by Matt Asay

The news goes online while software goes open

analysis
Jun 11, 20071 min

It's happening on TV, too. It turns out, as Paul Kedrosky captures, that news doesn't happen on TV anymore. It breaks first on the Internet.Some fascinating stuff going on when you get beneath the respective hoods of CNN's decline and CNN.com's ascent in recent years. It starts with traffic, as the following figure shows, and it continues to revenue, with CNN's revenues dropping 11% since 2003, and CNN.com's rev

It’s happening on TV, too. It turns out, as Paul Kedrosky captures, that news doesn’t happen on TV anymore. It breaks first on the Internet.

Some fascinating stuff going on when you get beneath the respective hoods of CNN’s decline and CNN.com’s ascent in recent years. It starts with traffic, as the following figure shows, and it continues to revenue, with CNN’s revenues dropping 11% since 2003, and CNN.com’s revenues doubling to $71.4m.

To my friends at proprietary software companies who laugh at the still miserly revenue bases of open source companies, I’d point them to the CNN.com growth curve. It’s nice that proprietary software companies have a massive revenue base. But the future belongs to today’s explosive growth rates.

And those are online (in news) and open (in software).