Paid News Content — Yay or Nay?
With social media on the rise we see more and more news sources that are free and available 24/7. Therefore, with so many news sources available for free, are people really spending money on paid news content? Whether it be a digital subscription, combined digital and print subscription, or a one off payment for an article, app or e-edition; we would like to know if the age of the consumer effects whether or not people are spending money to access this news information or if they are obtaining it for free.
To obtain our answer, we took two questions from Reuters Digital News Report Questionnaire 2017¹ to use as our two variables.
The first question asked was:
“What is your age in years?”
The second question asked was:
“Have you paid for online news content or accessed a paid online news service in the last year?”
Based on the questions we chose, our independent variable is age. Age is known as a ratio variable, because it can be measured by numbers. The space between the numbers is always equal, and we can, if needed, have an absolute zero. For this study, we are only taking a look at participants 18 year of age and older.
Our dependent variable is the payment/access to paid online news content. This variable is nominal since we have a classification of answers — 1) YES, 2) NO, 3) I DON’T KNOW. One answer does not have a higher or lower value than the other.
Our null and alternative hypotheses are the following:
Null: There is no difference in mean age between consumers of paid online news content and non-consumer of paid online news content.
Alternative: There is a difference in mean age between consumers of paid online news content and non-consumers of paid online content.
Our goal is to now reject or fail to reject one of these hypotheses.
According to British news report², paid for news content is slowly becoming something of the past. News outlets are now relying more on selling advertisements to obtain a profit. The outcome of this test will be important to Canadian producers who chose to remain true to their paid online news content platform. If our test identifies a relation between age and if they are consumers, the producers will now have a clear vision of whom their target audience is and will be able to come up with proper marketing strategies for said age group. If our test identifies no relation, then we know that these producers are going to need to make their advertisement appropriate for all age groups above 18 years seeing as they are all consumers.
We chose to run our test using a T-Test since it allows us to examine the differences in a ratio variable (age) between categories of a nominal variable (consumers of paid online news content).
When checking to see if our assumptions were met, we found the following:
1. Our age variable meets the assumption that there is only one dependent variable, which is measured at the continuous level.
2. We met the assumption that there is only one independent variable that consists of exactly two independent groups because we changed our paid news content variable to only have 2 answers. YES or NO, we have chose to not take into consideration people who have answered I DON’T KNOW, since this group does not apply to our search.
3. We do not have any outliers, therefore we met the assumption that the dependent variable should be approximately normally distributed.
4. The met the assumption with the population variance in each group for the independent variable should be similar because when ran our Levene’s test we obtained a value of 0.269. This value is greater than 0.05 therefore our test is not statistically significant and we have an equal variance.
5. We met the assumption that the sample is random because we know that the data set from our sample is random.
6. We know that the Reuters Digital News Report Questionnaire 2017 used independence of observation, in which means a participant cannot qualify for more than one group
218 people respondent yes and 2276 people responded no to the question:
“Have you paid for ONLINE news content, or accessed a paid for ONLINE news service in the last year ? (This could be a digital subscription, combined digital/print subscription or one off payment for an article or app or e-edition)” (Reuters 2017)
The p value was .017 which is statistically significant, therefore we reject the null hypothesis. Concluding that there is a difference in mean age between consumers of paid online news content and non-consumers of paid online content. The Cohen’s D was found to be 0.16732349065413635 therefor there is a small effect size.
There were no limitations and no assumptions were not violated in this process. The impact this study has on society is that it can help us understand the relationship between age and people that consume paid online news content. Understanding the relationship between age and consumption will allow for the producers of the content to know who to target. In addition to this, people become more aware of their own consumption habits, and we can then start to try to understand why there is a relationship between age and consumption.