Study­ing the progress of the Finnish finan­cial daily Talous­sanomat as it became Europe’s first online-only news­pa­per, researchers from City Uni­ver­sity Lon­don dis­cov­ered a num­ber of seem­ingly coun­ter­in­tu­itive trends from the newspaper’s retir­ing of its print busi­ness.

Six and a half months after going online-only Unique Users were 22 per­cent lower and Page Impres­sions 11 per­cent down. […]

Although Talous­sanomat costs fell 52 per­cent when its presses were silenced, rev­enue also dropped—by at least 75 percent—due to the loss of print adver­tis­ing and sub­scrip­tion income. […]

Based on their case-study [the researchers] con­clude that a news­pa­per would have to have an oper­at­ing loss of 31 per­cent or greater to make ditch­ing its print edi­tion worthwhile.

The researchers have also con­ducted a num­ber of other stud­ies in this realm that may be of inter­est.

via @zambonini