The website of Germany’s most popular news magazine Der Spiegel (www.spiegel.de) is by far the most used German website with editorial content. The site registered almost 660 million page impressions in September 2009 alone – over 100 million more than the previous year. This figure illustrates how quickly the Internet is developing in Germany. Germans currently spend 120 minutes a day on the World Wide Web, compared to just 13 minutes in 2004. Apart from the fact that many households – about 14 million so far – have excellent high-speed broadband connections, it is primarily the ever-growing range of websites that makes the Internet an important source of information for people of all levels of education. 40.3% of Germans name the Internet as an indispensable source of information. Some 55% of all adults consult the Web when they want to find out more about a particular subject. In 1999 this figure was just 9%. In the 20- to 29-year-old age group it is now 81%. Most publishers are facing up to this media challenge and actively using the Web. In fact, most German news portals like Spiegel Online are offshoots of established media brands – for example, FAZ.NET is the website of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, sueddeutsche.de the portal of Süddeutsche Zeitung and zeit.de the online service of the weekly Die Zeit. The WAZ Media Group launched the most comprehensive website to date of any regional newspaper in October 2007 with its Internet offering Der Westen. As a news and communication portal, Der Westen unites the websites of five of the WAZ Group’s daily newspapers, offering news from 140 cities, the rest of Germany and all over the world. The articles are supplemented by video and audio clips. As news and editorial sites become increasingly popular, the debate over paid online content is flaring up again – hardly surprising in times of economic crisis and shrinking advertising budgets. Many media companies see the future of journalism in paid-content models. Yet even in Germany it has so far proved virtually impossible for companies to make any money with journalism on the Internet. Few Internet users are willing to pay for journalistic content. In a survey conducted by the Forsa Institute, only 16% of respondents were willing in principle to pay for such content. Of those who would be willing to spend money on online news and articles, a vast majority (93%) were only willing to pay up to ten cents per article. In order to survive in this “freebie culture”, many publishers aim to focus on exclusive and high-quality journalism. At the opposite end of the scale there is a trend towards the tabloidization of journalistic sites – producing sensationalist headlines, exaggerated stories and picture galleries containing hundreds of photographs. Spiegel Online, for example, has been repeatedly criticized in this respect.
