Still Unwilling to Pay: An Empirical Analysis of 50 U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Subscription Results

The Value of Local News in the Digital Realm – Introducing the Integrated Value Creation Model

“…For the local newspaper industry, the model highlights problems with how local newspaper businesses currently aim to create and capture value echoing previous research by Pickard and Williams (2014), Myllylahti (2014); Chyi and Ng (2020), Chiou and Tucker (2013) and Carson (2015) on paywalls and people's willingness to pay. The value flow gap between the local newspaper organization and certain audience segments is a call to action for the industry.…”

“…There is considerable pessimism in the research literature regarding the local newspaper industry's increasing dependency on reader revenue (Hess and Waller 2016). Earlier studies have concluded that the prospect of funding journalism by means of paywalls is poor (Franklin 2014) since selling access to online news has generated limited revenue (Pickard and Williams 2014;Myllylahti 2014;Chyi and Ng 2020) and paywalls may drive away audiences and reduce advertising revenue (Chiou and Tucker 2013;Carson 2015). This encourages news operations to sometimes drop their paywall (Ananny and Bighash 2016).…”

“…If people do not perceive news media's value proposition to be of superior value in a high-choice information abundant environment, if other offerings are more attractive or more aligned with their needs and wants, or the cost of consumption is too high in terms of required resources, they are unlikely to spend time let alone money on these news media (Picard 2010). Previous research showing low willingness to pay for online news (Chyi 2012;Chyi and Ng 2020) as well as decreasing audience reach for local newspapers after the introduction of paywalls (Chiou and Tucker 2013;Kim, Song, and Kim 2020) suggests that this may be the case.…”

Marking 40 Years ofNewspaper Research Journal

“…It was found that most of these newspapers charged digital subscribers a fraction of the print subscription price but on average attained no more than 6,000 subscribers with their Web and app editions—which is about 6% of their print circulation at 101,000. It was estimated that digital subscriptions contributed less than 3% of total reader revenue (Chyi & Ng, in press).…”

“…Surprisingly, about two thirds of print readers remained loyal to a lesser product that has become so much more expensive (Chyi & Tenenboim, 2019). In contrast, the vast majority of news consumers were reluctant to pay anything for the same newspaper’s online products (Chyi & Ng, in press).…”