Chasing the User: The Revenue Streams of 2006

摘要

It is now a tradition in the annual EContent 100 issue that we climb way out on a limb and anticipate promising new sources of revenue for the coming year. Even as 2005 closes, it is already clear that boatloads of money are about to start racing online, especially from big media TV and radio brands desperately chasing audiences that are fragmenting into smaller niches of personalized, on-demand media consumption. In past years, advertising drove many of the trends online, but this coming year much of the energy will be coming from the media industry itself as it tries to retool for an on-demand future. Web radio is getting real, fast. Online audio stream listening has been a quiet giant for a year or two, but it is an emerging trend about to get super-charged by big media investment. Terrestrial radio powerhouse Clear Channel is already logging 800,000 uniques a week to its radio streams, and dwindling offline listeners will drive the company to start significant new initiatives online. Their foes will be Yahoo! and Napster, both of whom now offer subscription-based, personalized streaming audio channels.