Newspapers' Content Policy and the Effect of Paywalls on Pageviews

This paper examines the impact of newspaper paywalls on daily pageviews, and how their impact varies across newspapers as a function of their content provisioning strategies. Our data consist of daily pageviews of 42 newspapers that introduced a paywall during the eight-year analysis period from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2017. We find that a paywall has a negative impact on daily pageviews for most newspapers, but that the impact varies significantly across them. Newspapers that publish proportionately more articles on politics, business/economics, sports, and general social news tend to perform better with a paywall than newspapers that publish proportionately fewer articles on those topics. Interestingly, the effectiveness varies substantially across news topics. For example, increasing the proportion of business/economics news by 1% is nearly 1.4 times more effective than increasing the proportion of general social news by the same percentage in mitigating the negative impact of a paywall. We also find that newspapers with proportionately more unique content and papers with a more liberal slant experience a smaller drop in pageviews. These results have important managerial implications for newspapers—especially pure-play online news publishers (for whom online advertising is the primary revenue source)—regarding how to develop and manage their content policy with paywall adoptions.