Best Paper Award and Best Paper Presentation Award for members of research group

30 June 2022, by Elena Koch

Photo: private

The project focuses on current challenges in the news industry. For years, publishers experienced a steady decline in print subscriptions. New digital subscriptions cannot fully compensate for corresponding revenue loss. At the same time, more and more consumers use one of many possibilities to read digital news for free. The authors test different pricing models for a news platform that bundles articles from various publishers.

Customers who are already paying for news services are also interested in this platform offer and prefer a flatrate model. The implementation of a monthly price of €11 optimizes the platform's revenues. However, the willingness to pay for non-paying customers remains low. Instead, these can be monetized by the usage of non-monetary payment methods such as advertising, surveys or image recognition tasks and thus, contribute to the financial success of the platform provider.