Eighteen percent pay for news, but only across a chosen basket

The revenue mechanism

Publishers deciding whether to charge for online news rely partly on how many readers already pay somewhere. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025 is a survey-based measure of that behaviour, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and fielded by the polling firm YouGov as an online questionnaire from mid-January to the end of February 2025. The report states it is based on 'almost 100,000 individual survey respondents' across 48 markets, its largest edition to date, though the specific paying-for-news figure it highlights is drawn from a smaller, longer-tracked 'basket of 20' richer countries used for year-on-year comparison.

What the documents show

The report states that 'the proportion paying for any online news remains stable at 18 percent across a basket of 20 richer countries,' with Norway highest at 42% and Sweden at 31%, a fifth of respondents (20%) paying in the United States, and as low as 6% in Croatia and 7% in Greece and Serbia. The report's own methodology page states that samples used 'nationally representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market,' but also that this is a non-probability online sample, meaning a conventional margin of error cannot be computed for individual figures.

The assumptions exposed

The methodology page states its own central caveat plainly: 'surveys capture people's self-reported behaviour, which does not always reflect people's actual behaviour due to biases and imperfect recall,' and that results are 'useful for capturing people's opinions' rather than an objective count of transactions. An online-only sample also tends to over-represent the online population relative to older or less affluent groups who use the internet less, a limitation the methodology page states directly rather than one this analysis infers. The 18% figure describes payment across 20 selected wealthier countries, not the full 48-market sample, so it should not be read as a global payment rate.

What to check before you rely on it

A publisher citing this figure should specify which country or countries it describes, since the range runs from 6 percent to 42 percent within the same tracked basket, and should treat differences of a few percentage points as within the report's own stated margin of caution. This is an editorial recommendation drawn directly from the methodology page's own guidance.

• Does the figure you are citing describe the 20-country tracking basket or a single named market within it?
• Is the comparison you are drawing across years larger than the 'roughly 2 percentage points' the report says should not be treated as meaningful?
• Are you treating a self-reported survey answer as equivalent to verified payment data, which the report's own methodology says it is not?

The report is a transparent, methodology-disclosed measure of stated willingness to pay, not a transaction record, and its own caveats say so.