An early version of this factsheet contained one inaccurate coding that has consequences throughout.

Introduction

As legacy news revenues continue to decline, and with the lion’s share of digital advertising revenues claimed by large technology companies, pay models have become an increasingly important part of the business of digital news. Digital advertising remains a key source of income; as Newman’s (2019) survey of news executives finds, 81% of respondents say that it is still the most important revenue focus, followed by subscriptions (78%), native advertising (75%) and various other sources of revenue. Nevertheless, subscriptions are a key priority for the news industry going forward, with over half (52%) of the executives expecting this to be the main revenue focus in 2019.

In April 2017, RISJ analysed the adoption of three dominant forms of pay models – freemium, metered paywalls, and hard paywalls – across leading news organisations in six European markets: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom (Cornia et al. 2017). This factsheet offers an update to our original analysis based on the same sample of news organisations, in order to understand how the landscape has developed over the last two years. We also expand the original sample to include data from the United States for 2017 and 2019, given its importance as both an early testing ground for pay models in news and as a major media market.

Overall Findings and Differences by Sector

The analysis presented here is based on examining the online offerings of more than 200 leadings news organisations across the seven markets. (See detailed methodology and sample at the end of this factsheet.) As in 2017, we collected data from four broad categories of outlets: daily newspapers (up-market, tabloid/mid-market, business, and regional), weekly newspapers and news magazines, TV news (commercial and public service media), and digital-born news outlets. We sorted pay models into three categories: hard paywalls, where no content is accessible for free at all; ‘freemium’ models made up of a mix of free and premium content; and metered paywalls, which allow access to a limited number of free articles each month.1

Based on an examination of 212 of the most important news organisations in these seven countries, we find that:

• 69% of the newspapers in our sample operate some kind of a pay model today, a small increase from 64.5% in 2017. Hard paywalls are extremely rare, with the landscape evenly divided between freemium models and metered paywalls (33% each).

• More than half of weekly newspapers and news magazines (57%) operate a pay model, down 5 percentage points from 2017. Freemium models are the most widely used, followed by metered paywalls and hard paywalls.

• Just as in 2017, all broadcasters continue to offer free access to their digital news in 2019. This includes private sector broadcasters as well as public service media like the BBC in the UK or Yle in Finland.

• Almost all digital-born news outlets (94%) across the seven countries offer free access to their news. Mediapart in France and the Independent in the UK2 are the only digital-born/digital-only organisations in our sample that operate a paywall, up one from 2017.

• Looking only at those news organisations that operate a pay model, the average price for the cheapest available monthly subscription (without discounts) in 2019 is €14.06 (£12.19), roughly similar to 2017. Prices range from as little as €2 (£1.74) to €41.50 (£36) a month. For comparison, the average price for a Netflix subscription across countries is €7.77 (£6.73). (See Table 1.)

We thus find that the trend identified two years ago persists in 2019, with newspapers across Europe and the US gradually moving away from digital news offered for free and supported primarily by display advertising. Some corners of the industry have moved even quicker: among regional newspapers in our sample, just over a quarter (27%) now offer free access to readers, down sharply from 36% in 2017. This shift is in line with other research (Cornia et al. 2016) showing that many newspapers and news magazines are cultivating a wider range of revenue sources – not just various pay models but also native advertising, e-commerce, events, etc.

Figure 1. Pay models across media types (all countries)

This shift is not mirrored across the rest of the industry, however. Overall, more than half of the news organisations in our sample – 53% of the 212 outlets across seven countries – continue to offer free access to digital news. This includes digital-born news media (94%), most tabloid newspapers (73%), and all private sector broadcasters and public service media we examined. (See Figure 1 and Tables 2–4 for details.) The continued dominance of free access among digital-born outlets is especially noteworthy given the industry attention to a few organisations that are building their business around paying members/subscribers, such as France’s Mediapart or (beyond our sample) De Correspondent in the Netherlands and the US and Republik.ch in Switzerland (Nicholls et al. 2016).

Country Differences

The six European countries we cover represent a wide range of media systems, including countries with a history of strong private sector and public service media as well as countries with historically weaker private sector media and less well-funded and widely used public service media. The European markets also differ in terms of overall market size, levels of advertising expenditure, and the degree of direct competition they face from international content. Meanwhile, the United States is by far the largest media market in the sample, marked by a strong, highly competitive private sector and relatively weak public service media.

Comparing results across Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the US, we find interesting differences (see Figure 2 and Tables 4 and 5 for details):

• A majority of top newspapers and news weeklies in Finland, France, Germany, Poland, and the United States have adopted pay models.

• By contrast, in both Italy and the United Kingdom, most major newspapers and weeklies continue to offer free access to their digital news. These are very competitive markets where even leading titles may fear losing market share if they implement pay models.

