As I recall, newspaper and magazine subscriptions barely pay for printing and distribution. What subscriptions do is get the readership up so that advertisers will pay enough to cover content and a profit. I believe that printing and distribution costs for a portal are very low relative to those of a newspaper. If this analogy holds, the key to getting readership up for the portals is content: financial pages, sports pages, comics pages, home, health, news stories, commentary, etc. High quality, comprehensive content will pull in viewers, and advertising revenue will follow. The cool thing about the Internet is that ad revenue scales with number of viewers, but the cost of content and distribution doesn't. In that sense, a portal is a lot like a TV network. Actually, come to think of it, a portal combines the advantages of a newspaper and a TV network and adds a few advantages of its own. Cost structure is a lot like a TV network, but you don't have to fit your schedule to the content schedule (view it when you want to, like a newspaper). The obvious advantages are that you can cross reference and search much more effectively through your portal than you ever could with a newspaper.
I get most of my news via the Internet now. I got a cable modem last January and it radically changed how I deal with news and my investments. About the only thing I read in the paper now is the comics. |
