Hey, my name is Greg Piechota. as researcher-in-residence and lead of the INMA Readers First Initiative, I study news media business models for INMA. In this regular newsletter, I write about innovations in digital subscriptions and beyond. 

In today’s newsletter:

• Discover the main reader motivations for subscribing.

• Review the business case for subscriber-exclusive benefits at The Hindu. 

• Learn how many online readers circumvent paywalls and how.

If you have questions or suggestions, e-mail me at greg.piechota@inma.org.

6 core motivations for subscribing to news

A desire to help fund journalists and protect the free press, access quality journalism, and to stop annoying paywalls are the top three motivations for subscribing to news.

The other core drivers are: attachment to the local community, affordability of the subscription, and useful content.

Not all motivations apply to all. For example, supporting journalism and journalism quality are key drivers for national news brands. Community attachment — for local news. 

Demographics explain how much people can pay, but motivations explain whether they will pay and what kind of news they might subscribe to.

These are key findings of a new research study by U.S.-based professors Weiyue Chen of Butler University and Esther Thorson of Michigan State University.

Practical implications? “We can design subscription ads based on the six motivations,” recommend the authors in Journalism & Communication Monographs.

Apart from tailoring messages, news publishers can segment users by motivations rather than usage or demographics, and optimise targeting with paywalls.

The six core drivers: Here is a ranking of the subscribing motivations in the order of their relative predictive strength.

1. Supporting journalism: The desire to help sustain news organisations and keep journalists employed is found to be the single most predictive motivation — and also the reason to have more than one subscription. 
2. Journalism quality: Subscribers value accurate, fair, and in-depth reporting, especially on national and global issues.
3. Paywall trigger: Many subscribe spontaneously when they hit a paywall they can’t bypass, especially if the article is compelling or they read a lot and hit the paywall many times.
4. Community attachment: This motivation is stronger in local contexts for people who value staying informed and involved in their community or local politics.
5. Affordability: Discounts, bundles, and perceived value for money influence purchase. Price sensitivity correlates with fewer or cheaper subscriptions.
6. Content utility: If journalism feels useful — personally relevant, interesting, or helps with work – people are more likely to subscribe.

What’s new: Instead of relying on assumptions or studies from other sectors, such as retail, Professor Chen and Professor Butler developed and validated news subscription-specific motivations and then tied them to transactions. 

They combined in-depth exploratory interviews with two large-scale surveys of U.S. consumers and statistical analysis to find which factors were not only frequently mentioned but were most predictive.

The emotional or mission-driven motivations trumped demographics, although higher education correlated with subscribing to national news and higher income or age with paying more.

What about the reputation of news brands or individual journalists? User needs such as “Update me” or “Entertain me”? The convenience of app or Web site experience? News reading habits?

These commonly discussed motivations might explain why people use news but not necessarily why they pay. They were considered but did not stand out statistically or were found overlapping with the core six.

How to use this: The new framework isn’t just academic. It can inform your brand positioning, audience research, and acquisition, retention, and pricing experiments.

• Align your brand messaging. Are you emphasising credibility? Local connection? Civic responsibility? These map to specific motivations for paying.

• Rethink segmentation. Instead of crude demographics or behavioural data, consider building personas based on motivational profiles.

• Personalise your paywall pitches. Someone driven by utility needs a different call-to-action than someone driven by mission.

Interested in learning more? Read the monogragh in full. 

What motivates people to support The Guardian despite the lack of a paywall? Join me for a live interview with Liz Wynn in the INMA Subscription Masters series on Wednesday, May 14, at 10:00 a.m. New York time.

One-minute case study: anchoring prices at The Hindu

“Establishing the value of a subscription to readers was our core challenge,” admitted Pradeep Gairola.

The vice president and business head of digital at The Hindu, a quality broadsheet in India, spoke at my recent INMA Webinar on digital subscriptions in Asia.

Across the region, INMA survey found news executives believe low willingness to pay for online news and competition from free alternatives are the biggest obstacles for growth.

The Hindu’s research confirmed the gap between the cost of subscriber-exclusive articles, Webinars, or e-books and their perceived value in the eyes of subscribers. 

The solution was to test putting a market price tag on e-books and offering them for purchase on Kindle to non-subscribers. The non-fiction books advised on healthy diet, explained AI, guided sports careers, portrayed India’s legendary founder of Tata Group, and analysed the appeal of maoism in India.

“Our goal was not to sell many e-books on Kindle but to influence how readers perceive the value of a subscription in which these e-books are included,” Gairola explained.

