Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Jan. 15, 2019, 11:28 a.m.

What is the biggest benefit of paying for online news? Digital publishing firm Twipe surveyed nearly 4,000 people from six European countries and the U.S., and found that the most-cited reason for paying is unlimited access to stories — followed by, uh, access to print (with feeling good about paying for news quite a bit further down).

Most of the people surveyed also spend between 5 and 20 minutes per day consuming news, so it’s not as if they’re reading everything they have access to, but the “all you can eat” feeling is appealing — knowing you could read it all if you wanted to.

Respondents were clear that their favorite time to read news is the early morning, and “In Germany and Switzerland, a benefit that was mentioned by a few respondents was that the print newspaper comes too late to be included in their morning routines. Instead by paying for the digital version of the newspaper, they are able to access the day’s edition already early in the morning.”

Interestingly, while those surveyed cite unlimited stories as a big benefit to paying for digital news, few of them (11.7 percent) said that hitting the paywall was the main reason they started paying up (though “couldn’t get news in this specific format otherwise” may refer to payments as well).

You can download the full report here.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
“The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.”
BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
The New York Times and the Washington Post compete with meme accounts for the chance to be first with a big headline.
In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question
Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest — but ultimately rejected them all.