ABSTRACT
Economic reasoning suggests that at least part of the difficulty in monetizing digital content lies in readership, which is the foundation for subscription and advertising revenue. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of 51 US newspapers' online and print readership data collected in 2007, 2011, and 2015. The readership trends challenged conventional wisdom and triggered a debate over US newspaper firms' technology-driven strategy. Users perceive online news as an inferior good, a less satisfying alternative to print newspapers. From 2007 to 2015, print readership declined substantially, while their in-market online readership saw very little or no growth at all during the same period. Driven primarily by fear and uncertainties, newspaper firms addressed their financial woes by slashing resources for their print editions and continued their incomplete transition online. For multiplatform media firms, understanding user demand for different product offerings help identify which product is the "cash cow" and which is the "problem child".
