7
Internet advertising went from a non-existent business in 1993 to a $21 billion industry in
2008 (NAA2008). The faster speed, cheaper costs, personalization, and quantification of
online advertising are the main reasons for its success and growth. Not only can companies
now completely control how and where they want their advertising to appear, they can
analyze the data associated with their advertisements and adjust how well they are
performing.

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Newspapers have never been faced with this level and sophistication of competition.
Newspapers’ advertising and content business models relied on the difficulty and high
costs of delivering news and advertising content from businesses to individuals. Their
competitive advantage has been radically devalued by the existence of the Internet.
Ironically, as newspaper websites continue to grow, pageviews and advertising impressions
will continue to expand and dilute This puts continuing downward pressure on the CPM
model advertising model. This is another reaction to supply and demand. The supply in
this case is a growing number of web pages every time new content is added to a website.
The advertising spaces on those pages also grow at a multiple of the number of ad spaces
on the page. The result is more ad space than quality advertising to fill it. The value of the
CPM display ad now goes down. Figure 8 shows this phenomenon in action.
Figure 8
Pubmatic Q3 2008

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Pubmatic’s Q3 2008 report of display advertising revenue reports that all display
advertising pricing is trending downwards. The best pricing was found to be on business
and finance websites followed by gaming websites. The value of ad inventory for “small”
(less than 1million page views per month) sized websites was more than triple the value of
“large” (100million page views per month or more) sized websites in Q3 08, with values of
61 cents and 18 cents, respectively. (Pubmatic Q3 2008)
So the revenue per thousand impressions is falling. What about the engagement of readers
and the advertisements they are seeing? In a multi-media engagement study conducted
between July 2007 and June 2008 it was reported that, “Only 28% of the audience of an
average news program, website or magazine gets valuable information about products and
services advertised there, making news venues less effective at conveying ad messages than
all forms of media combined, according to consumer research from Experian Simmons”
(Experian2008).
A recent Wall Street Journal article states that most newspapers charge $20 to $10 CPMfor
ads sold by the papers, however usually more than 50% of the available ad slots do not get
sold. These slots are then filled by ad agencies like Google Adsense, which generate up to
$1CPM but usually much less as the Pubmatic data in Figure 8 reveals. (WSJ2008/12/15)
Additionally, IAB’s 2006 report states that the top 50 websites in the world receive 93% of
the available online advertising revenue, making the opportunity for smaller news sites to
generate meaningful revenue difficult. (37)

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3.3 News Website Economics
NewYorkTimes.com
NewYorkTimes.com is ranked the number 1 newspaper website in the nation, the number
44 website in the United States, and the number 85 website in the world. (Quantcast, Alexa
2008). In total, Internet businesses accounted for 12.1% of total revenues in October
2008 versus 10.5% in October 2007. (NYT Q3 2008)
A review of The New York Times 2007 annual report as well as their quarterly reports for
2008 revealed that online advertising in general is growing approximately 12% year over
year. 2008 NYT online advertising revenue is projected to be ~$350 Million or $29.17
Million per month. The NYTimes.com reaches an average 15.6million people per month
(Quantcast) and newspaper websites in aggregate reached 69.8 Million people (NAA).
65.4% of NYTimes.com Readers come from USA. My simple calculation reveals that
NYTimes.com is reaching approx. 3.3% of the US population (15.6million x65.4%)
=10.2024million/(305million) (NYT 10-K 2007).
WashingtonPost.com
WashtingtonPost.com is ranked the number 2 newspaper website in the nation, the number
93 website in the United States, and the number 286 website in the world. (Quantcast,
Alexa 2008) 2007 year end revenue for The Washington Post newspaper publishing
division was $889.9 million of which, $114.2 million was from their online site
washingtonpost.com. (WPO 2007 10-k) A quick calculation reveals that online revenues
accounted for only 12.8% of total revenues.

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“During 2007, revenue generated by the Company’s online publishing activities, primarily
washingtonpost.com, increased 11% to $114.2 million, from $102.7 million in 2006.
Display online advertising revenue grew 16% and online classified advertising revenue on
washingtonpost.com increased 10%. A small portion of the Company’s online publishing
revenue is included in the magazine publishing division”. –Washington Post 10-K 2007
annual report
LATimes.com
LATimes.com is ranked the number 3 newspaper website in the nation, the number 117
website in the United States, and the number 374 website in the world. (Quantcast, Alexa
2008) “Latimes.com generates $60 million a year, about 5 percent of the newspaper's
total revenue. Nearly 80% of our web revenue ($47 million) is from related but separate
classified sites such as CareerBuilder. Display advertising on latimes.com brings in just
$13 million.” (MediaBistro2007) The Las Angeles Times total operating revenue for
2006 was $1.095 Billion.
HuffingtonPost.com
The Huffington Post is an online only news site launched in 2005 and operated with
financial support from advertising revenue and continued support from venture capitalists.
The site is ranked 118 in the USA and 484 in the world, serving up 179million page views
per month. (Alexa, Quantcast) Despite all their large audience, the advertising revenue
(approximately $7.5 million) generated by the site is insufficient to sustain their operations.

