Revenue streams and digital content providers: an empirical investigation

There is tremendous confusion among practitioners regarding the relationship between various potential online revenue streams and the performance of a firm’s online efforts. Such questions are of particular interest to firms that provide information goods, due to both the unique characteristics of such goods and the fact that such products are increasingly offered free by online providers. Using the magazine publishing industry as a context, this paper provides an empirical exploration of various revenue streams and relates them to manager assessment of the performance of the firm’s online efforts. These results present, to the authors’ knowledge, the first empirical exploration of the link between the performance of an online effort and various revenue streams pursued.