Columbia Journalism Review has a new report out on the business side of online journalism:
For decades, there has been a connection between the journalism that news organizations provide and the advertisements that generate most of their revenue. Whether it’s a glossy spread that runs before the table of contents in a fashion magazine, or the anchorman’s “more after this message” assurance on the local Eyewitness News, ads and content have always been closely linked in the stream that appears before the consumer. That linkage is breaking down, and news organizations are scrambling to re- place it with something else.
Felix Salmon parses the reports, and favors media relationships (like local papers and Yahoo) that can greatly expand a site's advertizer reach. He also weighs in on the Dish's move to the Beast and what it means for bloggers building their own personal brands:
People who like Andrew Sullivan also like James Fallows, or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or other Atlantic bloggers Andrew linked to on a pretty regular basis; they also followed his links to magazine articles and turned out to be pretty appreciative of the rest of the material on theatlantic.com. So while Sullivan did have a very large number of unique visitors, it’s wrong to say that he took them with him when he left. Yes, most of them now read him at the Daily Beast. But that doesn’t mean that all or even most of them have left The Atlantic.
It's win-win, as far as unique visitors are concerned, I'm happy to say, although it's probably a little premature to make any grand inferences yet. Give it six months and see how it sorts out. From our point of view, it seems we have lost almost no one in the move, largely because our bookmark rate is over 80 percent. And, as I've noted, it's good to see the Atlantic's unique visitors stay stable.
But it's worth noting that, according to Quantcast, the Beast's traffic in terms of page views is now 39 million a month, compared with the Atlantic's 15 million. The month before the Dish moved, it was 27 million pageviews for the Beast vs 21 million for the Atlantic. The gap in pageviews between the two sites has gone in one month from 6 million to 24 million. Since ads are sold on pageviews, that has got to mean something long-term. Quite what I don't really know.
The Dish 