Designing ubiquitous media services - Exploring the two-sided market of newspapers

Abstract

The two-sided market of newspapers with its two customer groups, readers and advertisers, is changing due to digitalization. This former stable and profitable market has lately suffered from both decreasing subscription and advertiser revenue. In this paper we use the term ubiquitous media environments to represent the vision of future media environments enabling device independent mass-scale distribution of ubiquitous media services in integrated infrastructures. We build upon a two-year action research project where researchers worked together with the Swedish newspaper industry to envision future ubiquitous media services and explore the following research question: how can ubiquitous media services be designed to leverage and balance value in a two-sided market? Five examples of ubiquitous media services were developed in collaboration and thereafter evaluated. These services were then illustrated in movie clips to trigger discussions on how ubiquitous media services can be designed. Drawing on the value aspects of ubiquitous media services from an advertiser and reader point-of-view and the platform owner role of the newspapers in a future ubiquitous media environments, we describe and discuss how ubiquitous media services can be designed to leverage value for advertisers and readers, and how newspaper organizations can strategize ubiquitous media environments.