Mucha gente no paga el precio completo de su suscripción a noticias. La mayoría no quiere pagar nada

Source: Nieman Lab

Is it sustainable to increase the number of subscribers by offering people rock-bottom trial prices?

By CRAIG ROBERTSON

It's no secret that news publishers have struggled to make money and sustain their businesses in the digital age. Advertising revenue has been siphoned off by big tech and money from print advertising has steadily declined. The solution to this problem is simple on the surface, but not in practice: get people to subscribe.

En todo el mundo, los editores de noticias se enfrentan a un “reinicio de plataforma”

June 17, 2024

Some media have been quite successful at this, with several major publishers reaching milestones in digital subscriptions: 300,000 subscribers at El Pais , 500,000 at Le Monde and 10 million at The New York Times . But the phenomenon we've documented in the Digital News Report is a "winner-take-all" one: a few large, respected news brands amass healthy online subscriber bases, but others struggle. The successful effort to increase the number of digital subscribers by some major news publishers also masks another possible story bubbling beneath the surface: the fact that many of these 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 this year's Digital News Report 2024. We asked online news subscribers how much they actually paid and non-subscribers how much they would be willing to pay, if anything. Our findings are surprising. Informe de noticias digitales 2024 de este año. Preguntamos a los suscriptores de noticias en línea cuánto pagaban realmente y a los no suscriptores cuánto estarían dispuestos a pagar, en todo caso. Nuestros hallazgos son sorprendentes.

In the 20 countries where we asked people how much they paid, 41% said they paid less than full price for their online news subscription. We calculated this by looking at the price people said they paid for their subscription and comparing it to the full, undiscounted price of a basic digital subscription for the brand they said they paid.

While 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 the full price, but only a fifth said the same in France (21%), and a quarter in Denmark (25%).

It's hard to put these figures in context, as we don't have comparable estimates of the proportion of people who, say, pay trial prices for Netflix or Disney+. And certainly individual news brands will have a clear idea of how many of their own customers are paying full price. But what our data allows us to do is to paint an overall picture of the news landscape across countries: a picture that can show headlines about subscriber growth in a different light.

"It got too expensive to have all the subscriptions": how people now think about paying for news

September 28, 2023

Every publisher in every country offers deals of some kind, whether it's a free month or two, a discount for a few months, or even a trial for a full year. These offers give people the opportunity to subscribe to news and try out the brand without committing too much financially. The struggle, however, is keeping trial subscribers on board and convincing them to continue paying full price once the trial is over. While our data does not give us an idea of how many of the 41% who pay less than full price will continue to pay the full amount, anecdotal evidence we have collected over the years suggests that many will not. Underneath those headline figures for subscriber numbers there appears to be a lot of churn. While increasing subscriber numbers seems, on the surface, to be a good thing, it raises the question of how those increases are achieved. Is it sustainable to increase subscriber numbers by offering people rock-bottom trial prices?

This also comes against the backdrop of an apparent stagnation in online news subscriptions. In the 20 markets we have tracked over time, we find that 17% of people say they pay in some form for online news, a figure that has not changed in three years. Payment rates have not increased and, in some cases, may have receded with the cost-of-living crisis in many countries.

Cuando se trata de personas que actualmente no pagan por las noticias, que son la gran mayoría en la mayoría de los países, encontramos que la mayoría (57%) no está dispuesta a pagar nada en absoluto. Cuando se les preguntó cuánto estarían dispuestos a pagar, el 69% en el Reino Unido y el 68% en Alemania no dijeron nada. Incluso en países con altas tasas de pago por noticias en línea, Noruega y Finlandia, una gran proporción (45% y 43%, respectivamente) también dijeron que no estaban dispuestos a pagar nada. Entre los que estaban dispuestos a pagar algo, la mayoría sólo estaba dispuesta a pagar el equivalente a unos pocos dólares estadounidenses.

La historia general parece ser que la industria de las noticias, en muchos países, ya ha logrado que la mayoría de la gente se interese lo suficiente como para pagar por lo que se ofrece a los precios actuales. Incorporar a las personas restantes que actualmente no están dispuestas a pagar nada por las noticias en línea será una batalla cuesta arriba. Hay un límite de descuentos que se pueden hacer razonablemente sin que el negocio sea insostenible (si es que no lo es ya), y si bien existen otros modelos que involucran diferentes paquetes de contenido a diferentes precios (así como enfoques como el empaquetado), es difícil ver cómo se puede convencer a quienes no están interesados de que paguen por un producto que no quieren o que no valoran lo suficiente como para financiarlo.

But the positive is that some news brands have been successful in building subscriber bases among those who are still interested and engaged with news, and it's not just the big players. A wider range of smaller niche publications that cater to specific audiences have succeeded, particularly in the U.S. on platforms such as Substack, demonstrating that the "revenue per reader" model can work. Substack, lo que demuestra que el modelo de “ingresos por lectores” puede funcionar.

Craig Robertson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.