A new University of Notre Dame study finds that digital newspaper paywalls on stories drive most users away without subscribing, but paywalls are still surprisingly valuable for news sites.
Many people complain about paywalls but what do they actually end up doing when they hit one? Notre Dame marketing associate professor Vamsi Kanuri partnered with Georgia Tech researchers in a study looking at a year’s worth of data from a major U.S. newspaper.
They found that 59% of users leave the digital news site after hitting the paywall. That would seem ineffective for the site. But over that year this digital newspaper site varied its free-article limit between three and four articles. That showed researchers a causal link. People encountering a paywall were 84 times more likely to subscribe than those who did not hit a paywall.
The study also found that opinion readers subscribe at nearly twice the rate of readers of national news, and local coverage also converts readers at above-average rates. That, the authors say, highlights the value of investing in distinctive opinion journalism and local reporting.