• Monthly prices vary dramatically across titles and countries (see Figure 2). Looking specifically at newspapers and weeklies, Poland has the lowest average monthly price at €9.05 (£7.84). The UK has the lowest percentage of newspapers and weeklies with pay models (33%) but the highest average monthly price at €17.45 (£15.12), peaking at €41.50 (£36) for the Financial Times.

• Prices vary by model. Metered models average at €15.46 (£13.40) across all countries and range from €10.95 in the US to €19.75 in Germany. Freemium models are on average cheaper at €11.78 (£10.21), running from €8.10 (£7.02) in the UK to €14.49 (£12.56) in France. The prices for content on websites with hard paywalls vary the most, with average prices between €8.48 (£7.35) per month in Poland and €35.83 (£31.06) in the UK (see Table 1).

• Prices also vary by market orientation, with clear differences among business, up-market, regional, and tabloid papers. Business newspapers are unsurprisingly the most expensive, with an average monthly price of €28.32 (£24.55) across the seven countries. They are also the only category which consistently has had pay models in place in both 2017 and 2019.

• Finally, the United States has seen a sharper rise in paywalls than the EU. Some 48% of US outlets in our sample have a paywall, compared to 38% in 2017, a 10 percentage point increase in just two years. This increase stems exclusively from newspapers, of which 76% have a pay model in place in 2019, up 16 percentage points from 2017. During the same period, the number of paywalls across the sample of media from EU countries covered here has stayed nearly flat, rising just one percentage point to 46% in 2019.

Figure 2. Average monthly price across countries (newspapers plus weekly newspapers and news magazines with pay model only)

As in the original report, we found that the content and services offered vary as much as the pay models and prices themselves.3 For instance, many Finnish newspapers use a hybrid paywall model (a combination of a monthly page view limit and some premium content). The US is dominated by metered paywall solutions (see also Steffens 2018). While freemium models abound in Poland and are present across Europe, we did not find one instance in our sample in the US. Some news organisations include in their minimum price offer only access to their news on the websites, whereas others opt to charge more and also offer other services (e.g. the digital version of the printed newspaper, mobile apps for subscribers, archive access, newsletters). It also has to be noted that news organisations that offer free access might, in a few cases, ask for other forms of compensation. For instance, both the UK’s The Guardian and Germany’s die tageszeitung (taz) offer readers the option to donate and to become voluntary supporters.

Summary

In many ways, 2018 has been a difficult year for legacy media companies, especially newspapers; print revenue has continued to decline with digital unable to make up the difference. In this climate, we are seeing a strategic split: as many publishers (particularly in complex and fragmented markets) continue to offer online news for free, much of the industry is making a renewed push to implement pay models as well as membership and donation models (Newman et al. 2018). As Newman’s (2019) survey of news executives finds, subscription and membership is the key priority for the news industry going forward. Over half (52%) expect this to be the main revenue focus in 2019, compared with just 27% for display advertising, 8% for native advertising and 7% for donations.

Recent surveys give reason to be cautiously optimistic about this approach. As the Digital News Report 2018 notes, the number of people paying for news is slowly growing and, across countries, the future likelihood to pay has increased amongst those who are not already paying (Newman et al. 2018). Yet this growth is, in most cases, still incremental and reader revenues, though growing as well, rarely make up for declining legacy revenues and an increasingly difficult digital advertising market. This outlook has not significantly changed since our last factsheet in 2017.

Overall, we can draw the following conclusions from these findings:

• Paywalls are likely here to stay. The trend identified two years ago persists in 2019, with newspapers and news magazines across Europe and the US moving away from digital news offered for free. However, growth in the US has significantly outpaced growth in the EU.

• Nevertheless, fears about paywalls limiting the access to quality information – with all the concomitant implications for democracy – seem overblown for now. Hard paywalls are extremely rare, even among newspapers, and a majority of outlets overall (53%) remain free to access for users.

• Pay models are not evenly distributed across countries but tied to the individual circumstances of each market. Overall, freemium and metered approaches are dominant, with hard paywalls only used by a small minority. In the US, however, freemium models do not exist.

• Most digital-born outlets (94%) continue to provide free access to users. Given recent disruptions in this space, however, it remains an open question how long this trend will continue and whether we will see a shift to pay models over the next several years.

• Among newspapers, regional outlets have embraced paywalls more eagerly then their up-market counterparts.

As this overview demonstrates, a growing number of news organisations across Europe and in the US are challenging the assumption that people will not pay for digital news. And, encouragingly, research suggests that some people across all age groups, including younger media users, are willing to pay for quality content and services online that they find valuable and useful (Fletcher and Nielsen 2016, Newman 2018). The challenge for news organisations now is to deliver such quality content and services, to develop products that provide the kind of user experience and convenience that people have come to expect from digital media, and to market their offers to the many who are currently not paying for journalism, but might do so in the future.

