Revenue streams and digital content providers: an empirical investigation

There is tremendous confusion among practitioners regarding the relationshi p 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 s uch goods and the fact that such products an increasingly offered free by o nline providers. Using the magazine publishing industry as a context. this paper provides an empirical exploration of various revenue streams and rela tes them to manager assessment of the performance of the firm's online effo rts. These results present, to the authors' knowledge, the first empirical exploration of the link between the performance of an online effort and var ious revenue streams pursued. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.