Paywalls and paid content

In the digital media world, media companies are increasingly competing with new players, such as tech giants like Google and Facebook, or streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime, for the attention of users and thus, ultimately, also for advertising revenues. Due to this competitive pressure, new forms of financing were established in journalism, away from revenue models based on distribution and advertising. In the JoIn-DemoS project, the introduction of paywalls was identified as one of the central innovations in journalism from 2010 to 2020 in Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. With the help of “paywalls and paid content,” the freebie mentality on the internet should be countered, and the recipients should be given the feeling that high-quality journalism costs money and cannot be produced for free.