So what are these other models? What other options for future revenue growth are there?

The next few years will witness the continued growth of four major business models for online journalism: the direct payment model, the native advertising model, the venture capital model, and the traditional advertising model.

The first model, the direct payment model, eliminates the intermediary organizations that have long stood between news consumers and news producers. In earlier eras of news, the relationship between audiences and producers of news was mediated in two ways: first, by the business departments of newspapers who negotiated with outside advertisers and whose dealings were walled off from the editorial side of the company, and second, by the advertisers themselves. Advertisers paid news companies in order to be able to reach readers. The amount readers themselves subsidized news organizations through the direct purchasing of their content through subscriptions and newsstand sales has varied over time, but at least since the start of the twentieth century it never represented the majority of the newspaper's income. This is the American story; European newspapers normally receive much more income from subscriptions and sales, much less from advertising. In years to come, US newspapers are likely to see a greater and greater emphasis on readers paying directly for media content, including news content. Early 2013 was something of a landmark in this regard, as it marked the first time ever that annual circulation revenues passed advertising revenues at the flagship New York Times. How will news organizations make their money in the future? One answer is that readers will start to pay for the news they want directly.

The second possible future business model continues to rely more heavily on advertisements, but advertisements of a radically different kind. Called "native advertising," these ads are designed internally by creative teams at news organizations and then folded into publications so they largely "blend in" with actual news content. Not surprisingly, these native ads have been very controversial. They fundamentally rely on a sort of reader deception in order to be successful and also challenge the church-state separation between the editorial and business sides of many news companies. However, native advertising has also been very successful. Vox Creative and Buzzfeed Creative now work with advertisers to help them directly market their content, with Buzzfeed native advertising making a reported $120 million in sales in 2014. But it's not only new entrants into the journalism space that are dong this—even venerable outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post are. Internal teams at these publications also act as externally focused technology teams as well, with some even going so far as to build and market content management systems that can be sold to other news organizations and publishers of various kinds. How will news organizations make money? They will make money by making better advertisements and by blurring the lines between news and advertisements in the first place.

A third model for news is perhaps the oldest, as well as the simplest: online advertising, with ads popping up or appearing on webpages, ads that are clearly marked out from the rest of the content. But isn't traditional online advertising dying? These advertisements, publishers seem to have concluded, were a losing business and would never provide news organizations with enough revenue to make a significant dent in their expenses. But two developments over the last few years have changed this calculus enough to at least prompt news companies to revisit traditional online ads: the shift to the so- called "mobile web," and direct partnerships between online platforms like Facebook and select news publishers like the New York Times. Both these developments are related.

Mobile traffic now accounts for a larger percentage of overall Internet traffic than does PC-based traffic. Much of this traffic from mobile, in turn, is devoted to mobile apps rather than the "mobile web"—users spend a whopping 86% of their time on apps, versus only 14% on the web. The hope among many in the news industry is that the advertising experience will be substantially different enough on cellphones that it will make display ads more lucrative again. A second important development in the evolving conversation about online advertising emerged only in early 2015, with the debut of Facebook's "Instant Articles." Under the instant article program, a few select news organizations began to host content directly on Facebook, rather than uploading them to their own homepages and linking to them off Facebook. These instant articles promised faster load times and improved visual display, particularly on Facebook's mobile app. Facebook has also promised publishers 70% of the revenue generated by adjacent display ads, and access to the metrics about each article. If Facebook really does service better advertisements for news stories than these companies themselves do, the value of display ads might go up even as journalism organizations sacrifice some control over their content.

But even after all the hoopla about Facebook Instant Articles in the early summer of 2015, it's unclear if these articles would amount to anything more than an afterthought for most news organizations. Following the excitement about Instant Articles when they debuted, there were no new articles posted again for several months. This gap between the buzz surrounding the initial product launch and day-t o-day reporting practice points out how hard it is to foster change in the world of journalism.

There is a fourth and final possible future business model for news—but we might call it less of a long-term model than a temporary holding strategy. Over the last few years, the largest funding streams for many of the newest digital news/ entertainment hybrids have come from venture capitalists and Silicon Valley. In 2014, Andreessen Horowitz invested $50 million in BuzzFeed and valued it as being worth $850 million dollars. Vox Media was valued at $350 million in 2014. And while these venture capitalists (vcs) may be impressed with plans to create and market content-management systems (CMSs) and build native ads, the fact is that these investments are usually made on the basis of predicted future growth. In other words, Buzzfeed may not be worth $850,000,000 today, but it will be worth that much money one day in the future. Is that right? History has shown that vc valuations do not always pan out, and one of the biggest future questions for the startup news business will be to see how many of these infusions of cash pay off for journalism in the long run. There is the distinct possibility that the current value of these new digital media startups constitutes a bubble and that many of them could collapse in much the same way that "Pets dot com" did in the early 2000s. If this happens, this fourth option will not have amounted to much of a "business model" at all.