| New media and media type transformations are inevitably subject to the influences of social, political and economic factors. This thesis takes as an example the development of commercial news websites in mainland China from 1995 to 2009 and investigates the influences of economic factors on the developments and transformations of new media.Due to public demand and favorable government policies, a significant number of commercial news websites emerged during 1990 s in mainland China. However, subsequent operations and management were not quite satisfactory. Among the mainland commercial news websites, only a handful of sites managed to run successfully with online news as their main products, where Sina and People.cn are two examples. As a stand-alone commercial news website, Sina has been striving to make a “news supermarket” since being listed. It eventually succeeded in Building online news to be its core product and making profits with advertisement fees as the main source of income through interested online news readers. On the contrary, among those news sites with traditional media background only People.cn became to be listed and achieved profitability.Other than Sina and People.cn, which solely focus on online news products, there exited far more commercial news websites on similar tracks but failed to sustain. They either transform for new models of profit or seek for support from government or parent media if not eliminated in the stiff competitions of the internet market. From 1995 to 2009, commercial news websites in mainland China were in general not running very well. The main underlying reasons include limited capacity for online advertisement, low advertising value and policy restrictions regarding online news media in this country.Past experiences on these issues can provide us important information and point us to promising directions on the future development of news websites and new media. |
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