The High Cost of Downtime in the Media Industry: How to Mitigate the Impact

Website downtime is a costly issue for any business that relies on its digital presence. Downtime can occur for a variety of reasons, including technical issues with the website’s hosting, problems with the content management system (CMS), and issues with the various services that are used to run a news website.

In the media and newspaper industry, website downtime can have a significant impact on revenue, as news websites rely on advertising revenue and subscription revenue. Any interruption in service can lead to a revenue loss in addition to a decrease in website traffic.

Calculating the cost of downtime for news websites can help businesses understand the financial impact of website outages. The cost of downtime can be broken down into several categories:

• Loss of Revenue: This includes any revenue that would have been generated from advertising or subscriptions, but was lost due to the website being unavailable. This can be calculated by multiplying the expected revenue per hour by the number of hours the website was down.
• Loss of Productivity: Downtime can also lead to a loss of productivity, as employees may not be able to access the website or may have to spend additional time trying to access it. This can be calculated by multiplying the hourly rate of employees by the number of hours they were affected by the downtime.
• Loss of Customer Satisfaction: Downtime can also lead to a loss of customer satisfaction, as users may not be able to access the website or may have a poor experience trying to access it. This can be calculated by surveying customers and determining the percentage of customers who were affected by the downtime and what their satisfaction level was.
• Loss of Employee Satisfaction: Downtime can also lead to loss of employee satisfaction, as they may have to work extra hours to fix the issue, and most likely have to deal with unhappy customers. This can be calculated by surveying employees and determining the percentage of employees who were affected by the downtime and what their satisfaction level was.

The exact cost of downtime is of course unique to each business. But according to Pingdom, a monitoring website, the cost in media is on average $ 90,000 per hour.

4 steps to understand and mitigate risks

Understanding these costs, and the many aspects of a news publishing business that is impacted by downtime, disruption, or degradation of services, is key in being able to address and prevent these scenarios.

Let’s look at some steps that can be taken to mitigate these risks.

Step 1: Understand the different causes of website downtime.

Some common causes of website downtime include technical issues with the website’s hosting, problems with the content management system (CMS), and issues with the website’s code.

Step 2: Understand how website downtime affects revenue in the media and newspaper industry.

News websites rely on advertising and subscription revenue, and any interruption in service can lead to lost revenue. Additionally, news websites often rely on traffic to generate revenue, and downtime can lead to a decrease in website traffic.

Step 3: Use website monitoring tools to detect and alert the website owners of any downtime.

Website monitoring tools can be used to detect and alert the website owners of any downtime, enabling them to take immediate action.

Step 4: Implement a fallback solution to mitigate the impact of downtime.

Fallback solutions provide a safety net for tech stacks and can step in when a website’s services become degraded, disrupted, or go down.

By following these steps, businesses in the media and newspaper industry can better understand the causes of website downtime, understand their financial impact of website outages and take steps to prevent or mitigate them.

What fallback solutions are there on the market?

Norkon has recognized the need of a fallback solution for publishers and has developed Parachute, which provides independent redundancy and a separate CMS and services able to step in when different levels of news publishers’ infrastructure go down or are compromised.

Parachute ensures that readers can continue to access the content even when the primary website is down.

One of the key benefits of using Parachute is that it provides a completely independent publishing tool and hosted service. This means that even if the primary CMS or hosting service goes down, the website can still continue to publish new content and update existing content, minimizing the impact of downtime on revenue and customer satisfaction.

Another key benefit of Parachute is that it continuously syncs and keeps a record of all previously published content. This means that even if the primary website is down, readers can still access previously published content, ensuring that the impact of downtime on readers is minimized.

Parachute is also very simple to use and can be quickly set up and integrated with any news website, regardless of the underlying technology stack.

Parachute is relied on by Danish Radio DR as well as Amedia, Norway’s largest media group of local newspapers, to ensure they have a plan B for when things go wrong, are disrupted, or similar. Through Parachute, their 100+ newspaper have access to a fallback solution so that they can keep publishing content, and their readers with access to their articles and updates.

If you want to learn more about Parachute, reach out to us here or visit Parachute’s product page to find out how Parachute can step in to save the day.