It’s shorthand for the chief problem of transitioning a local news operation’s business model from print to online: Newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies. Despite increasing readership online, advertisers continue to pay a much higher price when they place their ads in print.
A lot of that has been laid to inertia on the part of advertisers and a lack of sales imagination at papers. But there’s also something very real at play as well: the loss of scarcity.Why it’s so hard to move revenue from print to online