| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores adult’s willingness to pay for paywall regulated news. By ´adults´ I mean people who grew up with the printed version of the newspaper, and those who consider it to be an important source for accessing news. These users have been a part of the digital revolution in Norway, and witnessing a change where online news first were completely free of charge (1995-2011), to the news being put behind paywalls from 2011. Although it took some time for newspapers to notice growth in digital income, we can now see signs that this trend is turning.
The main goal of this paper is to explore whether the newspaper generation – those who grew up with the newspaper in printed format – are willing to pay for online news. The research question I want to take a closer look at is therefore: Is the newspaper generation willing to pay for online news and what factors can trigger payment willingness?
The collected data consist of qualitative depth interviews with eight people at the age 45+, and one key informant. I use previous research on who pays (and don’t pay) for online news, willingness to pay, motives to pay for the source you pay for today, motives to start paying for online news, trust in the media, format preference and characteristics of news consumers, to analyze my findings.
My key findings suggests that the participants are willing to pay for online news, but the motivation that lays behind is fragmented. Therefore there’s no easy explanation to the research question, and there’s no simple strategy that the media businesses can use to reach this group. However I have come up with some factors that should be seen in a broader context because overall they can form a basis for saying something about the participants’ willingness to pay. I chose to divide these factors into two groups: underlying and obvious factors. Underlying factors that may affect the willingness to pay are format preferences, interest in news and attitude towards online news behind paywall. Obvious factors that may affect the willingness to pay are trust in media, tradition, affiliation, if they find the content interesting, quality of the content, price or discounts, and if they have access to similar content elsewhere. The latter factor affects the willingness to pay negatively. | nb_NO |
