Personalization friend or foe?

Within the past years the online news media market is subject to rapid growth, with already 82% of Americans solely consuming their news online (Pew Research Center, 2012, p.2), the Internet has emerged into the main source of information. As new competitors are entering the online market news organizations are increasingly seeking ways to improve their strategic position in order to attract and retain customers. Especially personalization has been widely adopted by e-businesses as a driver for strategic concepts, which create increased value for users and thus foster the competitive advantage in the online market. Consequently it has gained growing attention by practitioners as well as academia. Although various personalization strategies have been implemented there are still major challenges in how to best design personalization concepts. This thesis aims at contributing to the current debate around personalization by investigating how it can function as a driver of innovating business models in the online news media market. In order to examine in what ways personalization contributes to the strategic positioning of the online news media its implications for differentiation and lock-in are explored through conducting five best practice case studies paired with ten semi-structured expert interviews. The elaborated results were transformed into strategic solutions that can offer future perspectives on how to gain competitive advantage in the online news media market by personalizing content as well as online services. The results furthermore underline the growing potential of niche and participatory content as interlinking concepts complementing personalization and give insights into how this interplay of provisions can open up new pathways to monetizing on the readership of online news media platforms.