Online news service feels the pinch

Though the vast majority of users worldwide expect free services, some providers, such as the Wall Street Journal, charge for full access to their sites.

Others, such as Avusa, which owns The Times, provides Internet content free.

This is done to support the cost of growing Internet platforms with revenues from other, more traditional news operations.

One site that relies almost exclusively on advertising revenues is Moneyweb.

Its shares rarely trade and it remains a family-run business. The latest annual results underscore the difficulty of breaking out into anything approaching operational maturity.

In the year to the end of March, advertisers' aversion to spending money to buy space on a medium that provides uncertain benefits cut Moneyweb's advertising revenue by 14 percent from R23-million to R19.9-million. It further converted an operating profit of R2.4-million into an operating loss of R199000.

There is no doubt there is a longer-term future for Internet news services. But, as Moneyweb has shown by its launch of a subsidiary horse-racing tote service, concentrating on one's core business in the online world is not seen as the way to go.

Source: The Times

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