The paper looks at the attitudes to paying for online news in France, Germany, United Kingdom, and Spain, as well as in the US and Japan – a pool of countries sharing similarities but also having distinct patterns of news consumption.
Survey data from these countries indicate that people's attitudes are influenced to some extent by their habit of paying for other kinds of news or contents. In particular, the analysis shows that individuals paying for print newspaper are more likely to pay for online news, and that younger people are more likely to pay for online news – probably because they are used to paying for other types of digital content. Even people who regularly access free online news from public service media do not appear unwilling to pay for other online news contents.
The study is based on data drawn from the 2015 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, which were used in order to test the scholars' hypotheses via regression analyses.
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