(The) wall of paywall: Empirical evidences from south korean newspaper

Abstract

Nowadays, news institutions face the dilemma of the tradeoff between paywalls and advertisements. Gathering customers’ data which has excellent potential for various purposes and is the key to resolving the dilemma, is a primary task for firms. This study empirically estimates the effect of the loginwall policy using the difference-in-differences and triple-differences approach by conducting a quasi-experimental setting based on the individual-level clickstream data from a major newspaper in South Korea. I find that the policy requiring a customer to register causes a significant negative effect on the core customer groups: reduce the number of articles customers read by six and increase the average duration for reading an article by less than one second. But this is the heterogeneous effect that weakly affects the general customers. The result of the survival analysis report that the policy positively affects churn behavior. This study discusses the relationship between the low switching cost driven by the unique news market condition of South Korea and user registration with few privacy concerns.