Digital News Report shows that most subscribers pay promotional prices for news
*Per Craig Robertson
It’s no secret that newspapers have struggled to make money and stay in business in the digital age. Advertising revenue has been siphoned off by tech giants, and print advertising revenue is in steady decline. The solution to this problem seems simple at first glance, but it’s not in practice: get people to subscribe.
Some outlets have been quite successful at this, with several major publishers reaching significant milestones in digital subscriptions: 300,000 subscribers in The Country500,000 in Le Monde and 10 million in the The New York Times.
But the phenomenon documented in the Digital News Report It’s “the winners take most”: some big, respected news brands have built up healthy subscriber bases online, while others have struggled.
The successful boosting of digital subscriber numbers by some major news publishers also hides another potential story bubbling beneath the surface: the fact that many of those subscribers are not paying full price.
This question of how many people actually pay full price for their digital news subscription prompted a question in the 2024 Digital News Report. We asked online news subscribers how much they actually paid, and we asked non-subscribers how much they would be willing to pay, if anything. The findings are striking.
Across the 20 countries where we asked people how much they paid, 41% said they were paying less than full price for their online news subscription. We calculated this by comparing the price people said they paid for their subscription to the full, undiscounted price of a basic digital subscription from the brand they were paying for.
Although the overall proportion is 41%, there is some variation by country. About half of subscribers in Canada (54%), Switzerland (47%) and the United States (46%) said they paid less than full price, but just a fifth said the same in France (21%) and a quarter in Denmark (25%).
Putting these numbers into context is difficult, as we don’t have comparable estimates of the proportion of people who, for example, pay promotional prices for Netflix or Disney+. And certainly, individual news brands will have a clear picture of how many of their own customers are paying full price. But what our data allows us to do is paint a general picture of the news landscape across countries: one that can paint headlines about subscriber growth in a different light.
Newspapers in every country offer some kind of offer, whether it’s a free month or two, a discount for a few months, or even a full year trial. These offers give people the chance to purchase a news subscription and try out the brand without making a financial commitment. The struggle, however, is in retaining these trial subscribers and convincing them to continue paying the full price after the trial ends.
While our data doesn’t give us a picture of how many of the 41% who pay less than full price will continue to pay full price, the evidence we’ve collected over the years suggests that many won’t.
Underneath these subscriber numbers, there appears to be a lot of churn. While increasing subscriber numbers seems like a good thing at first glance, it raises the question of how these increases are achieved. Is increasing subscriber numbers by offering extremely low trial prices sustainable?
This also comes against the backdrop of an apparent stagnation in online news subscriptions. Across the 20 markets we tracked over time, we found that 17% of people say they pay for online news in some form – a figure that has not changed in the past three years. Payment rates have not increased, and in some cases may even have decreased as the cost of living has plummeted in many countries.
When it comes to people who don’t currently pay for news, which is the vast majority in most countries, we found that the majority (57%) are not willing to pay anything at all. Asked how much they would be willing to pay, 69% in the United Kingdom and 68% in Germany said nothing. Even in countries with high rates of payment for online news, Norway and Finland, a large proportion (45% and 43% respectively) also said they were not willing to pay anything. Among those who were willing to pay something, the majority were willing to pay the equivalent of just a few US dollars.
The general story seems to be that the news industry in many countries has already attracted most people enough to pay for what is on offer at current prices. Onboarding the remaining people who are currently unwilling to pay anything for online news will be an uphill battle.
There are a limited amount of discounts that can reasonably be done without the business being unsustainable (if it isn’t already), and while there are other models that involve different content packages being priced differently (as well as approaches like bundling), it is It’s hard to see how the uninterested can be convinced to pay for a product they don’t want or don’t value enough to finance.
But the silver lining is that some news brands have found success in building subscriber bases among those who are still interested and engaged in news—and it’s not just the big players. A wider range of smaller, niche publications catering to specific audiences have found success, especially in the U.S. on platforms like Substackshowing that the “reader revenue” model can work.
Craig Robertson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Text translated by Katarina Moraes. Read the original at English.
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