By Sunil Saxena
For the past two decades, the news industry has been obsessed with traffic. How many people clicked? How long did they stay? Which headlines got the most shares? This data, flowing in real time from Google Analytics dashboards, has quietly shaped what journalists cover, what editors prioritise, and which reporters get hired or let go.
But what if traffic is the wrong signal entirely?
A new working paper from Stanford economists Gregory Martin, Shoshana Vasserman, and Cameron Pfiffer suggests that click-based metrics are systematically misleading newsrooms — and that the content readers are willing to pay for looks very different from the content they merely click on.
The findings carry big implications for the future of local journalism, the debate over news subsidies, and whether investigative reporting can survive the internet age.
The Study: Four Years, 600 Million Visits
The researchers partnered with an anonymous major metropolitan newspaper in the United States and gained access to something remarkable: the complete digital footprint of every reader on the site between 2020 and 2024. That means over 600 million article visits, more than 55 million paywall encounters, and years of subscription data — all linked to individual readers.
The newspaper, like most, uses a metering system: read a certain number of articles per month for free, then hit a paywall. Because the meter count is hidden from readers (they never know exactly how many free articles they have left), hitting the paywall is essentially random — a stroke of timing, not a deliberate choice. This quirk gave the researchers a clever way to measure something that’s normally very hard to pin down: how much readers actually value different types of news content, in dollars, not just in clicks.
The logic is simple. If you hit a paywall while trying to read a story about local politics, and you decide to subscribe, that’s a signal that you valued that story enough to pay for access. By comparing subscription rates across article types, the researchers could estimate the true value of different kinds of journalism to readers.
The Big Finding: Hard News Is More Valuable Than Clicks Suggest
Here’s the headline result: readers are willing to pay significantly more for “hard news” than their clicking behaviour would suggest.
When it comes to raw traffic — the metric most newsrooms watch most closely — entertainment content, sports, and syndicated advice columns perform extremely well. People click on them constantly.
But when it comes to subscriptions — people actually opening their wallets — the picture flips. Articles covering local politics, public health, economics, and civic affairs were far more likely to trigger a subscription than entertainment or sports stories. Health journalism was especially powerful, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic years covered by the study.
The researchers found that readers’ willingness to pay for a typical Local News article (covering local politics, schools, and the economy) was roughly double that for a typical Entertainment article. Yet entertainment content drives more clicks.
This gap — between what people click and what they’ll pay for — is the study’s central insight. Click-based evaluation, the authors argue, “substantially underestimates the private value of public-interest news content.”
Why This Matters: Newsrooms Are Optimising for the Wrong Thing
When newsrooms use traffic as their primary performance metric, they’re essentially asking: what do people browse? But the study reveals that browsing behaviour and purchasing behaviour are driven by quite different motivations.
Casual readers — people who drift onto the site from a Google search or a social media link — contribute lots of clicks but almost never subscribe. Engaged readers who are likely to pay for access tend to prioritise exactly the kind of content that gets deprioritised when newsrooms chase traffic: accountability journalism, local government coverage, public health reporting.
In short, ad-driven newsrooms have a structural incentive to produce less civic journalism. Subscription-driven newsrooms have an incentive to produce more. This aligns with what many observers have long suspected, but this study puts hard numbers behind it.
The Bad News: Subscriptions Alone Aren’t Enough
Here’s where the story gets sobering. Even though local and investigative journalism drives subscriptions, the subscription revenue it generates still isn’t enough to cover the cost of producing it.
The researchers compared the marginal subscription revenue generated by adding one journalist to each beat against that journalist’s estimated salary. The result? Every single beat — including the most commercially valuable ones like Local News and Health — is “underwater.” The revenue a new journalist generates doesn’t cover what they cost to employ, even in the best-case sections of the paper.
This is a fundamental problem. Digital subscriptions are a better business model than advertising for public-interest journalism, but they’re not yet sufficient. The math doesn’t close.
The Case for Subsidies — and How Much They’d Cost
Given that gap, the researchers turned to a question that’s become increasingly urgent in media policy circles: how much would it cost to subsidise the production of investigative journalism?
Their estimate: roughly $11,000 per investigative article per year at the margin — meaning, to expand investigative output without the newspaper losing money on the hire. That’s a surprisingly modest figure. A philanthropic foundation, a government journalism fund, or even a civic-minded donor could support dozens of additional investigative pieces annually for the cost of a single mid-level employee.
The costs do rise steeply as you try to dramatically scale up output — reaching $50,000 per article for 35 additional pieces per year, and over $100,000 per article at 55 additional pieces. But for small expansions above the current baseline production, public investment in investigative journalism is a relatively cost-effective use of money.
What This Means for the Future of Local News
The findings land at a critical moment. Print advertising revenue has collapsed. Digital advertising is dominated by platforms like Google and Meta, which have massive data advantages over any individual news outlet. New AI-powered search tools are poised to further shrink referral traffic to news sites.
The authors suggest this may actually push newspapers toward subscriptions out of necessity — and that this could, counterintuitively, be good for the quality of civic journalism. The beats that perform best under a subscription model are the same ones that produce the most investigative and public-interest content.
But optimism has limits. Even a full pivot to subscriptions won’t make most local newspapers financially self-sustaining. The gap between what readers will pay and what journalism costs to produce is real and persistent.
That points toward a clear policy conclusion: if we want local investigative journalism to survive, some form of public or philanthropic support is probably necessary. The market alone won’t get us there. But the good news — and this study makes it clearer than any previous research — is that the journalism people actually value most is civic journalism. Readers aren’t simply chasing entertainment. They care about their communities, their health, and their local governments.
They just need to be asked to pay for it — and given a reason to.
Disclaimer: The help of AI has been taken in writing this blog post.
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