TY - JOUR
T1 - Application of the Long Tail Economy to the Online News Market
T2 - Examining Predictors of Market Performance
AU - Huang, J. Sonia
AU - Wang, Wei Ching
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was made possible through research grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology [NSC 98-2410-H-009-001] and the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences of National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. We would also like to acknowledge Jen-chih Tseng, Ashira Yang, Wei-Hsuan Huang, and Che-Wei Wang for data entry contributions and to thank anonymous referees and the editors, Hugh J. Martin and Nodir Adilov, for valuable comments.
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - The online news market worldwide has met several challenges, one of which is the lack of sustainable business models. The long tail is a concept defined by Chris Anderson to describe a business model used by the majority of Internet firms and ecommerce stores. Is the long tail model crucial to the news media's competitive market capacity today? The study integrates relevant economic concepts of production costs, distribution costs, search costs, and market performance to construct a long tail economy for online news. Using survey, third-party traffic metrics, and content analysis, this study found that the traffic performance of online news sites was significantly impacted by long tail forces, but the impact had not transferred to the news sites' financial performance. The synthesis provides rich explanations of how the long tail economy can be applied to online news to reveal the forces that both drive and constrain its performance.
AB - The online news market worldwide has met several challenges, one of which is the lack of sustainable business models. The long tail is a concept defined by Chris Anderson to describe a business model used by the majority of Internet firms and ecommerce stores. Is the long tail model crucial to the news media's competitive market capacity today? The study integrates relevant economic concepts of production costs, distribution costs, search costs, and market performance to construct a long tail economy for online news. Using survey, third-party traffic metrics, and content analysis, this study found that the traffic performance of online news sites was significantly impacted by long tail forces, but the impact had not transferred to the news sites' financial performance. The synthesis provides rich explanations of how the long tail economy can be applied to online news to reveal the forces that both drive and constrain its performance.
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U2 - 10.1080/08997764.2014.931860
DO - 10.1080/08997764.2014.931860
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84905648249
SN - 0899-7764
VL - 27
SP - 158
EP - 176
JO - Journal of Media Economics
JF - Journal of Media Economics
IS - 3
ER -