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TopIntroduction And Methodology
Media organizations worldwide are in a state of flux, facing enormous challenges that are threatening their own survival (Picard, 2014). As many experts in the industry have outlined, in order to survive, media companies need to develop new organizational practices, new business concepts, entirely different skills and new strategies (Malmelin & Villi, 2017). This means, according to Horst and Murschetz (2019), that the focus should be placed on understanding how and what kind of processes and practices of organizations, managers and creative workers are helping them to drive their new ideas and strategies forward. However, most media try to change by executing a few random projects, such as updating a website or launching a new mobile app. Others put all their effort into the pursuit of different revenue models, ignoring other structural parts of a media business model (Picard, 2016).
Bearing this in mind, this paper is based on the hypothesis that if media organizations could re-arrange their structural elements around a specific business model typology, then they could have much better chances in their fight to face and overcome the challenges posed by the ever changing and competitive digital ecosystem.
However, this readjustment is easier said than done. To succeed in such an endeavor, a strategic approach to managing business models in the media industry is considered to be a necessity. Indeed, an abundance of studies in the field of media management emphasize that strategy –together with entrepreneurship- constitutes the basis of success for media practitioners in today’s media industry (Horst & Murschetz, 2019) and that strategy processes and practices are needed more than ever to help managers make sense of their challenges and anticipate or respond to ongoing developments in today’s rapidly changing environments in a strategic manner (Burgelman, Floyd, Laamanen, Mantere, Vaara, & Whittington, 2018; Hutzschenreuter & Kleindienst, 2006).
A strategic approach essentially entails coping with change; As Horst, Järventie-Thesleff and Baumann (2019) point out, this coping can be bold and innovative such as starting a new camp for idea development in the organization’s startup-incubator. In the same way it can be less radical and more incremental such as writing a new app for a magazine, trying out a new way to reach customers for advertisements, or changing the style of writing in cover pages in a niche magazine. According to the authors, these strategic actions may not reorient an entire business model. Nevertheless, as their study has shown, they are enormously successful for ensuring strategic survival, because they allow people to playfully develop ideas, visions and possibilities and develop the future in shared manner.
Notwithstanding strategy’s important role to managing media business models, research at the intersection of strategy and business models remains scarce since we still lack an understanding of as how the concept of business model can be used as strategic tool for supporting managers and entrepreneurs in this context.
Following the recent calls from the field, which emphasize the need for more studies and efforts for theory building (Mierzejewska, 2018; Rohn, 2018), the main objective of this work is to develop a strategic business model typology that advances the theoretical perspective of the concept and serves as a valuable strategic tool for media companies worldwide.
Also, the article aims to address Zot, Amit, and Massa’s (2011) argument that scholars who have developed typologies appear to have been less concerned with empirical testing and actually test this typology in two websites from Greece, a country whose media industries experienced two parallel crises of different types—an economic crisis and a credibility one.