News media or advertising media
Do newspapers dedicate themselves to informing people or to selling advertising space? I took a screenshot of the newspaper El Informador, whose name indicates that it is dedicated to informing, and analyzed the content.
In the following image, you can see that the content displayed on the screen is divided into essentially three types:
- Information: The article the user wants to read—the information. In theory, this should be the main content and therefore occupy the most space.
- Engagement: This type of content is intended to get the user to navigate to other sections of the site or share content on social media.
- Advertisements: Advertising spaces.
A quick look reveals that the largest share of screen space is devoted to engagement because the more pages are viewed, the more value can be assigned to the website's traffic, while the advertisements also receive more views. In second place is the space devoted to advertising, and in last place, the space devoted to information.
Do newspapers dedicate themselves to informing people or to selling advertising space?