Methodology and Sample

In total, we analysed 212 news organisations for this study, 170 in Europe and 42 in the United States. The 170 European news organisations included were first sampled in 2017 (Cornia et al. 2017) and kept for comparison in 2019.4 For each European country, our 2017 study selected:

• 15 national and regional newspapers with the highest print circulation according to national official sources5;

• Up to three weekly newspapers or news magazines per country based on their print circulation or reach according to national sources or the Digital News Report 2016 (Newman et al. 2016)6;

• Up to five broadcasters – public service and commercial – based on their reach for TV news according to national official sources or the Digital News Report 2016 (ibid.)7;

• The five digital born news websites (domestic and/or international) in a broad sense with the highest reach in each of the countries based on Comscore data for reach within the countries in January 2017.

Because national media markets differ significantly from country to country, the sample is not entirely symmetrical. To avoid leaving out individually important sites not captured by the overall sampling, we strategically added up to four additional news organisations in each country – ranging from digital-born news media like Mediapart in France to national newspapers like Die Welt or die tageszeitung (taz) in Germany – that we knew in advance are important parts of the overall media landscape and represent important examples of digital journalism, even if they would not have been selected according to reach alone.

For the 42 outlets in the United States, we relied on a study conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review in September 2017 (Stulberg 2017). The CJR’s original sample is based on a list of all daily newspapers in the US with a circulation over 100,000. Using matching Comscore data, the original authors ranked the traffic of those paper’s websites and limited the final sample to the 25 outlets with the most-visited websites. To bring the CJR’s sample in line with our methodology,8 we further added:

• Six digital born outlets with the highest reach based on Comscore data for reach (multi-platform) in September 2017;

• Six broadcasters – public service and commercial – based on their reach for TV news according to the Digital News Report 2018 (Newman et al. 2018);

• Four weekly newspapers or news magazines based on the Digital News Report 2018 (ibid.).

Our sample thus includes a total of 212 of the most important news organisations across the seven countries covered, but leaves out a number of smaller news organisations, including many local and regional ones. In each country, we have coded between 22 and 42 of the most important news organisations. To code the websites, we visited each site. If a site had a paywall, we noted the type of the paywall and the monthly cost of a digital-only subscription without discounts. For each site, we determined through testing if the site had a metered paywall. The data was collected between 25 March and 22 April 2019, with a second round of random sample testing on 29 April 2019. It thus represents a snapshot of rapidly evolving markets. Exchange rates for currency conversation are from 23 April 2019 and 22 September 2017, respectively. Please see the Appendix for the full list of organisations included in our sample and more detail on each title.

References

Cornia, A., Sehl, A., Simon, F. M., Nielsen, R. K. 2017. Pay Models in European News. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Cornia, A., Sehl, A., Nielsen, R. K. 2016. Private Sector Media and Digital News. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Fletcher, R., Nielsen, R. K. 2017. ‘Paying for Online News’, Digital Journalism, 5(9), 1173–1191.

Newman, N. 2019. Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2019. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., Levy, D. A., Nielsen, R. K. 2018. Digital News Report 2018. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Levy, D. A., Nielsen, R. K. 2016. Digital News Report 2016. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Nicholls, T., Shabbir, N., Nielsen, R. K. 2016. Digital-Born News Media in Europe. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Schröder, J. 2017. ‘Die große Auflagen-Analyse der Regionalzeitungen: die 78 größten Titel auf einen Blick’, Meedia, 23 Jan., https://meedia.de/2017/01/23/die-grosse-auflagen-analyse-der-regionalzeitungen-die-78-groessten-titel-auf-einen-blick/

Steffens, B. 2018. ‘New research indicates tight meters have won the pay model war for news websites’, RJI, 16 Feb., https://www.rjionline.org/stories/new-research-indicates-tight-meters-have-won-the-pay-model-war-for-news-web

Stuhlberg, A. 2017. ‘In paywall age, free content remains king for newspaper sites’, Columbia Journalism Review, 22 Sept., https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/newspaper-paywalls.php

TheMediaBriefing. 2017. ‘Key takeaways from the Europe’s Successful Paid Content Strategies report’, TheMediaBriefing, 26 Jan., https://www.themediabriefing.com/analysis/key-takeaways-from-the-europes-successful-paid-content-strategies-report/

Zubayr, C., Gerhard, H. 2016. ‘Tendenzen im Zuschauerverhalten. Fernsehgewohnheiten und Fernsehreichweite im Jahr 2015’, Media-Perspektiven 3, 142–155.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the guidance, feedback, and support our colleagues at the Reuters Institute offered throughout the process of preparing this report, including Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Nic Newman, and administrative team member Alex Reid.

Published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism with the support of the Google News Initiative.

About the authors

Felix M Simon is a journalist and researcher and currently works as a Research Assistant at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Lucas Graves is acting Director of Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism with the support of the Google News Initiative.

An earlier version of this factsheet had coded Newsweek Polska as free access instead of freemium. The fact sheet was updated on 23 May 2019.

Appendix

Organisations included in the study

See the main document for the sample strategy behind the sites selected. In cases where subscriptions are sold on a weekly basis, monthly prices are for four weeks.