How content production and business relations can generate fresh revenue sources

Generating income is crucial to the viability of any news media, whether they are non-profit or for-profit organisations. Quality journalism costs money to produce. But finding diversified revenue sources to pay for it is a fundamental challenge. We need to continue to delve into the different ways quality news and information can make money. By focusing on income, we bring the economic problems facing journalism to the fore, providing a starting point for media viability that is focussed on business practices.  

IMS is committed to strengthening our media partners as organisations and businesses so that they can defend and assert their editorial independence. Finding workable revenues is a key component of this work – revenues plural, because research and experience indicate that in most media ecosystems today, media need to draw on a variety of income streams in order to survive. Our approach to business viability is to ignite interest and enable capabilities in local contexts for future-oriented responses, so that our media partners can harness their entrepreneurial spirit and feel more confident in the business side of their operations. Our support is tailored to each media partner’s needs and where they are in their development. 

In the politically pressured and fragile economies in which our partners operate, the barriers to starting a media organisation are relatively low, but the barriers to sustainability are anything but that; a challenge too often exacerbated by ethnocentricism. Little research into what makes journalism sustainable is focussed on these kinds of economies. 

In particular, native advertising, sponsored content and advertorials are poorly evidenced as revenue streams and the terms are often used interchangeably. There is little known about how to conceptualise such revenue opportunities and to deliver on them thereafter. Yet we know they hold promise. Grant income aside, the creation of content for non-media clients, followed by sponsored content or native advertising were found to be the two most promising revenue streams for digital media across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. 

Therefore, we have brought together relevant case studies to illustrate how content production and business relations can be reconfigured to generate fresh revenue sources, and to demonstrate which tools may be helpful along the way. These cases include special thematic projects, creative agency models, and native-only formats in digital and multimedia form revisiting the boundary negotiation between editorial and business departments.  

The Native Advertising Playbook casts new light on the complex, overlapping and increasingly coupled relations between consumers and clients that require significant alignment and coordination to succeed.  

This is the first in a series of Revenue Playbooks where we will look under the hood of more unconventional revenue streams, with an emphasis on timely and useful steps to adoption.