Survival is Success
Journalistic Online Start-Ups in Western Europe
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Nicola Bruno
International Symposium on Online Journalism, April 2012

Overview over the performance of the nine case start-ups

Different media systems/context
Germany: Strong and slowly declining legacy news
media
France: Weaker and rapidly declining legacy news
media
Italy: Weak and rapidly declining legacy news media

Challenge No. 1 - competition from legacy media
“As long as Netzeitung was one of the few websites
providing a constant flow of updated news, our
visitor traffic increased exponentially. When around
2003 mainstream news media landed on the Web,
however, we could not hold our position and could
not attract new readers, given our lack of a definite
brand, easy to recognize and understand by the
general public.”
Dominika Ahlrichs, former managing editor of
Netzeitung

Challenge No. 2 – the economics of online ads
In 2008, “[One million unique visitors per month]
brings in revenues of one million euro; with two
million visitors, we could gain three million euro in
advertising alone.”
Pierre Haski, co-founder of Rue89
In 2011, Rue89 regularly drew around 2 million
unique monthly visitors, but generated less than a
million euro in advertising revenue.

Survival is (a precondition for) success

Thank you
Email: rasmuskleisnielsen@gmail.com
More at: http://rasmuskleisnielsen.net/