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Despite the highest readership of any newspaper in the United States, the New York Times
only generated $330 Million through online advertising in 2007. Total operating costs for
that same year totaled $2.928 Billion. It is widely reported that total newspaper operating
costs would be reduced by 35% if newspapers if newspapers eliminated their print product.
Here is the precedent for print costs:
“Going totally online eliminates the cost of paper and circulation delivery and radically
reduces production cost. By my back-of-the envelope calculations, based on Inland Press
survey data, that might be about 35 percent of expenses”.
And…
“Paper and production costs account for nearly 25% of total expense. Circulation sales and
billing together with fleets of trucks and delivery employees throwing papers on the front
lawn account for 10% more” (Edmonds2007).
Some disparity in distribution numbers comes from figuring in Circulation revenues, which
typically accounts for 30% of the top line. In the case of NYT Q3 2008 circulation
represented 32.8% of total revenue. Production costs however consumed ~48% of total
revenues. The difference is roughly a 10% cost or in this case 16%.
In a recent New York Times article, the vice president of interactive with newspaper
company E.W. Scripps Company Rusty Coats said his company hopes to break even by
2012. That same article however states that, “But while newspaper sites received 44
percent of local Internet revenue in 2004, that figure dropped to 27 percent this year,

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according to Borrell Associates. Local advertisers, though, are spending more and more
money online — but it is mostly going to portals and stand-alone Web sites, not
newspapers”(Clifford2008).
Average profit margins for publicly reporting companies have halved to 11% for the first
nine months of 2008 from 22% in 2003, estimates analyst John Morton. (Peers2008)
National Public Radio
If a newspaper’s mission is to serve the public good then its best hope for economic
sustainability may be to run the paper as a non-profit. NPR does a good job of this: “NPR
supports its operations through a combination of membership dues and programming fees
from over 860 independent radio stations, sponsorship from private foundations and
corporations, and revenue from the sales of transcripts, books, CDs, and merchandise.“
NPR also collects money through government grants. It must be noted that 2007 year-end
revenue for NPR Inc. was $179 Million. As of December 2008, NPR will let go 64 of its
889 employees, or 7 percent of its workforce, to close a $23 million shortfall. NPR.org
generates 3.5 million unique visitors per month making it the roughly the number 375
website in the country. (Quantcast)
Talking Points Memo
From their site, “TPM is funded by advertisements and reader contributions. Please give
and give generously to keep the site online as a fresh, independent voice in political
journalism”. Began in November 2000 TalkingPointsMemo is a blog covering news and

26
politics. The site never had the cost burden associated with printing a newspaper.
However, the site must rely on a combination of advertising revenue and reader donations,
as well as help from readers in composing some stories. On several occasions the
publication has asked its readers to read through mountains of documents to parse out
specifics if a news story. The website is ranked 2,791 in the USA and generates roughly
750,000 unique visitors per month (Quantcast).
Review of the available literature into the state of the online newspaper industry involved a
lot of information coming from newspaper trade organizations, online advertising
organizations and financial reports from publicly traded newspapers. Newspaper
journalists and media pundits were also used as source material. There is not a lot of
research in academia on the transformation of the newspaper industry in the age of the
Internet.
What the available literature tells us is that the newspaper industry is experiencing steep
circulation declines in their print product and steep revenue declines in their print product.
Online, newspaper websites are growing their audience reach higher and higher ever since
the data started being measured in 2003 but the revenue still only accounts for 10 to 12% of
total advertising revenue for the entire industry. Total advertising revenue has been falling
since the beginning of 2006. In The Great Unbundling, Nicholas Carr states, “The most
successful articles in economic terms are the ones that attract high priced ads”. It must be
noted that every single online media company mentioned in this thesis paper other than the
general news sites is economically sustainable.

