New Media Researcher/Asssitant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin

Archive for the ‘long-distance’ tag

Long-distance users: Are they an inconvenient truth?

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Every newspaper website serves two groups of readers: 1) local users and 2) long-distance users (from outside the print market).

I have always been interested in the long-distance segment, primarily because I’ve been a long-distance user myself since the first Chinese-language online newspaper became available in 1996. In Hong Kong, Tucson, or Austin, I check news from Taiwan online almost everyday.

Based on a series of research, I know the long-distance group constitutes a substantial market segment for most newspapers.

What struck me as interesting (or unbelievable) is, for so long, no newspapers seem to be interested in monetizing these loyal users (yes they seem to be the most loyal group of users, according to our latest study). Many are reluctant to reveal the breakdown of local/long-distance users; some try to exclude long-distance users from the audience metrics. Why?

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Written by Iris

August 17th, 2009 at 2:09 am