The promotion of highly priced books as subscriber benefits drove more than 5,000 downloads for each e-book, elevating them to bestseller status in India. 

The books attracted new subscribers, helping to recover one-third of their cost. And subscribers who downloaded books retained at 10% higher rate, boosting lifetime value.

The success motivated The Hindu to publish a new e-book every week instead of monthly. They are considering expanding price anchoring to Webinars and even individual articles.

Learn more about The Hindu’s focus shifting from acquisition to retention of digital subscribers.

And read about opportunities and challenges in marketing subscriptions in Asia based on unique data from the INMA Subscription Benchmarks. 

Every 10th paywall stop is evaded by readers 

What happens after a reader hits your paywall? Most leave the Web site. Some desperately reload the page or navigate to the home page. Many learned how to successfully bypass the paywall.

A team of researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Notre Dame in the United States studied how readers respond to paywalls and discussed their results with INMA.

They used clickstream data from a large North American news publisher with a client-side, metered paywall. The clickstream data allowed the academics to observe actual behaviours rather than relying on surveys and self-reported reader journeys.

Buyers, leavers and dreamers: The good news is that paywalls are confirmed effective even if they don’t lead to immediate conversions.

In line with what we see in the INMA Subscription Benchmarks, the academics found only 0.21% paywall stops resulted in subscriptions. 

Still, this conversion rate was 50 times higher than the rate among visitors who hadn’t seen the paywall at all. “Almost no one comes to the Web site to subscribe without first seeing the paywall,” Professor Adithya Pattabhiramaiah from Georgia Tech said.

So what did readers do if not subscribing? 

• In 57% instances, they simply left the Web site. 

• 21% of the time, readers stayed and read non-premium content, such as the home page or section pages. 

• Readers also probed the meter 12% of the time, trying to access other articles. Unfortunately for them, this also triggered the paywall. 

• Some (10%) responded by reloading the page, perhaps in a hope the paywall goes away.

Paywall evaders: The bad news is the researchers saw readers successfully bypassing the paywall after 11% of stops.

How did they figure it out? Hard to say about evaders, but the researchers pioneered a novel method of measuring the evasion behaviour. 

They tracked cases where a user viewed the same article twice in quick succession — once triggering the paywall and once not — from what appeared to be the same user (based on IP address, user agent, and other signals). 

This “article-as-anchor” method shed light on paywall evasion even when cookies were refreshed or deleted.

“Tracking browser cookies doesn’t work for detecting paywall circumvention because many circumvention methods generate a new cookie,” explained Professor Eric Overby from Georgia Tech. 

For example, the most common evasion method was switching to the browser’s private mode (82% of instances). Other ways, such as switching a browser or disabling JavaScript, were used too but less often. 

“Our key insight is that readers who circumvent are often doing so to access the article that triggered the paywall.”

How to use this: Both responses to the paywall — subscribing or bypassing it — reflect reader engagement. 

The academics analysed what factors predicted reader responses. Interestingly, both subscribers and evaders tended to visit directly rather than from social media or search. They also accessed opinion articles more than other content.

In other words, the evaders love your content but instead of paying money, they pay with effort.

“Publishers can use our method to assess which readers are circumventing the paywall,” advised Professor Vamsi Kanuri of Notre Dame. “This can help better understand those readers and, for example, target them with promotions.”

Interested in learning more? Read the full research paper. E-mail Professor Eric Overby at eric.overby@scheller.gatech.edu.

Next in the Readers First Initiative

• Subscription Masters online series: On May 14, join the live discussion with Liz Wynn, chief supporter revenue officer at The Guardian. E-mail me your questions: greg.piechota@inma.org.

• INMA World Congress of News Media: On May 23, I will be hosting the Subscriptions Seminar in New York with top innovators from The Atlantic, CondéNast, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Piano, Schibsted, and Stampen. Register now.

• INMA Subscriber Retention Master Class: On June 5-12, we will set a new retention agenda: forever subscriptions for modern customers. Our faculty is stellar: Advance Local, DC Thomson, Dow Jones, Mediahuis, News Corp Australia, Publico, Telegraph, Washington Post, and more. Register now. 

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Grzegorz (Greg) Piechota, INMA’s researcher-in-residence and lead for the Readers First Initiative and Subscription Benchmarks.

E-mail Greg at greg.piechota@inma.org, message him on Slack, meet him in New York in May at INMA’s World Congress of News Media.

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