27
Figure 9
Top Ten News Stories of 2007
Following Carr’s statements Figure 9 shows a breakdown of news story by content and the
percentage of the newshole that content took up.
The pundits have been telling the newspaper industry since 1995 that their print business
model has been shattered for various reasons but without a full and concrete explanation of
the economics of online news publishing. The reaction from the newspaper industry has
been to prepare for their decline by cutting costs, and developing a web presence for their
print newspaper to grow their online audience. It is now clear, reviewing the state of the
art, that these preparations have been insufficient to stem the losses of advertising revenue.
To reiterate, the disparity of print revenue to online revenue for the entire newspaper
industry is 90% to 10%.

28
Figure 10
Print VS Online Expenditures
According to the State of the News Media 2008 study, the total number of USA
newspapers as of the latest poll stood at 1,437. If we are to assume that each of these
newspapers had a website, they would then be fighting over ~$3 billion of online
newspaper ad revenue or ~$2 million each (Edmonds2008).
In that same study the report concludes with these words, “Even weakened, newspapers
remain the top source of news for their communities. The editorial inroads of community-
based online publications are patchy geographically and have been slow in coming”. There
is no discussion about generating sustainable revenues in the conclusion section of their
report other than to suggest, “…balance – urgent attention to finances but taking care not to
destroy what is essential for longer-term viability”. (Edmonds2008) They do not give any
indication what specifically is “essential” to long term viability.

29
Chapter 4: Research Question
4.1 Is The Krugman Paradox real?
This is the question the thesis is attempting to answer. The paradox states that regardless of
online audience reach, general interest newspaper websites cannot generate an
economically sustainable advertising revenue stream. Acceptance of the paradox implies
that in order for news sites to become profitable they must change their content, from
general news to something more valuable. Absent such a content change, newspapers
must subsidize their unsustainable business with outside money. Absent either of these
changes, newspapers will cease to exist as sustainable business entities online.
4.2 Justification
Seemingly since the Internet began being utilized by the masses, it has been said, as Clay
Shirky did in 1995, that newspapers will go out of business. From then until now
newspapers have been attempting to prove that assumption incorrect by slowly moving
their business models online. As time went on and internet companies like Craigslist,
Google, and even new industries like online marketing lured newspapers’ most valuable
paying customers away, newspapers attempted to change more in the hopes of retaining
readership as it moved online. They tried all the new media methods of “success” such as
blogging, videos, starting a wiki, social networking, charging for content, then not charging
for content, sharing content via RSS feeds, and lately linking out.

30
Newspapers also cut their costs during this period to try and get to breakeven faster, but as
the numbers show, Internet advertising revenue could not catch up, not even close. For the
industry as a whole, online revenue generates only 10% of total revenues. At a time when
companies like Google make $16.593 billion, eHarmony make $200 million, Monster
Worldwide make $1.35 billion, and eBay make $8.46 billion, the newspapers were trying
to figure out why their product couldn’t attract “print” level revenues or even local
advertisers. The NY Times article with Rusty Coats alludes to the problem. Businesses
too are using the internet to advertise, but the advertising is not via getting on a local
newspaper website, it is by building their own site and doing things like listing themselves
on Yahoo local, Google Maps, Yelp, and maintaining relationships via email newsletters.
Newspapers are faced with massive competition, unrestricted from geographic boundaries.
The Pubmatic data shows that it is much more effective for advertisers to appear next to
content that helps sell their product or service. IAB data backs this up. The CPM rates that
news sites get are some of the lowest of any measured category. The highest CPM rates go
to business, finance, and gaming sites. The content on these sites lend themselves to
actionable advertisements. General information news sites do not. Stories about iPods will
sell iPods. What is the best product to sell next to a 9/11 story, or a Mumbai attack story?
Newspapers cannot charge high CPM rates for advertising on their site because the content
does not lend itself to actionable click-throughs, the money that would have been spent on
a newspaper or news site is being spent on websites, and targeted advertising on niche sites.

31
If the advertising will not cover costs, will people pay for a subscription? So far no one is
willing to pay for such coverage at a general news site. The New York Times “Times
Select” model, the non-profit NPR model, and even the religious Christian Science Monitor
model all fail in this attempt. All three publications rely on subsidy to support their
operations. It is no coincidence that niche business sites that charge for content like
IBD.com, FT.com, and WSJ.com exist in a category with the highest CPM pricing. The
content on those sites is valuable to readers and advertisers. The value of the content has
been deemed to be high enough to justify the subscription costs.
Newspapers continue to attempt to generate online advertising revenue as if it were print
revenue in an age when the Internet did not exist. It should be clear by now that this
method of generating economically sustainable revenue for a general information news site
is impossible. Research for this thesis uncovered not one single newspaper website that
could sustain its operating costs without outside subsidy from print revenues, donations,
government assistance, or church subsidy.
4.3 Discussion of the Research Question
It is important to answer the question posed in this thesis paper to raise awareness of The
Krugman Paradox and its implications for generating sufficient online revenue. When
newspapers realize that their growth strategies are not sufficient in and of themselves to
solve their revenue needs, other revenue strategies may be more seriously analyzed.

