SFN report: Most publishers believe more than 20% of revenues will come from non-traditional sources in next 5 years

Posted by Erina Lin on January 4, 2010 at 3:02 PM

The first annual World Newspaper Future & Change Study has found that as market conditions decline on a global scale, publishers are looking for new revenue streams outside print, and have set up objectives to find non-print revenues. The global research study focuses on newspaper publishers' business strategies moving forward for the next five years, with the key objective to inspire newspaper executives to invest and innovate their business units and business practices, the latest SFN's report, Charting the Course for Newspapers, reported.

The purpose of the study is to pinpoint the business and strategic challenges of the world's newspapers, and then to identify the publishers' strategies moving forward to turn the challenges into opportunities.

A majority of those surveyed - nearly 70 percent - said they believe revenue streams other than traditional print will have to account for less than 20 percent of total company revenues in the next 12 months. However, 73.6 percent said they believe more than 20 percent of revenues will have to come from outside the traditional printed medium over the next five years.

According to the study, over the next 12 months, 27.5 percent of those surveyed said they believe between 6 percent and 10 percent of their revenue/income will come from sources outside the traditional print median in order to achieve income objectives set up by the company. This was closely followed by 26 percent of respondents who indicated they expect between 11 percent and 20 percent of total company revenue/income to come from outside print within the next year. Almost 15 percent said they expect between 21 percent and 30 percent of revenues to come non-print sources; however, on the lower end of the spectrum, 13.4 percent said they expect between 0 percent and 5 percent of total revenue/income to come from sources other than print.

Less than 20 percent of the total respondents expect 31 percent or more of revenues to come from outside print, with just 2.6 percent saying more than 70 percent of revenues are expected to be derived from the non-print median.

Looking ahead, the largest number of publishers (26.1 percent) said between 21 percent and 30 percent of revenue/income will have to come from sources outside traditional print in the next five years. This is up from the 14.9 percent who said so for the coming 12 months, beginning in 2009.

The report, released by SFN and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, details the results of the Future & Change Study, completed in partnership with the Norwegian School of Management and the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, which shows a majority of the 653 respondents around the world are looking to businesses outside the printed newspaper in order to grow revenues and revamp structures along the value chain that are no longer functioning at full throttle.