Consumers’ Willingness to Share Personal Data: Implications for Newspapers’ Business Models

Abstract

As people's willingness to pay for digital news remains low, this paper investigates whether people would be willing to share personal data as a new currency for accessing news. Increasingly, news organisations collect personal data and track cross-media consumption to build detailed knowledge about and (re)connect with digital news consumers. This paper presents the results of an industrydriven big data project that allows news organisations to engage with their audience more deeply by suggesting personalised content recommendations, serving targeted advertising and/or improving the user experience. It presents the concept of the datawall, where the user pays with their data, and delivers new insights into the challenges facing data-driven business models.

Contributions of academic articles to the practice of journalism and data management

“…The most used methods of capturing data are online tracking cookies and website pathing (Forbes Insights, 2014) but also mobile apps can provide useful information (Howard, 2014). Data can be used to customize automatically the media composition, personalizing the offer (Evens and Van Damme, 2016). It offers great opportunities to the communication market (Marks, 2013;Papí-Gálvez, 2014).…”

Big Data y televisión. Una reflexión crítica sobre el auge del Big Data como nuevo paradigma tecno-económico, y su impacto en el concepto de target de audiencia

“…Industry insiders, supported by a fleet of affirmative experts, have been quick to grasp that commercial mass media would be struggling to find new revenue streams and thus proposed different strategy perspectives for the converged-media future (Downes & Nunes, 2014). Traditional broadcasting, the argument goes, would only survive of it continued to experiment with content innovation and new programming (Dogruel, 2013; Gandhi, Martinez-Smith, & Kuhlman 2015), advanced into «programmatic TV» as a technology-automated and data-driven method of buying and delivering ads against TV content (wywy, 2016), thus delivering the right content to engaged audiences-as-buyers, invented new strategies for distribution (such as, for example, the «platform» model to replace TV channels with portals; Baumann & Hasenpusch, 2016), increased audience engagement including the audience's willingness to share personal data (Evens & Van Damme, 2016), monetizated activities and the search for new business models (such as Paid-Owned-Earned, POE 1 ); Murschetz, 2016), and employed big data analytics with a view to increasing performance (Bughin, 2016;Chen, Chiang, & Storey, 2012).…”

“…However, the data-wall's success ultimately rests on consumers' willingness to share personal information, and hence, pay with personal data. Issues of data protection and privacy, however, may undermine consumer acceptance of data-walls and hinder the implementation of these part of big data strategies (Evens & Van Damme, 2016).…”

Business model innovation in news media organisations – 2018 special issue of the European Media Management Association (emma)

“…In contrast, business model innovation is driven by the search to expand business horizons as part of a digital transformation process. With regard to business models, it appears crucial that, to be successful, the introduction of a mobile app or the implementation of a paywall is accompanied by a process of fundamental business renewal and organisational transformation (Evens & van Damme, 2016).…”

“…A considerable number of recent research has focused on how news media organisations can develop new revenue models for digital news and how funding for high-quality journalism in the digital era might be secured. Studies have looked into alternative revenue models, including paywalls (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017;Holm, 2016;Myllylahti, 2017;Sjøvaag, 2016), micropayments (Geidner & D'Arcy, 2015;Graybeal & Hayes, 2011), crowdfunding (Carvajal, García-Avilés, & González, 2012;Ladson & Lee, 2017), personal data and sharewalls (Bechmann, Bilgrav-Nielsen, & Korsgaard Jensen, 2016;Evens & Van Damme, 2016). In addition, online and multiplatform distribution strategies (Chyi & Tenenboim, 2017;Doyle, 2013Doyle, , 2015Lehtisaari & Grönlund, 2012;Villi & Hayashi, 2017) and the dominance of social media platforms Facebook and Twitter that have a gatekeeping position (Ju, Jeong, & Chyi, 2014;Nielsen & Ganter, 2017) have been scrutinised.…”