Online Media
According to the Reuters Digital News Report for Ireland, nine of the ten most frequently used digital brands in Ireland are offshoots of legacy media outlets. RTE News Online is the most popular online news brand with 24% of the population accessing news on the site each week. Independent.ie is the third most popular online digital news brand, irishtimes.com, the fourth and BreakingNews.ie (a subsidiary of the Irish Times) is the fifth.
Although Irish legacy media outlets were slow to introduce paywalls for their online versions, they have become increasingly prevalent amongst newspapers as print circulations have continued to decline. “Digital first” strategies are increasingly the order of the day. The Irish Times launched a “freemium” paywall in 2015 allowing online readers access to a limited number of articles at no cost before requiring payment for further access. By the end of 2022, the Irish Times Group claimed to have around 142,000 digital subscribers. Having also adopted the freemium model in 2020, Mediahuis claimed to have approximately 70,000 subscribers to independent.ie by Spring 2023, at which point CEO Peter Vandermeersch expressed the expectation that daily print editions would be phased out by 2033.
One online news source NOT adopting the paywall approach is TheJournal.ie, the second most frequently consulted online news source and the only one in the top ten news sources that can be regarded as digital native. Furthermore, TheJournal.ie is an example of the common overlap of ownership in media and advertisement. Its owners, Eamon and Brian Fallon, hold through the Distilled Limited (a joint venture with the Norwegian Schibsted media group) shares in daft.ie. donedeal.ie, adverts.ie and gumtree,ie. Daft.ie, a website listing property for rent and sales was established by Brian Fallon in 1997 and remains a thriving operation, with the Distilled Limited group now including the two largest classified advertising websites in Ireland (Adverts.ie and Donedeal.ie) and - until 2021 - Boards.ie, the most popular online forum in Ireland. This advertising/media outlet cross-ownership structure is also evident within Mediahuis Ireland (carzone..ie) and The Irish Times Group (myhome.ie).
