Net News Pays Off: The common lament...

Net News Pays Off: The common lament among electronic publishing and entertainment companies that there still aren’t many viable models for making money on the Internet was repeated often at Jupiter Communications’ Consumer Online Services conference in New York last week.

But amid all the cautionary talk, there were a few surprising nuggets indicating that even some mainstream media companies are starting to do well with their Internet ventures. Most remarkable, perhaps, was the assertion by Andrew Nibley, head of Reuters New Media, that the British news agency now makes more money selling its news services to Web publishers than to print publications in the United States.

Clearly, Reuters has done a good job in establishing itself as the live news standard on the Net. With the notable exception of newspapers, which often prefer Associated Press, most Web sites that want to have a mainstream news component now buy the service from Reuters.

Still, it’s startling that Web revenues would already exceed print revenues. Nibley, who declined to give any further subscriber figures, attributes the results in part to the fact that Associated Press, a newspaper cooperative, keeps the prices that newspapers pay for news wire services very low.

Gene DeRose, president of Jupiter, said Reuters’ success marks a corner-turning of sorts, though most parts of the consumer Internet business still have a ways to go. It also underscores one of the broad themes of the conference: that brand identity is very important on the Net, and therefore that old media companies, for all their difficulties in adjusting to the electronic world, retain some major advantages.