Online News Business Model No. 1

Examples: WashingtonPost.com, DenverPost.com, Time.com

Description: This is the most common business model for online news sites. Content is freely available on the Web, and no user registration is required to view content. Most articles and other content include advertising -- banner ads, interstitials, pop-up banner ads, text ads, etc. Additionally, other revenue streams for this free content are possible -- such as contextual links to purchasing order forms, where the publisher is paid referral fees or commissions on consumer purchases (e.g., an editorial book review contains a "Buy the book" link to an online bookseller). Many free-content sites do charge fees for access to article archives.

History: Giving away content is as old as the Web. In the early days of Internet publishing, site operators realized that online consumers were unlikely to be willing to pay for content. Early Internet users largely held an "information wants to be free" mentality. A few Web publishers that started out giving away content experimented with charging (e.g., Mercury Center of the San Jose Mercury News, USAToday.com, and Slate.com), but later backed off and made their content free again.