Commentary

Traditional News Publishers Have Online Consumer Worries; Linear TV News, Not So Much

If premium media is moving to digital platforms, marketers better quickly figure how to get consumers to pay for it -- especially when it comes to specific content.  

Take news content. In April, Reuters polled 1,230 of its readers and found out people still value quality news but -- no surprise here -- they don’t want to pay for it.

Though nine out of 10 will go to a news brand for breaking news, two thirds wouldn’t be willing to pay for any online content -- regardless of quality. Nice.

The survey seem to pinpoint specific online news content. For many that means mostly non-video, print content.  These results mimic what newspapers, which have continually suffered over the years, probably already know -- that declining ad revenues may continue to be in the cards.

Traditional print news content providers like Reuters aren’t top of mind when it comes to video news content.  Meanwhile publishers like the New York Times continue to push digital boundaries by adding digital video -- in the hopes of gaining soaring advertising revenues.

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Now you wonder what this means for the likes of traditional TV news operations -- Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, and others -- in moving more to digital platforms. Probably not much -- at least initially.

Those new digital transitions might be focused more around viewing via connected TVs,  through skinny TV bundles like Sling TV. All this will remind viewers that linear TV channels are still very much in the traditional pay TV model.  

Still, it can’t be helpful to see these results for any news media platform -- print, linear TV, or otherwise.

Right now, linear TV news networks seem to have a split personality: what they do on the big TV box, and everywhere else. Online news content will continue to be an important component of linear TV news networks. But it has a long road to go before bringing in more advertising revenue than traditional linear TV.

In better news, versus pure-play Internet or print-derived news organizations, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC already have much video content on their own digital areas.

The question is whether brand-loyal TV news consumers would pay for this -- if they had to.

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