Brent Wallis <brent.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:
A start up doesn't have to hold on to their profitability like the incumbents do. Starting a news site in competition with an on line only Age would not cost much. All that would be need is good content born of good journos.
It needs to make enough revenue to be sustainable, from advertising, subscriptions or another source. The main costs would be: 1. Employment of journalists and covering of their work-related expenses. 2. Server capacity and bandwidth. 3. Web development, system administration, etc. 4. Administration, legal and accounting costs, etc. 5. Optional: office space - not really essential if meetings can be conducted online and employees can work from home. This doesn't suit everybody, but preparedness to do this could be a selection criterion. I've probably neglected something important. How does this compare with running a (print) newspaper? As to income, the online advertising market is significantly in favour of targeted advertising - Web search, social networking sites, and so on. I don't know how successful a new media outlet could be in this environment. Subscription revenue would also be available, however, according to a variety of models (e.g., the first n articles that you retrieve from a given IP address are free, but you're asked to pay thereafter, just to mention one possibility). The requirement here would be to gain enough subscribers to keep the prices down to a level that would sustain a readership. The quality of the content would also influence the subscriber count. Someone would have to go ahead and do the research, then perform calculations to determine how viable it could be. It could be a non-profit organization, of course, but it wouldn't need to be.