32
Chapter 5: Problem Resolution
This thesis resolves the problem of determining whether newspaper websites can generate
economically sustainable. Review of the literature studied the audience levels of the
newspaper industry as a whole and for certain companies. Online, print and total revenues
were also studied to reveal whether any newspaper sites were profitable. Also investigated
were statements made by newspaper industry pundits who acknowledged the problems
associated with moving a print newspaper online.
The thesis investigated financial statements of publicly traded newspapers to reveal the
differences between revenues and costs to highlight to inability of online revenues to cover
costs. Successful online businesses that rely on Internet advertising revenues were also
explored to show that they could produce economically sustainable revenue streams.
Investigations into the total online advertising expenditures and CPM rates for display
advertising were undertake to reveal disparities in the rates between news sites and non
news sites. The data shows the CPM rate for news sites to be among the lowest anywhere.
New media sites that have sprung up during this same period of time such as niche blogs,
search sites, and listing sites were investigated to reveal whether they were producing
economically sustainable advertising revenue streams.
This study looked at the annual State of the News Media reports generated every year from

33
2005 to 2008 by the Poynter Institute in Florida. The studies are comprehensive reports
generated by a reputable source. These sources as well as industry pundits’ comments
were used to get information about consumer behavior and the advertising shift away from
newspapers. The data and commentary also revealed the sentiment of key industry analysts
and CEOs regarding the future viability of newspapers. Specifically the Newspaper
Association of America’s Vice President of Business Analysis & Research Jim Conaghan
who is quoted following this question,
Q) “So will online advertising get to the point where it can revive newspapers, as a
mainly digital product?
A) The Newspaper Association’s Conaghan believes the answer is yes”. (Edmonds2008)
The data contained within this thesis as well as a review of the literature, do not in any
way back up Mr. Conaghan’s belief that online advertising can revive newspapers.

34
Chapter 6: Conclusions
6.1 Conclusions
The problem stated in section has been answered. The Krugman Paradox is real. The
paradox states that regardless of online audience reach, general interest newspaper websites
cannot generate an economically sustainable advertising revenue stream.
Despite the newspaper industry’s emphasis on online growth, it has been shown that the
newspapers with largest online audience reach in the United States, The NY Times, The
Washington Post, and The LA Times could not generate enough online advertising revenue
to sustain their operations. These companies didn’t fail by a small margin; on average they
could only produce 1/10 of print revenues.
It has been shown that non-newspaper websites are capable of producing economically
sustainable online advertising revenues. The audience size of successful online companies
varies greatly. What does not vary is that successful online companies serve fill a very
specific need. Whether it is job listings on Monster.com and Craigslist.org or getting tech
news at TechCrunch.com, these companies are creating value by filling a specific need
both to the reader and the advertiser.
Through the widespread acceptance of the Internet as an effective communications medium
without geographic boundaries, a newspaper’s value addition to readers and subscribers has
been rendered nearly valueless.

35
6.2 Summary of Contributions
This thesis makes the following contributions to new knowledge.
1. This thesis demonstrates that general interest newspaper news sites are incapable of
producing economically sustainable online advertising revenue streams, supporting The
Krugman Paradox.
2. This thesis demonstrates that newspaper websites cannot rely on advertising revenue as
their main source of income if they are to continue publishing general interested news
content.
3. This thesis demonstrates that even if newspapers do go completely online and save 35%
of their costs by making the switch, they will still fail to achieve economic sustainability.
4. This thesis demonstrates that newspapers must increase the value of the content they are
providing to readers and advertisers by filling their specific needs.
5. This thesis demonstrates that newspapers, which fail to change their online strategy from
simple growth, to need fulfillment, will go bankrupt.

36
6.3 Future Research
1. New revenue streams need to be the number one focus of newspaper right now.
2. An in depth report needs to be quickly done to find out what a newspaper’s core
competency is NOW, in the internet paradigm.
3. An in depth account of how many business websites are in existence as well as the
growth and usage of Google maps, Yahoo locals, and listing sites like Yelp would be
interesting to compare to advertising revenue lost to the newspaper industry.

37
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