Consumers’ Different Website Use Patterns and Value Perceptions in the Context of Local Newspapers

The Internet has changed the media consumption patterns during the last decade and half. Many newspaper organizations are struggling with the aim of turning their online news into profitable products. In this task it is crucial to first (1) understand consumer behavior in the Internet and then (2) assess the relationship of this behavior with consumers’ willingness to pay for the content of newspaper websites. In the present study we explore the above mentioned two issues. First, this study contributes to the theory of consumer behavior in the Internet. While advances have been made in studying consumers' Internet behavior, the main focus in the past studies was the potential risk of cannibalization, where newspaper websites and Internet news were expected to draw audience from traditional printed newspapers. As a consequence, the researchers spent their efforts on studying consumers’ choice between printed newspapers and their online versions (see e.g. Flavian & Gurrea, 2009a). Recently, however, it has been acknowledged that a large proportion of consumers are actually ‘hybrid’ or ‘multi-platform’ readers. For example, a recent study on U.S. consumers indicated that consumers of local newspapers are mainly ‘hybrid readers’, who read the news both from printed newspapers and their websites (Chyi et al., 2010). In the light of these recent findings, it seems that the assumption of pure choice between printed and online newspapers does not hold, and further understanding on the nature of this ‘multi-platform use’ is needed. The past studies have revealed that consumers have different motivations for reading a newspaper (see e.g. Flavián & Gurrea, 2007a; 2009b), but no studies to our knowledge have yet assessed the consumer motivations for the multi-platform use in this context. The websites of the newspapers offer also more interactive content than traditional printed newspapers, and therefore the motivations for the multi-platform use need to be assessed separately. Basing our work on the uses and gratifications (hereafter U&G) theory (see e.g. Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974; Rubin, 2002), according to which consumers have varying motivations to use media, we explore consumer segments that differ in their multi-platform use patterns. Secondly, since the different consumer segments have different motivations to use newspaper websites, we assume that their value perceptions of these websites differ also. We operationalize consumers’ value perceptions as their willingness-to-pay (hereafter WTP) and we apply Homburg et al.'s (2005) proposed model of nonlinear relationship between consumers’ WTP and satisfaction to explore the differences in the levels of willingness to pay for the digital content between the identified consumer segments. Based on above, we derived two research questions:

Research Question 1: Can consumers be segmented by their multiplatform newspaper consumption patterns?

Research Question 2: How do the consumer segments differ in terms of their willingness to pay for newspaper websites?