According to a new study from the Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the failure of the British newspaper business has been wrongly attributed to the Internet. Instead, this study says that an over-reliance on advertising for revenue is the more precise culprit.
This study challenges the conventional wisdom that the Internet is the great destroyer of markets. In fact, traditional newspaper businesses and Internet usage can and do co-exist in many places. When advertising revenues became the backbone of the business and generating around 80% of the total revenue for an organization, you will see a greater rate of failure, whereas in markets like Germany where the revenue from advertising is around 50%, the industry tends to fare a lot better.