News you can refuse: If news is important, why aren’t more people willing to pay for it?

Abstract

Guided by public goods and uses and gratifications theories, this study examines the link among motivations for news consumption, perceived importance of news, and willingness to pay for news. Through a national online survey in Singapore ( n = 818), this study found that both entertainment and socialisation motivations are positively related to willingness to pay for news, while surveillance motivation was not. The analysis also found that perceiving news to be personally important is positively related to willingness to pay for news; in contrast, perceiving news to be important to society was unrelated to willingness to pay for it. While surveillance motivation was not directly related to willingness to pay for news, it exerts an indirect effect through perceived personal importance of news. These findings challenge conventional assumptions about the drivers of news subscriptions and offer pivotal insights for news organisations seeking sustainable revenue models in an era of media transformation.