The impact of web traffic on revenues of traditional newspaper publishers 5 Appendix: Methodology This study has estimated the value of web traffic to newspaper publishers in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK. The study uses an econometric model to isolate and test the effects that different sources of total web traffic and other revenue drivers have on newspaper publisher revenues. This approach is described in more detail in Section 5.1. This study is based on publishers’ historical data. It does not seek to develop any counterfactual scenarios or answer any “what if?” questions related to the subject, as stated in Section 5.1. The newspaper publishers included in this analysis differ in their business models, product offerings, or readers’ demographics. These differences make the estimation complex. The techniques used in this study have been selected to most accurately tackle these challenges. The subsequent sections outline the approaches employed in the estimation and provide sources for the underlying data and explanations for any assumptions. 5.1 Econometrics methodology Econometric modelling was used to identify the impact that total web traffic has had on newspaper publishers’ revenues. 5.1.1 Sample The analysis considered a sample of 66 newspaper publishers across four European markets: Germany, France, Spain, and the UK. These publishers were selected based on data availability and their levels of circulation or online traffic within their respective market. In addition, the sample also included smaller regional publishers. The time period examined was from 2011 to 2013. Only publications with both a print and an online component were included in the sample. Online-only publishers such as Eurosport.fr and Goal.com were not considered, nor were the national broadcasters in the four markets, such as France TV, NDR, RTVE, and the BBC, that are otherwise popular sources of online news but do not have print editions and often are not funded by advertising revenues. Companies with divisions unrelated to newspaper publishing were excluded, unless their publishing divisions had separate financial results available. News sources removed due to this limitation include Sky News, whose parent company Sky is a provider of cable and internet services that does not provide financial statements disaggregated for its news section. In addition, Sky News is available only online and not in print. The inclusion of these publishers would have introduced noise into the model from the non-publishing revenues, which are not relevant to this study. In addition to these exclusions, where data for some publishers was unavailable or inaccurate, these publishers were not included. The size of the sample varied across years due to missing values for some publishers. Different sample sizes did not affect the reliability of the estimation under the fixed effects methodology, which is described below. Deloitte LLP. 18