New revenue drivers in the newspaper industry

The newspaper industry is in big trouble. US Newspaper ad revenues sag to a 25-low in 2010. The classified ad revenues decreased by 92% since the year 2000 to $723 million in 2010. The total US newspaper ad revenue per capita fell from $213 to currently $84. Next to the decreasing ad revenues, more and more customers prefer to read their news online than a physical subscription. The consequence of this collapse in revenues is a high and even increasing...

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Impact of self-publishing on the book industry

Some days ago, I read an article on Businessweek about the new trend of self-publishing and crowdfunding in the publishing industry. In this post, I want to explain what those changes mean for the industry in general and why it makes business models like lulu.com emerge. To make this analysis more practical, I will include a generic editorial income statement and show how it is affected by those trends. Lulu.com is a platform where authors can publish...

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Crowdsourcing in the music industry

Recently, I read an interesting article about the increased importance of crowdsourcing in the music industry, stating that this new approach of funding and distribution has become possible through significant changes in this sector during the last years. Building up on my previous post about the music industry, I want to explain the model of crowdsourcing and how it changes the value chain. As a part of the analysis, I want to include the discussion...

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Evolution and Future of Online Gaming

Yesterday I visited the Electronic Arts headquarters in Silicon Valley and had the chance to talk to senior management about the company’s business model, its current situation as well as its future plans. In this post, I want to shortly share the main ideas we discussed and based on that and some further research explain the value chain of the gaming industry and how it is affected by recent trends. Electronic Arts’ business model has been the...

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What is the next big challenge for Google?

For the last years, Google has been the leading company in online business. To maintain its dominating market position and further increase its revenues, Google has been extensively diversifying its portfolio with products such as the Chrome browser, the mobile operating system Android and its lately launched service, Google Wallet. With this multitude of products and services (check it out on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products)...

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Impact of technology on the music industry

Enablers are the development of advanced hardware and software products as well as the increased importance of internet and especially social networks. During my research, I found a number of interesting statistics about recent changes in the music industry. Based on this data I will try to analyze each step of the value chain to explore how new technologies and the change in customer behavior affect the companies’ business models as well as the...

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