A customer-based indirect approach to determine the value of news provided to Internet portals in Korea

Abstract

The online channel becomes one of the most important distribution channels of news contents. As the portal becomes a platform for the distribution of news content to users, the conflict between the portal and newspaper companies arises about the value of the news content provided to Internet portals by newspaper companies. This paper attempts to estimate the value of the news content on the portal using the case of the relationship between the Naver portal site and newspaper companies in Korea. Since there is no direct way to estimate the value of news content, this study utilizes an indirect way based on consumer's intention to visit portal site. An analytic hierarchy process based on consumer surveys is employed in this paper to estimate the relative importance of news content on a main page and a search service. On the basis of this relative importance, this paper estimates the portal's operating income which is generated by the contribution of news content, using accounting data from Naver.