“Let’s enjoy it while it lasts” was a familiar reaction on social media when The New York Times announced last week that it would temporarily disable its paywall to mark World Press Freedom Day. The excitement of many users points toward a key development in online news of recent years: the rise of paywalls across online news sites, as publishers around the world try to find new, sustainable business models in order to make up for the revenue shortfall caused by a rapidly changing business environment.

Paywalls may seem to be everywhere these days, but how widespread are they in fact? This is the question Lucas Graves and I tried to address when we set out to survey the current pay model landscape across six European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom) and the U.S.

When we first conducted a similar study in 2017, pay models had already spread across nearly two-thirds of newspaper sites in Europe. Two years have passed since then — eons in the rapidly evolving news environment — which is why we thought that it was time for a much-needed update. So what did we find?

Pay models are on the rise — but not as quickly as one might think

For our study, we collected data from four broad categories of, in total, 212 news outlets: daily newspapers (up-market, tabloid/mid-market, business, and regional), weekly newspapers and magazines, TV news (commercial and public service media), and digital-born news outlets. We sorted pay models into three categories: hard paywalls, where no content is accessible for free at all; “freemium” models, made up of a mix of free and premium content; and metered paywalls, which allow access to a limited number of free articles each month.

Our data suggest that a growing number of news organizations across Europe and in the U.S. are challenging the assumption that people will not pay for digital news.

69 percent of the newspapers we surveyed now operate some kind of a pay model, a small increase from 64.5 percent in 2017. Hard paywalls — operated by outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times — are extremely rare, with the landscape evenly divided between freemium models and metered paywalls (33 percent each). When it comes to weekly newspapers and news magazines, just over half (52 percent) operate a pay model, down 10 percentage points from 2017. Freemium models are the most widely used in this category, followed by metered paywalls and hard paywalls.